Tag Archives: higher education

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Andrew Orta: The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear

Responding to a question about future of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) in the wake of the pandemic, the Dean of a top program recently suggested that “the future is bright,” but would require “a fundamental rethinking of business education. When the MBA was first established a century ago, there was a real sense that we would be forming leaders of business and society, a focus on forming values. I see a return to that earlier concept of business education.”

Just prior to the onset of the pandemic, MBA applications were sharply down, business and popular press were declaring the death or obsolescence of the MBA, and business programs were scrambling to reinvent themselves. But what a difference a global pandemic makes. My comments here build on ethnographic research conducted in MBA programs prior to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as a recent sampling of online informational forums for MBA applicants, program websites, and business media to examine the ways MBA administrators are reframing the value proposition of the MBA, marketing the degree as a necessary feature of the “bright future” of capitalism after COVID.

Two men and two women, dressed in business attire, look at a whiteboard with a graph showing an upward trend.
Image 1: Business meeting, photo by Yan Krukov

MBA programs are zombies: always returning from the dead. Their death is announced every few years, usually correlated with scandals or catastrophes tarnishing the capitalist brand. But the MBA cheats death through periodic reinventions. Indeed, the legitimacy of the MBA and its purchase on civic life in the US has been an open-ended project from the founding of the degree just over a century ago.

The early 20th and 21st centuries are productive bookends for thinking about this. There are intriguing parallels of economic and social disruptions, transformations in globalization, epochal technological changes, and, of course, experiences of global pandemics. But rather than thinking with the Dean about these parallels, I want to highlight some salient differences in the anticipatory rebranding of the post-COVID MBA. Thinking against the grain of the Dean’s hearkening back to origins elucidates a sleight-of-hand in current directions in MBA training – having to do less with a reanimation of the early 20th century specialist manager, than with “his” disappearance.

Producing Managerial Subjects

A common misperception of MBA training is that the students learn nothing; the programs are merely credentialing exercises providing entrée to elite business networks. But, as I’ve argued in a recent ethnography of MBA training in US business programs, MBAs get more than they bargain for (Orta 2019). MBA programs present highly distilled versions of the concepts and habits of capitalism. Course content is simplified, to be sure, but this streamlining takes on compelling depth through the cascading reinforcement of material across the curriculum. Programmatic simulations of professional life further instill a habitus of fast-paced decision-making in overscheduled conditions, based upon imperfect information. MBAs learn to frame the necessity of this simplification as an index of “hard work,” for which they should be highly compensated.

MBA programs have developed an additional value proposition: technical skills are not enough; an effective capitalist leader requires “talent.” MBA programs sell themselves as spaces for the cultivation of talent, helping students become better versions of themselves to be more effective versions of “the MBA.” The “x-factor” of talent is cast as the necessary supplement to the shortcomings of technical business teachings when faced with the real world. And the connections of the MBA to the technical operations of capitalism as a systemic form of profit extraction are increasingly masked by the rhetoric of talent as a driver of corporate success – a talent theory of value.

MBA Programs on the Eve of COVID

On the eve of COVID, MBA programs were dying—reeling from a set of compounding crises, including the Great Recession and MBA complicity in the runaway financialization that led to it. A season of institutional soul-searching spurred updated curricula and non-finance focused program tracks. A second crisis involved MBA programs’ increasing dependence over recent decades on international student enrollments. The visa policies of the Trump administration triggered a precipitous drop in international MBA enrollments. Some programs closed; others rolled out a variety of online degrees aimed at a broader pool of international and domestic students.

The Continuous Reinvention of the MBA

Such challenges and changes were business as usual. The arc of MBA education has been a continuous project to legitimize and reinvent the MBA idea across a series of scandals, crises, and transformations of capitalism, beginning with the founding of collegiate business degrees at the turn-of-the-20th century. Seen as lowering institutional standards with vocational school commonness, nascent business programs sought to emulate more established programs in law or medicine. And they tapped into an intensifying cultural sense of “business” as a discrete realm and a driver of an American modernity (Cruikshank 1987, Daniel 1998).

