The spectral scientists of corridor B: Neoliberalization and its ghosts in higher education

Abstract

This paper examines the role and function of science as a vocation in contemporary higher education. In recent decades, universities have expanded and reorganized their resources and expertise around commercially viable research avenues. All the signs point towards the creep of new public management coupled with neoliberal economic policy that starting in the 1980s had introduced accountability, standardization and internal competitiveness into public sector institutions. In this paper, I examine how the idea of the vocation is produced in higher education institutes using the example of an internal research audit that was carried out in a major research-led university between 2002 and 2005. I examine its impacts on biomedical scientists who lost access to laboratory space, a move that effectively ended their research careers. These scientists were redeployed to teaching-only positions and shortly thereafter, resurrected as ghostly reminders of the effects of audit. While teaching-only staff echoed Foucauldian critique in exposing the power/knowledge matrices of institutional management, it was their spatialization as spectres stalking the edges of research that revealed how the moral economies of science are valorized not in resistance to neoliberalization but as constitutive of it.

Urban Geography III: Universities and their spaces

“…Second, university management actively locate and relocate academics through estates strategies, and academic careers are partly structured by the spatial organisation of campus space. Holden (2022) discusses how one British university reorganised its disciplinary structures as the result of a research assessment exercise: those who didn’t fit within the institution’s plans were relocated into a ‘corridor B’ of ‘spectral’ science researchers without access to laboratory space, thus sealing their fates within a highly competitive science environment. This is the physical spatial displacement of knowledge producers to the point where they can no longer produce knowledge.…”