industry & research campusreview. com. au
Toxic universities: Part 1
Managerialism, academic capitalism and the rise of Professor Toxic.
By Sarah Chua, Duncan Murray and Tricia Vilkinas
The tertiary education sector has dramatically changed over the past two decades. Universities now more closely resemble the corporate sector in their structure, philosophy and guiding ethos, than they do traditional higher education institutions grounded in a collegial system of management.
Today, accountability places higher education institutions under a microscope: budgets need to be balanced, accreditation and assurance requirements influence how contemporary tertiary institutions behave. Globalisation, internationalisation and reduced government funding have been suggested as some of the overarching reasons behind these changes. Still, the cause is irrelevant to the outcome – universities have changed.
Public universities have moved from being predominately reliant on government funding, to this funding comprising only about a fifth of operating budgets( Davis 2015). This has changed the nature of work at universities, with institutions shifting towards a more entrepreneurial approach. According to Deem( 2001), this shift has
been referred to under a variety of labels: entrepreneurial universities, academic capitalism and managerialism.
In this first instalment of our article, we explore the rise of academic capitalism and managerialism as dominant contemporary concepts in the university sector, and how this has changed academic work.
The second instalment employs case studies from the US, Canada and Australia to outline how this rise is responsible for creating a context or environment in which toxic leaders can flourish. We also discuss whether toxic leaders may be an inevitable consequence of such an approach.
CAPITALISM AND MANAGERIALISM IN THE ACADEMY
Slaughter and Leslie( 1997) introduced the term‘ academic capitalism’ to label the market-like activities that universities are increasingly focusing on. The premise of such marketisation is to generate increased funding and to ostensibly drive greater efficiency and effectiveness within the organisation. Marketisation in universities includes activities such as university-industry partnerships and consultation, commercialisation of research patents, offshoot companies, and faculty selfpromotion( including personal websites, social media profiles and media appearances).
On the surface, the pursuit of such activities seems to be a logical reaction by universities to progressive reductions in real levels of government funding. Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, claims that universities in Australia have faced a 40-year reduction in real-value public funding. The University of Melbourne now relies mainly on international student fees, as well as research grants, commercial activity and benefactors, with less than 20 per cent of funding coming from public sources. The rise in academic capitalism has changed the nature and focus of academics’ work – and not always for the better. The dominance of market-like values within the university has created a disconnect between competitive capitalist values and the traditional social collaborative values that used to guide academic staff. This challenges the very principles of the university sector: mass higher level education, knowledge advancement and conservation.
So instead of focusing on quality education and pure research, an industrialist mindset dominates management thinking. Our universities have become factories, producing a skilled workforce and commercialised research( often in
18