While the earliest iteration of the MBA curriculum was thus tightly connected to claimed civic needs, those needs were in the service of a still emerging order of extractive capitalism. By the 1930s, the corporation could be taken as standing for a particularly “American” modernity and generative of what came to be seen as the American way of life (Berle and Means 1932, Chandler 1977). MBA programs connected their mission explicitly to serving this process (e.g., Johnson 1906, Donham 1931).

By mid-century, business education was an established part of the landscape of higher education in the U.S. “The MBA” was a recognizable avatar of capitalism, albeit a shifty one: subject to recurring reinventions in the face of critiques, challenges and crises over the post-War decades and beyond – including the fallout from 2009 and the enrollment crisis (e.g. Drucker 1950, Gordon 1959, Pierson 1959, Petriglieri 2012).

The MBA Value Proposition for a Post-COVID World

The MBA responses to the post-2009 and post-2016 challenges positioned the programs well for the COVID years. Flexibility in delivering the MBA was already becoming a habit as many programs developed online and hybrid MBAs to maintain access to international students as well as employed domestic students. “Rigor” is a new keyword as recruiters legitimate the online programs; there is now a separate infrastructure of rankings for online MBAs, reproducing the bounding and marketing mechanisms of the traditional programs.

“Diversity” is another keyword. Business schools continue to struggle with gender and, especially, racial inclusion and equity among students and faculty—a concern linked increasingly by administrators and business trade publications to BlackLivesMatter and the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color in the U.S. However, while many programs report statistics along lines of gender and race, the emphasis of much of the recruitment materials I have reviewed is on the “diversity” of professional fields represented in a cohort. This follows from post-2009 efforts to distance the MBA from finance. Deans now say things like: “many of our students come from homogenous worlds, but their classmates have a diversity of professional experiences in different careers.” Students echo the pitch, describing the ways the “MBA experience of working with people outside of your industry broadens horizons.”  

As MBA programs recruit for the post-COVID world, they are most aggressively selling their “transformational” impact on students – often downplaying traditional functional training in business. “Transformational impact is the mission,” said one Dean, adding, “Our realization is that a lot of that impact will not come from the classroom only.”  Students describe their “MBA journey” similarly, stressing how the degree allows them to “view things more holistically.”   “The MBA program forced me to look at what I value,” reports one student.  Others describe a growing sense of “confidence,” and tell prospective applicants, “the MBA helps bring more you into the world.”

While the MBA may help bring more you into the world, it does so in coordination with a curious managerial self-effacement. There is a lot of talk about teams and the value of delegating decisions to local levels. This squares with neoliberal the rhetoric of decentralization and agility, and is familiar from existing MBA emphasis on entrepreneurial talent and soft skills.

But there is something more in the mix: the disruptions and anxieties of the pandemic. Students are “rethinking what they are doing.” Programs now promise “lifelong career coaching” for careers of change and uncertainty. And at a time when routinized neoliberal truths of business are explicitly up for debate, MBA programs stress the importance of humility, of not knowing what to do, as a facet of leadership in uncertainty.

The focus on talent and leadership skills increasingly downplays the relevance of core functional practices of managerial capitalism. They are mentioned – usually as part of the effort to show the “rigor” of online programs. But current marketing of the MBA underscores an ascendant conceptualization of talent that eclipses the core disciplines of capitalist extraction and harnesses the post-COVID business leader to a differently imagined project.

MBA marketing explicitly positions the talented MBA as the solution to a set of social and political crises exacerbated by the pandemic. “Leadership is more important than ever,” commented one Dean as he described a three-fold crisis facing the post-COVID US: “health, economics, and inequality.” Further, he laments, increasing polarization from before the pandemic has led to a loss of trust in governmental and non-governmental institutions, which “typically provide the safety net in times of crisis.” Thus, he identified a fourth post-COVID crisis: “leadership.”

That amounts to a familiar reading of the times. But he caught my attention when he went on to say, “But the level of trust has gone up dramatically in the business community. This is a great time for the business platform. An opportunity that goes well beyond anything that has been there before. […] We can now tackle issues that go beyond traditional profit and loss. We can have a bigger impact on society. [T]he expectation is there that business will step in.”

