Stop the Rot, Fight the Malaise and Reclaim the Void!

Reflecting on my 17 years of tertiary education and 19 years of teaching and learning, university life was mostly supportive and always challenging. Academics as my teachers and then later as workmates, were encouraging. Professors, however, remained unpredictable. From the 1960s on we saw burgeoning student numbers, all with their own personalities, needs and challenges—and all of them our responsibility. We were there to help in any way we could – that was the vocation we opted into. It was a vocation that even encouraged us to support our communities. Yes, the ‘publish or perish’ specter hung over us, but our job came first, not our fame or the university’s reputation; without suppression clauses in contracts or other intrusive government policy.

This world changed – in a word – the heart and soul of the university, despite all its shortcomings, was suffocating, and many of us, including students and all staff, were struggling. There was some fight back, but the juggernaut of an internal cancer of endless managerialism, restructuring and government pressure was relentless. Aspirations and ideals were replaced by the need for survival.

My own tertiary education was always presented as knowledge and critical awareness useful for one’s entire life. Even the textbooks used were chosen with the idea that they would be useful for a lifetime, no matter what one did. Our teachers had no idea what we might do in the rest of our lives but what was passed on was not just for the exams you took, papers you wrote or the jobs you might have, but for the life you would live. It required one to remember one’s experiences, one’s work mates, and all the people we would meet. Critical awareness of all that was around us was demanded.

One did not dismiss the Inuit hunter met in a Vancouver bar who posed the question – I need to know many types of snow. All are given different names, but you have this word ‘love’ and you apply it to anything – people, hot dogs, ketchup, cars, houses – everything! How do you know the difference? Nor the memory of an archaeologist on a Saturday field trip in 33-degree Celsius sun, asking his students to be quiet, admonishing us for not taking the opportunity to observe everything around us as we walked through the desert. He then stopped, bent over and picked up a chert artifact—a two-centimeter-long perfect bird point—distinguished from thousands of burnished rocks scattered on the desert floor. Critical thought, critical awareness expected, enacted in all situations. But now we need courses on critical thinking?

When I began to teach, I knew I had a responsibility not only to teach a course, but to have students realise their capability and make what we taught relevant for their lives – something that might stay with them. I still have echoes of students asking, “How is all this relevant?” And you had to answer. Simon Marginson and Lili Yang (2023, p.6) are right – university, aside from giving you the possibility to earn a living, you as a student, should expect to experience “self -formation through engagement in knowledge and the augmentation of reflexive agency and sociability.” Universities should benefit all social relations through knowledge, literacy, access to technological abilities, compliance with the law, political awareness (domestic and international) and the tolerance of differences.

This whole potential ethos lapsed as university freedom and autonomy was superseded by restraints under duress with requirements of changed governance, austerity, and structured accountability to external stakeholders – the state, taxpayers, employers, students/customers, and the community in general. We did have a sense of responsibility. Management and the state disagreed – we were unruly in need of disciplining. Yes, university autonomy continued:

But it was conditional. Proof of the product quality was now to be measured by an institution’s volume of research and publications, as well as their competitiveness in the education market – all done by managers and state appointed agencies. Academics’ outputs will be measured and graded like students and the cumulative result equaled the institutions’ funding/value to and by the state, not the producers, the students, nor the public good.

Once it was the responsibility of academics, required by an act, to be the ‘critic and conscience of society’ (s 268 (E)). Now, according to a NZ vice-chancellor, it is an institution’s role requiring nothing of academics (NZEmpC 478/2021). Indeed, the statutory role of academics by the act as ‘critic and conscience of society’ became a fiction in the eyes of administrators and politicians.

Externally universities were strangled by declining funding and forced political commitment to government’s purpose. Internally, they were hollowed out by an administrative class that disrespected academic and administrative staff and challenged the legitimacy of any self-determination. The intellectual space within universities became politicized and polarized, and the fear of voicing became palpable. We paralleled Peter Mair’s observations of our political world, “just as voters [academics] retreat to their own particularized spheres of interest, so too have political and party leaders [management] withdraw into the closed world of governing institutions” (Mair, 2006, p.45). Like the contemporary political elite management is more concerned with “office seeking” and “rather than represent; they bring order rather than give voice” (Mair, 2006, pp.47-48).

There is no new revelation in these changes for the reader in the tertiary sector, but it takes more to destroy the heart and soul of a university. What happened to us? How could we end up with a ‘public good’ university education system based on “quasi-market competition between institutions, ordered by price signals and/or status order created by calibration exercises like research assessment and university ranking … student places are modelled as economic commodities, as is research knowledge – projects, publication, copyrights and patents which become “economically valuable commodities” and degrees are measured by rates of return” (Marginson and Yang 2023, p. 6).

How had our collegiality and collective endeavor – our vocational aspirations – turned into a competitive quagmire of all against all? Perhaps Dennis Hayes (2009, p.127) was close to recognizing the nub of our problem. Had the declining social and political struggles after the late 1960s and 70s also narrowed “academic life” and hatched in turn “a new and impoverished concept of ‘academic freedom’ for a diminished idea of the human subject, of humanity and of human potential?”

