The noose of competitive accountability

Over the course of the last decade my work has focused on the effects of higher education (HE) policy innovations on academic researchers working in UK universities. Specifically, I have looked at the discrete yet frequently conjoined if not conflated policy areas of public engagement by academics and the economic and societal impact of academic research. What feels like and surely is a surfeit of studies later, I have learnt, often with brutal and discomfiting immediacy, much about academics’ struggle, perhaps even their crisis, in making sense of who they are and what they do in the face of such alleged innovation and in a milieu where their professional lives have become in many instances hostage to the whimsy – endless intrusion, interruption and intervention – of higher education technocrats. A crisis of academic personhood spun off from a giddying and ever-quickening carousel of policy permutations is also explained by many if not most senior academics – and therefore those who might contest or resist change – having meekly bowed to the aggressive expansionism of an ‘administrative estate’ (see Ginsberg 2011) and the cognate seductions of neoliberalism. Many academics, certainly those of a particular vintage, talk apologetically – and therefore often excessively and with a bias born of nostalgic indulgence – of having had their powers and rights to self-determination and expression seized by a massing rank of managerial Übermenschen. They claim to suffer the injustices of marginalization, disenfranchisement and banishment to the outer realms of their institutions, the universities over which they once presided and exercised government. Their authority is seen to have waned, their critical agency and political capital eroded. They have become mere bit-parts or walk-ons to the drama of which they are (at least listed as) major protagonists.