This goes beyond a post-2009 trend in business schools to link business to transformative social solutions through electives in social entrepreneurship or sustainability. Those turned on a familiar vision of doing good through doing well (in business) and have spawned a host of metrics to measure (and therefore manage) social impact in familiar business style. The Dean’s comments decouple the impact of business leadership from the fundamental operations of business and gesture to political governance in ways that have not been an explicit part of the MBA project – at least with reference to the US.

There is good strategic reason for this shift, as the post-pandemic economy seems likely to be characterized by continuing changes in the neoliberal alliance of governing policies and capital. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink puts it in his most recent annual letter to CEOs,

“COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs. […] In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead. Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information – more so than government, the media, and NGOs.”  

Other guidance for the post-pandemic economy makes a similar point: “beyond building resilience in busines and the economy, public and private leaders must also build societal resilience.” As MBA programs are marketing themselves to prospective applicants whose concerns are shaped by the crises listed by the Dean, this message of civic leadership seems resonant.

The pandemic has made the contradictions of capitalism visible in new ways, including accelerating levels of inequality. While this has opened up new conversations about equity and governance and provoked commentary on the expanding job description of the CEO, there is no indication that extraction of profit is not still the name of the game. Yet, in marketing the MBA for the post-COVID world, there is a sleight-of-hand by which the extractive operations of capitalism are screened from view. This may be the apotheosis of the manager-turned-leader, as the training of capitalist managers has progressively erased direct reference to the technical ends of managerial capitalism.

MBA programs have long been adept at repackaging themselves to weather crises, and scandals. Along the way they have shaped an ideal of the capitalist manager that balances the technical operations of capitalist industry with the softer skills and innate qualities of leadership – even entertaining the claim that MBAs don’t really learn anything of functional importance from their programs. As they turn to their “bright” post-COVID future, MBA programs are continuing a longer project of producing the disappearing manager.

Andrew Orta is professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is author of Making Global MBAs: The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture (California, 2019).

References

Berle, Adolf A., Gardiner C. Means. 1991 [1932]. The Modern Corporation and Private Property. Reprint edition. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A: Transaction Publishers.

Chandler, Alfred. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. 1987. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press.

Daniel, Carter A. 1998. MBA: The First Century. Bucknell University Press.

Donham, Wallace Brett, and Alfred North Whitehead. 1931. Business Adrift. Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill.

Drucker, Peter Ferdinand. 1950. “The Graduate Business School” Fortune 42 (August 1950): 92-116.

Gordon, Robert Aaron, and James Edwin Howell. 1959. Higher Education for Business. Columbia University Press.

Johnson, Joseph French. 1906. “The Business School and What It Should Do.” The New York Times, September 15, 1906 page 9. 

Petriglieri, G. 2012. “Are Business Schools Clueless or Evil.” Harvard Business Review Blog Network.  

Pierson, Frank Cook. 1959. The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration. McGraw-Hill.

Orta, Andrew. 2019. Making Global MBAs. The Culture of Business and the Business of Culture. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Cite as: Orta, Andrew. 2022. “The MBA won’t die. But it is trying to disappear.” FocaalBlog, 30 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/30/andrew-orta-the-mba-wont-die-but-it-is-trying-to-disappear/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Adam Brisley: RESPONSE: Ethics and the Anthropological Worker

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of representation and a practical knowledge of the bureaucratic norms and standards of institutional research ethics (informed consent, confidentiality, anonymisation etc.). And yet, if the PrecAnthro/EASA report (Fotta et al 2020) and the recent scandal at the HAU journal tell us anything (Kalb 2018, Murphy 2018, Neveling 2018, Singal 2020), it is that our disciplinary ethics does little to ensure the ethical conduct of our discipline. As other contributors to this debate have noted, the situation described in the report demands a political and an anthropological response. It requires us to unionise and work ethnographically to understand “the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization” (Narotzky 2021). In my opinion, the report should also provoke us to re-evaluate the ethics of anthropological knowledge production.

