Collective editorial on the neoliberal university

Abstract

This collective editorial on the neoliberal university follows eight days of strike action at sixty UK universities called by the University and College Union (UCU) in two separate legal disputes, one on pensions and one on pay and working conditions. Anticipating the recent labor strike after previous industrial disputes in 2018 at UK universities, the work included here emanates from two dialogues at the Nordic Geographers Meeting (NGM) in summer 2019, a public meeting called Protest Pub and a conference session on the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal academy. After an opening statement by the editors, this collective endeavor begins with the urgent collaborative action of graduate students and early-career academics and is followed by reflections on life in the neoliberal academy from those involved in the dialogues at the NGM 2019 in Trondheim. Additionally, the editorial introduces the content of the present issue.

Reconfiguring research relevance – steps towards salvaging the radical potential of the co-productive turn in searching for sustainable solutions

“…In an environment of economic efficiency and intensifying competition, the space for critical reflexivity and scholarly mobilization is experienced by many as shrinking (Berg et al 2016). This pertains in particular to young scholars who are often at the receiving end of some of the most brutal consequences of the neoliberal university in terms of job insecurity and intense pressure to perform according to narrowly set indicators on research quality (Riding et al 2019). In our study, interviewees who held temporary positions at the university brought their status up as a hindrance for engaging more critically with discussions on the research collaborations their work were situated within.…”

“…In formulating our critique, we likened protesting neoliberal reforms in Norwegian universities to "fighting fog", meaning how it was difficult for us as young scholars to navigate a landscape where the problem was more about the questions never posed, the articles never written, and the collaborations never formed than about any absolute restrictions on academic freedom (Andresen et al 2015). To "fight fog" requires a level of reflection that we as scholars seldom have time and space to achieve (Riding et al 2019). Because answering questions about what we do, and do not do, as an academic collective requires us, as called for by Staeheli and Mitchell (2008, 357), to frame the search for research relevance "within explicit discussions of either the politics of relevance or of the social practices that condition relevance" inside and outside of our universities.…”

Breathing spaces of fearlessness and generosity in the Anglophone/Western university

“…In addition, fearlessness and complaint, forms of embodied resistance and diversity work that are necessary for decolonising the university as a public institution, are arrested to produce a kind of "slow death"-we struggle to breathe unless we continue to participate in reproducing White privilege (Ahmed, 2014, p. 55). It is crucial to embody the right kind of diversity in a neoliberal, managerialist university rendered financially fragile by the COVID-19 disaster (Connell, 2020;Peters et al, 2020;Riding et al, 2019). But without the comfort of White privilege or the capacity to claim Whiteness as a "voluntary stigma," our silence is a performative agreement to "overlook how we are looked over" (Ahmed, 2014, p. 155).…”

States of power: Ronan Paddison, Space and Polity

“…His work was always marked by scholarly intensity but he roamed widely in his research and teaching and was a selfless ambassador for Geography in just about every service role conceivable. Alas, the neoliberalising academy, whose technes of governance privilege the subject of the academic entrepreneur, has blindly and foolishly diminished the figure of the general and generous intellectual citizen (Berg et al, 2016;Riding et al, 2019;Macfarlane, 2013;Mountz et al, 2015). As the dark clouds of neoliberalism redux scan the post-Covid-19 higher education sector in the hope of gaining further momentum and entrenchment, Ronan's oeuvre serves as a lighthouse, radiating the ongoing importance of catholicity within the professoriate and the critical work which the selfless protean scholar performs in the flourishing of academic communities.…”