Tom Brass, known for his critical discussion of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975, later a TV series) adds to this troubled context: “As with every other area subordinated to the rule of capital, academia is not immune to the power it exerts. Perhaps the most subverting influence is competition, a dynamic that drives both opportunism and fashion” (Brass, 2023, p.7). He further argues that the postmodernists’ position effectively led to the dismissal of Marxist political economy, along with “… its conceptual apparatus of socialism/materialism/class as just one more kind of Eurocentric/Enlightenment ‘foundationalism’.” Postmodernists, in their antagonism to Marxist theory, accused its proponents of deprivileging the issues of racism and sexism. Academics who had avowedly been left leaning now faced the option to either “water down or discard Marxism … or refuse to abandon Marxism” (ibid. p. 13).

Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) options for us of ‘exit’, ‘voice’ or ‘loyalty’ became our reality. The imposed regulatory regime under university management had tools to handle ‘voice’ as the applied matrices affected all aspects of the job – teaching, research, promotion, and one’s career. Collegiality and collective response had been superseded; competition was not only between institutions but between academics.

Professorial status success meant they didn’t need to voice, and the loyalty of new academics was guaranteed with strict managerial oversight. The in-betweens, that is the many very dedicated long serving academics, those who still treated the job as a vocation, became the victims, and in utter frustration and despair some exited, but many worked even harder struggling to cope with managerial demands, still committed to teaching that met their standards. I had first exited in 1994 and for the second time in 2017, but there were many far more knowledgeable, excellent teachers than me that left the job or found themselves stressed and struggling.

What remains of this vocation’s ‘essence’ when staff see the institution and government diminish the value of their work, the value of degrees, their contribution to society; when it lauds competition between staff and between institutions over collegial and inter-institutional cooperation; restructuring in the name of austerity and accountability to the state and the ‘electorate’, overrides any attempt to value, constantly re-evaluate and marshal support for public good education?

Is Marginson (2011, p.42) not correct in saying: “[w]hen these institutions stand for nothing more, nothing deeper or more collective, no greater public good, than the aggregation of self-interest …. then the institutions are vulnerable,” (2011, p. 412). One would have to add – so are all staff and students. Is the 2024 report of the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Academic Freedom Monitoring Project so wrong when they describe the ‘essence’ of the university and its integral relationship to society?

Tertiary education has been transformed from something conceived as a public good, into something redefined as a private good to be bought and paid for. The idea of a ‘public good education’ has been usurped by political interests who cynically redefine ‘public good’ for political expediency as economic growth and fiscal accountability and in this context, fee paying students are transformed into impersonal clients. I would wholeheartedly support Ignatieff’s call:

Now we face the populist far-right with its own anti-academic excesses. Another persistent threat to university autonomy, whether in government or opposition. The examples of policies in the United States, Turkey, China, Hungary, Austria, Holland, and Italy — plus the Chega party in Portugal, Karol Nawrocki’s presidency in Poland, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag — all manifest these threats. Professor Hasenknopf, adviser for European commitment at Sorbonne University, warns:

There is still a group of academics in all universities that have a keen sense of education as a vocation for the public good. They have a clear idea of what a university should be, but they are slowly being weeded out, exhausted. What is worse, nobody cares. I feel the that terrible foreboding of Mills’ predictions in The Sociological Imagination (1956) that a chronic rot has been fomented; that the insulated situation of the economic long boom diverted our gaze and we let slip our “cherished values” in a context where life looked good and the “threats had abated,” we became indifferent, apathetic to situations where we are “unaware of any cherished values, but still are very much aware of a threat” resulting in the feeling of increasing “uneasiness, of anxiety which if it is total enough, becomes a deadly unspecified malaise” (Mills, 1956, p. 18).

I think this is where we are now. The growing concerns in education with declining resilience, increasing mental anguish, and a lack of well-being amongst students and possibly staff, means a battle ahead. The neglected ‘cherished values’ of university left an ideological void filled promptly by free market thinking, surely the real challenge is to reclaim these cherished values against all who would belittle or destroy them.

References

Brass, Tom (2023). Academia, Marxism, and Sociology: A Warning from The History Man. Class, Race and Corporate Power. Vol. 11: Iss.2 Article 10. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol11/iss2/10

Dixon, Emily (2025). Is Europe really a safe haven for US academics fleeing Trump? Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/depth/europe-really-safe-haven-us-academics-fleeing-trump

Hayes, Dennis (2009). Academic Freedom and the Diminished Subject. British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol 57, No.2 pp.127-145.

Hirschman, Albert, O. (1990). Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. London: Harvard University Press.

Ignatieff, Michael (2018). Academic Freedom from Without and Within, in Michael Ignatieff and Stefan Roch (2018) Academic Freedom: The Global Challenge. Central European Press; Budapest

Mair, Peter (2006). Ruling the Void? The Hollowing of Western Democracy. New Left Review, Vol 42, pp. 25-51.

Marginson, Simon. (2011). Higher education and public good. Higher Education Quarterly. 65:4, October 2011, pp 411–433.

Marginson, S. and Yang, L. (2023). Has the public good of higher education been emptied out? The case of England. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01117-6]

New Zealand Education and Training Act 2020. https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2020/0038/latest/LMS302075.html

NZEmpC (478/2021). Brief of Evidence of Professor Jack Heinemann In Reply (20) p. 6.

SAR (2024). Free To Think. Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project. https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/resources/free-to-think-2024/

Wright Mills, C. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Penguin Books; Harmondsworth.