I welcome the PrecAnthro report for helping to illustrate the scale of anthropological casualisation in Europe, but it is true that my feelings likely reflect how closely the report describes my own experiences of academic precarity: I was educated in the UK and since completing my PhD in 2015, have worked on fixed-term research contracts. As Susana Narotzky (2021) and Natalia Buier (2021) note, the report privileges the perspectives of researchers like me, whilst excluding the experiences of some of the most marginalised precarious workers in anthropology such as low-paid teaching staff for whom EASA membership is neither professionally advantageous nor affordable. I write here from my located perspective as a post-doc who has worked in the field of research ethics for a number of years.

I found little to disagree with in the FocaalBlog commentaries on the PrecAnthro report and would only contend that I do not believe that anthropologists feel uncomfortable talking about precarity within our discipline. On the contrary, in fact, I think that anthropologists are more than happy to discuss academic precarity because they see it as a largely externally driven phenomenon – part of the same great process of neoliberal bureaucratisation that has devolved power from academics to university managers and driven a culture of performance review and job insecurity across the piece (so called publish-or-perish). Rather, I would think, what makes anthropologists feel uncomfortable is talking about how the precarity of junior colleagues leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by senior colleagues and reluctant to report abuse and bullying due to a fear of reputational damage (Kalb 2021, Drążkiewicz 2021, Rajaram 2021). The kind of exploitation that allegedly took place at HAU may be extreme, but as Neveling (2018) argues, it sits within “a spectrum of social, economic, and political processes that have always driven academia and continue to do so” and that reflect the general conditions of capitalism. Yet, whilst we should of course foreground the political economy of academic casualisation in order to understand the grounds for collective resistance, we must also question what it means to produce anthropology is a way that is sensitive to the risks of exploitation inherent to the contemporary academic process. Such a project would necessarily be as much about the ethics of anthropological knowledge production as the political economy of precarity.    

One of the difficulties that anthropology faces here is a lack of familiarity. Our existing professional ethics and standards are attuned to the practices of conducing fieldwork and writing ethnography. We are not used to thinking about how we interact with each other as a problem of anthropological ethics. Neither do we tend to think of “the anthropologist” as someone who is particularly vulnerable. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the anthropologist was seen as quite the opposite of a precariously employed, exploited worker. Typified by the image of Stephen Tyler on the cover of Clifford and Marcus’s Writing Culture (1986), the figure of the anthropologist-as-writer marked a dawning disciplinary confrontation with the idea that ethnography was not neutral scientific description, as had apparently previously been assumed, but a genre of “persuasive fiction” largely produced by elite, white men, working under conditions of colonial and post-colonial privilege. Anthropologists, who understandably tend to privilege the ethics of their own discipline to those imposed from the outside (i.e., institutional research ethics), have become keen observers of the politics and ethics of representation. Anthropologists are skilled at unpacking assumptions and revealing the structures of inequality that determine whose experience counts and who gets to speak for whom – as demonstrated in this debate by the various incisive critiques of the limits of the PrecAnthro survey. And yet it is unclear how effective our existing disciplinary ethics alone can be when the subject of exploitation is neither a subject of investigation, nor ultimately representation, but rather a fellow anthropologist.

The PrecAnthro report evokes a strikingly different image of “the anthropologist” to that of the elite, white man of crisis of representation. The typical respondent in the report is described instead as “a woman aged around 40… educated in either the UK or Germany… possibly in a relationship but has no children… and probably dissatisfied with her current employment and her work–life balance due to the fact that she works on a fixed-term contract” (Fotta et al 2020: 1). The report further illustrates what many already knew: contemporary anthropological knowledge production relies on a precariat of low-paid anthropological workers (postgrads, postdocs, teaching assistants etc.), many of whom will never obtain a permanent contract in the discipline nor academia more generally. What does the growing visibility of this version of “the anthropologist” mean for anthropological praxis? Are we to continue to imagine that the rights and wrongs of anthropological knowledge production can be discussed independently of the labour relations that structure our discipline? If not, then we may need consider whether our existing professional ethics are equipped to deal with the moral and political realities of anthropological research in the 21st century. Indeed, if it is our ambition to build the kind of class consciousness required for collective mobilisation, then we may need to start by acting in solidarity with precariously employed anthropologists and try to envisage ways that our working practices can be used to help mitigate, rather than exploit, the forms of vulnerability that academia creates.

