Hard Labour? Academic Work and the Changing Landscape of Higher Education: Volume 7

This book was written across a period of intense turmoil and change in higher education in Australia and England. We are deeply unsettled by these changes and wish to open up the discussion about what it means to be an academic and engage in academic work in the 21st century. Accordingly, each of the authors has nominated a theme or lens through which to examine the changes, tensions and uncertainties that have erupted in higher education. Thus, we offer this book as a constellation of ideas that traverse a number of aspects of our work and identities as academics. The overlap between these ideas is deliberate so that the multiple and complex challenges that underpin the higher education landscape can be examined.

This chapter focuses on researchers as knowledge workers in higher education in England as an illustration of what Katznelson (2003, p. 189) identifies as the ‘professional scholar’ undertaking intellectual work as a public intellectual. I begin by examining the challenges to intellectual work and its location in a university, particular from the media and the popularity of what Bourdieu calls Le Fast Talkers ¹ – those who talk a lot but have nothing much to say. After drawing out the tensions within knowledge production, I then locate the analysis of what it means to do research in a period of education policymaking in England between 1997 and 2010, when New Labour called on researchers to produce evidence to support radical reforms. In particular, I argue that school effectiveness and school improvement (SESI) knowledge workers in Schools of Education in higher education in England are an interesting case for investigating the public intellectual positioning as ‘detached attachment’ (Melzner, 2003, p. 4), particularly through their attachment to New Labour governments and the subsequent detachment following a change of government in May 2010.

The work of academics has intensified, but the focus for most remains on teaching, research and contribution to service. Institutional imperatives and positioning within universities impact significantly on how individual academics fashion themselves to fit with expectations and demands. There is, of course, no simple version of scholarly identity and Barnett (2000) called attention to the ‘super complexity’ of academic work some time ago. ‘Scholarly’ has been deliberately used in the title of this chapter, even though ‘academic’ is also used throughout. The purpose here is to draw attention to – and avoid – the binary that Stuart Hall notes: Academic work is inherently conservative in as much as it seeks, first, to fulfill the relatively narrow and policed goals and interests of a given discipline or profession and, second, to fulfill the increasingly corporatized mission of higher education; intellectual work, in contrast is relentlessly critical, self-critical, and potentially revolutionary for it aims to critique, change, and even destroy institutions, disciplines and professions that rationalize exploitation, inequality and injustice. (reported in Olsen & Worsham, 2003, p. 13)

Reading current accounts of higher education demonstrates the flux and damage of rapid neoliberal changes to the type and conduct of academic work. Opening the Times Higher Education magazine on the 28 April 2011 shows articles about cuts in staffing and undergraduate provision in England, concerns about the quality of for-profit higher education in the USA; the call for French universities to play the high fees international student game; and demands for the further modernisation of higher education so that there is more direct relevance to the workplace. In England the Browne et al. (2010) report is seen as re-locating previously publicly funded university provision firmly into the market place. Hence, Collini (2010, p. 25) argues that “what is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards re-defining them in terms of purely economic calculation of value and a wholly individualistic conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’”. In this chapter I intend examining what this means in regard to the nature of academic work: what it is that academic's do and why, and the impact that changes in the purposes of higher education are having on identity and professional practice. I do this by focusing on analysis from the Knowledge Production in Educational Leadership (KPEL) Project (2006–2007) funded by the ESRC (RES-000-23-1192), where I investigated the professional practice of knowledge producers in Schools of Education in UK universities during the period of New Labour governments (1997–2010). Through using Rose's (1996, p. 129) analysis of Foucault's concerns with ‘our relation to ourselves’ as ‘a genealogy of subjectification’ I examine the way researchers think about purposes, and generated rationales and narratives about their location in higher education.

This examination of the higher education landscape now shifts to consider the relationship between the university and the teaching profession. The intention of this chapter is to focus on pre-service teacher education to examine how professional identity and university curriculum have become managed. This chapter will introduce the conception of the scholarly blind eye to illustrate how performativity works in the modernised university and three central arguments are forwarded. Firstly, that pre-service teacher education programs are increasingly managed from outside the university. Secondly, that this represents a significant change to higher education. And thirdly, that higher education is contributing to the reworking of teacher identity.

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was invited to address members of the London and National Society for Women's Service about the employment of women. As a well-known literary figure as well as a woman intellectual, Woolf mused on her own biography and the risks she had to take to establish her own career. She used the metaphor of a room of one's own to underscore the challenges women faced to have a degree of freedom to shape their professional lives:You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men, You are able, though not without great labour and effort to pay the rent … But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. (Woolf, 1974, chapter 27)

As the chapters in this book thus far have outlined, profound changes have occurred to the higher education landscape that have impacted significantly on what academics do and how they position themselves and their intellectual work. As this chapter will illustrate, these changes are acutely visible in the intensified scrutiny of research outputs, performance and publishing, the rating of universities through ranking exercises, and the flows of knowledge through a mobile academic labour market. These are the rapid and relentless calculative technologies (Douglas, 1987; Shore & Wright, 2000) that frame the research environment. Significantly, ways in which individuals and universities have responded to these demands and the pursuit of status have ritualised academic work and the academy.

As the chapters in this book have identified, the academy and academics have experienced significant radical transformations across the past three decades. In many ways, academics have been eyewitnesses to these changes, and while there is much to mourn about what has been ‘lost’, this is not the time for academic ambivalence towards the effects of these reforms that have significantly altered the landscape of higher education. In this final chapter, I draw together the constellation of ideas presented across this book to propose five institutional typologies of universities in the 21st century. This chapter and book concludes by calling for a re-emergence of the public university and a reaffirmation of the role of public intellectuals.

Tanya Fitzgerald is a professor of Educational Leadership and Management at La Trobe University (Australia). She is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of women's education, and contemporary perspectives on leadership and policy in higher education, including Outsiders or Equals? A History of Women Professors at the University of New Zealand 1911–1961 (2009) and Travelling Towards a Mirage: Gender, Policy and Leadership in Higher Education (2010, with Jane Wilkinson). Her forthcoming book, Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University of New Zealand 1907–1947 (with Jenny Collins) will be published by Cambria Press. Tanya's current research projects include a study of women leaders in higher education and a historical study of women's professional organisations. She is the editor of History of Education Review and co-editor of the Journal of Educational Administration and History.