Adam Brisley is a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He has a PhD from the University of Manchester and has previously held post-doctoral positions in the universities of Manchester and Bristol. His research interests focus on the relationship between care and political economy in the context of health systems crisis.

References

Buier, N. 2021. “What sample, whose voice, which Europe?” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/natalia-buier:-what-sample,-whose-voice,-which-europe?/

Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia” Focaal Blog, 5 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Fotta, M., Ivancheva, M. and Pernes, R. 2020. The Anthropological Career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.22582/easaprecanthro

Kalb, Don. 2021. “Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t” Focaal Blog, 27 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/27/don-kalb:-anthropological-lives-matter,-except-they-don’t/

Kalb, Don. 2018. “HAU not: For David Graeber and the anthropological precariate.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/26/don-kalb-hau-not-for-david-graeber-and-the-anthropological-precariate.

Murphy, Fiona. 2018. “When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy.” www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/28/fiona-murphy-when-gadflies-become-horses.

Narotzky, S. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain” Focaal Blog, 29 January 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Neveling, Patrick. 2018. “HAU and the latest stage of capitalism.” FocaalBlog, 22 June. www.focaalblog.com/2018/06/22/patrick-neveling-hau-and-the-latest-stage-of- capitalism

Rajaram, Prem Kumar. 2021. “The Moral Economy of Precarity” Focaal Blog, 9 February 2021. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/09/prem-kumar-rajaram-the-moral-economy-of-precarity/

Singal, J. 2020. How One Prominent Journal Went Very Wrong: Threats, rumors, and infighting traumatized staff members and alienated contributors. They blame its editor. The Chronical of Higher Education, October 5th 2020: https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-one-prominent-journal-went-very-wrong?bclid=IwAR1F_go7fNeeRXDtTLZmAhBsNlKjv8ta3fb8e3o2uRn5WD-74cVqWKwsiVI

Cite as: Brisley, Adam. 2021. “Ethics and the Anthropological Worker.” FocaalBlog, 9 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/24/adam-brisley-ethics-and-the-anthropological-worker/

Blog

Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn

On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including teaching staff. Students had taken over the administration building of the University, protesting against a new bill on “Admission in higher education, protection of academic freedom, and upgrading of the academic environment,” according to which a university police force will be introduced. The police were called by the university’s rector, who did not attempt any dialogue with the students, as was the case in similar situations until then.

The newly introduced Law 4777/2021 seems to represent a turning point in Greek political life indicative of a more general shift towards neoliberal authoritarianism during the pandemic. Τhe Covid-19 crisis found Greece severely weakened by ten years of harsh austerity, political upheavals, hopes and disillusionments, and with a right-wing government in power. The latter saw the pandemic as an opportunity to promote its neoliberal agenda and to break down the social contract established in the country after the end of military rule in 1974. The social contract comprised both the solidification of democratic institutions and of the rule of law, and the promotion of a mixed economy of growth through some redistribution, favoring the expansion of the middle-classes.

Contrary to the general orientation of the EU, which recognized the necessity of state services to face the pandemic and thus abandoned strict budgetary discipline, the government of Nea Democratia (ND) pushed all the neoliberal “reforms” that governments implementing the bailout memoranda had not managed (or did not intend) to pass during the last decade. The ND government refused to increase the budget for the national healthcare and education system, public transport, and other relevant services. It also refused substantial financial support to those affected by the lockdowns (small and medium enterprises and their employees), with the exception of big private corporations. Moreover, with citizens locked in their homes, and with the Parliament working under non-regular conditions, the government has been passing a series of laws that initiate long-term structural reforms that will abolish remaining social and labor rights, remove environmental protection in favor of corporate business, promote privatizations of public assets, and attack the public character of education.

Following some global trends, the government has thus opted for a governance model that promotes growing inequalities, shrinking of democratic processes, rule through repression, and absolute media control. Actually, the only sectors heavily subsidized over the past year have been the mass media and the police. In the Greek context, however, there is one more important factor at play. The electoral success of the radical Left twice in 2015, as a result of huge discontent over the years of financial crisis, was a big shock for the Greek Right, which now seems intent to prevent another SYRIZA victory by treating the major opposition party not only as a political adversary but as an enemy whose electoral prospects must be eliminated.

In the context of the breakdown of the post-1974 consensus and intense political antagonism, universities are being used as a spearhead by the Greek Right. This consensus brought about the massive development and democratization of higher education. Universities increased in number, expanded their departments, and received growing numbers of students. They have also been the loci of critical thinking, contestation, political mobilization and emancipation for many young people, as well as a space where the Left often has an intellectual and moral supremacy. It thus comes as no surprise that they are being attacked first.

The Neoliberalization of Higher Education and Law 4777/2021

The efforts to alter the public, free, and open character of Greek universities go back to the 2000s (Angelidou 2017, Gefou-Madianou 2000), when both conservative and social democratic governments made several attempts to waive the financial responsibilities of the state towards universities in order to create a market of lucrative educational services for private investors. In this way, an attempt was made in 2006 to abolish Article 16 of the Constitution, according to which “Higher Education is provided exclusively by public institutions with full self-administration, which are under the supervision of the State”. Such efforts were successfully resisted by intense mobilizations of students and teaching staff. These struggles have substantially delayed, in comparison to other European countries, the implementation of neoliberal policies in higher education over the past two decades: in Greece there are still no tuition fees (with the exception of most Masters’ degrees), university administration remains in the hands of elected representatives, and there is a limited number of private colleges, which lack the prestige of public universities.

However, when Nea Dimokratia came to power in 2019, it targeted higher education by abolishing academic asylum. If the latter is one of the bedrocks of any university in the democratic world, in Greece it has an extra symbolic and political significance, due to its brutal violation by police forces seeking to suppress the student protest movement against the military dictatorship. The most prominent violation took place in November 1973, when a military tank entered the Polytechnic School to crush a student uprising, killing at least 24 students (the exact number has never been officially confirmed) and injuring many more, an event that played a seminal role in the fall of the military regime. As a result, once democracy was restored, police were prohibited by law from entering the university campuses – unless a crime was being committed. However, one of the first laws passed by the ND government abolished the asylum, thus permitting the police to enter the universities. Furthermore, after one year without the physical presence of students and teaching staff in the universities, with escalating prohibitions of public gatherings in the name of the pandemic, and without any real dialogue with the academic community, Law 4777/2021 passed on February 11th. Interestingly, this law was not introduced by the Minister of Education and Religions alone, but together with the Minister of Citizen Protection. The collaboration of these two ministries in educational affairs is unprecedented.

To defend Law 4777/2021, which the academic community overwhelmingly rejects, private and public mainstream media, under the control of the Mitsotakis government, orchestrated an extensive propaganda campaign. The propaganda aimed to discredit universities as centers of lawlessness, disorder, and violence, and their staff as “addicted” and trapped in this situation. In this way, university staff have been portrayed as unable to solve such problems internally, thus requiring external state intervention. A few cases of extremely violent acts against academic authorities and staff, mainly at the universities in the center of Athens, were presented as examples of a generalized situation of criminality and public danger. Also, the media disseminated false reports that the deployment of police corps independent of university administration is a common practice across Europe and the US, and that Greece is just “catching up” with the best practices of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world.

The new law introduces two major changes that threaten academic freedom and university autonomy, as well as the public character of higher education. First, it creates a special corps of 1,030 policemen that will be installed inside the universities and authorized to patrol, arrest, and interrogate whomever they consider to be “disturbing academic life”, a corps accountable not to university authorities but directly to the Chief of the Greek police. Furthermore, fences and checkpoints will be placed at the entrances of each campus, and “Centers for the control and reception of signals and images” will be established, which will have authorization to collect and store information that might infringe on the data privacy of teachers, administrative employees, and students. Furthermore, the law allows for many disciplinary measures to be taken against students and makes teaching staff serve in a disciplinary capacity to judge students’ acts (from plagiarism to the organization of parties, public events, and takeovers inside the campus) and punish them with fines that can go up to their expulsion from the university.

All of these measures are in direct violation of the principle of university self-government, as guaranteed by the Constitution, and have as ultimate goals the subjugation of students and teachers to strict disciplinary measures, and the banning of unionism and political contestation inside universities. It is also scandalous and ironic that in such a ravaged economy, with universities suffering from chronic underfunding, the yearly cost of this special corps will be as much as 20 million euros out of a total of about 90 million euros of yearly funding for all the universities (while an extra 30 million euros will be spent in the first year on control equipment). Moreover, those universities that will not accept police in their campuses will see substantial reductions of their state funding.

The second major change introduced by the law is the application of a system of admission where a minimum of 23% of candidates will be denied entry to public universities. This measure will transfer the cost of these students’ education from the state to their families, as their exclusion will create a pool of students who will turn to private colleges. In November 2020, the same government recognized diplomas by unregulated private colleges to be equivalent to those of public universities. So those candidates who fail the criteria for public universities will be able to enter without any criteria to private colleges, if they can afford the fees. This will lead to the closure of one in every three university departments in the country, affecting mostly peripheral universities. Law 4777/2021 is to be followed in the months to come by another law that will probably replace elected university administrations with nominated ones. The new law will also likely introduce student fees and loans, and the implementation of 3-years diplomas.

The academic community has expressed strong opposition against these neoliberal and authoritarian measurements. It is not fully united, as some academics have supported, and still support, the neoliberalization of higher education over the past two decades. However, there is unanimous recognition of the need for better protection of university campuses, equipment and people – protection that should be controlled by universities and not the police. Staff unions, university councils, rectors, and other academic groups have made concrete propositions for public funding for that purpose – propositions that, unfortunately, the government has now taken into consideration. But protection is something radically different from policing, and it is the latter that provokes strong objections (NoUniPolice 2021). Despite the lockdown and the ban on rallies, thousands of students and teaching staff have demonstrated in Athens and other Greek cities since January 2021, both before and after voting on the law. Moreover, student takeovers are spreading to universities all over the country at this very moment. The law also finds no consent among the majority of elected rectors and councils of the 24 Greek universities, with few exceptions, such as the authorities of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Also, numerous university teachers and some of their unions are now planning other means to continue their struggle against the law – for example, seeking to argue in the Supreme Court that several parts of the law are unconstitutional, and exploring possibilities for political disobedience to resist the law’s implementation.

Towards a closed and authoritarian university

The measures introduced with Law 4777/2021 aim to create a closed university, both physically and socially. Physically, by installing fences and control technology that will abolish open access to the campuses. Socially, by restricting the number of students who will have access to higher education, and by transforming the university from a place of sociability and open debate into to a sterilized place where students can only pursue their individual academic and professional paths. The law will definitely not solve any of the existing problems of the universities and it will likely open an era of tension and escalating violence. The brutal police attack at the Aristotle University in February can be seen as a “rehearsal” for such a turn.

More generally, over the past four decades, universities in Greece have been major centers of resistance against the neoliberalisation higher education and society, of critical thinking, and of political activism. They have been privileged places for fostering ideas of social justice and equality. Such critical forces are now faced with the risk of self-restraint, self-censorship, and self-disciplining due to surveillance and the police presence inside university campuses. The establishment of the police inside the universities transgresses democratic principles and transcends the limit of the thinkable until now. Similarly unthinkable until now is PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ euphemistic statement in Parliament that, under the new law, “it is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”. If the state succeeds in passing the “law and order” doctrine and transforming universities into places of fear, surveillance, and repression, while breaking the existing social contract by curtailing the right to free public education, then it will become easier to establish a generalized climate of terror and to ignore social claims and opposition to further restrictions of social rights. If this happens, when the lockdown is over, Greece will be a structurally different country, both in terms of economy and democracy.

Aliki Angelidou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. Her academic interests include economic anthropology, global economic history, anthropology of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, migration, borders and transnationalism. Currently, she carries out research on household and circular economy in post-memoranda Greece.

References

Angelidou, Aliki 2017. “Anthropology in Greece: Dynamics, Difficulties and Challenges”, in Barrera A., Heintz M. & A. Horolets (eds.), Sociocultural Anthropology and Ethnology in Europe: An Intricate Institutional and Intellectual Landscape, New York, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 250-276.

Gefou-Madianou, Dimitra 2000. “Disciples, Discipline and Reflection: Anthropological Encounters and Trajectories”, in M. Strathern (ed.), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and Academy. London: Routledge, EASE Series, pp. 256–78.

Initiative of Academics No Police on Campus 2021. “Greek Universities Targeted, Democracy under Threat The New Bill on Higher Education Threatens Academic Freedom and Brings Police Rule on Campuses”, online petition.

Screenshot of a petition header which reads "Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS. Email: NoUniPolice@gmail.com.
Image 1: Online Petition, “Initiative of Academics NO POLICE ON CAMPUS” (Screenshot by FocaalBlog editors, this petition has our undivided support, we call on our readers to join us as signatories)

Cite as: Angelidou, Aliki. 2021. “’It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy’: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn.” FocaalBlog, 18 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/03/18/aliki-angelidou-it-is-not-the-police-that-enters-the-universities-but-democracy-greek-universities-as-spearhead-of-an-authoritarian-turn/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Prem Kumar Rajaram: The Moral Economy of Precarity

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The authors of The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) have made visible the inequality and hierarchy that has become increasingly normalized in higher education in Europe. The impact of the report lies far beyond anthropology, and my reflections here build on the report’s key findings and consider the impact of precaritization on the university and academia as a whole.

Continue reading →
Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Ela Drążkiewicz: Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

I was reluctant to contribute to this blog series. The recently published EASA report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in anthropology. However, in the last decade we seem to have been talking about precarity in academia non-stop. There is even a nickname for the genre: “quit lit”. So, what, I wondered, would my story change?

Indeed, I have been telling my story to many colleagues, including to those in positions of power. A few colleagues proved to be wonderful allies, offering kindness, compassion, and practical support. However, quite a few showed little empathy or solidarity, and displayed a strong appetite for power. While academic credentials are key to building a career in academia, personal reputation also matters tremendously. You depend upon your colleagues for recommendation letters. This is even more true when you become an ‘internal candidate’ (the sort of candidate that you, as an international migrant, hated until you finally became one yourself). So you learn to please everybody, to be a “good girl”: not to question your Line Manager in meetings, and surely never, ever, in front of others; do not criticise your institution in public; never make demands; say yes to everything; never complain; do not admit you struggle; and most importantly, show endless gratitude.

When, after almost seven years of working at my last institution (where I arrived from Cambridge with my own Marie Curie grant) my third temporary contract was coming to an end, a group of undergraduates (without my knowledge) decided to collect signatures in support of me. However, at the last minute, they hesitated to go public. They revealed their plans to me and asked, “What if it causes more harm than good?” Even though they were new to academia, they already sensed that critique and bottom-up citizen action might be a great topic for an academic paper, but is not necessarily appreciated at the university offices. For me, the students’ support was moving, not least because it was evidence that I am good at my job – despite the stream of job rejections suggesting otherwise. My students appreciated my research insights and my pedagogical skills, and were willing to take a risk. Yet I feared that it would indeed be seen as an affront and a betrayal. I felt deeply insecure and was afraid of being accused of actually initiating the protest myself. I could be branded as a troublemaker. And who would ever want to hire a troublemaker? 

I was also reluctant to contribute to this important discussion on precarity because I do not wish to be viewed through the lens of the precariat. I want to be known for my craft, not my struggle. After all, we are professional academics, not humans. But, most importantly, I am still struck by the feeling that there is a stigma attached to being a precarious worker.The myth of meritocracy promotes a certain narrative: academic success is based on talent, skill, and accomplishment. Moreover, this is not a mere job, but a vocation, requiring sacrifice. Failure therefore suggests that you are just not good enough, or lazy, an old maid in the academic family. If you struggle, perhaps it’s because you just don’t have what it takes? Maybe you have chosen the wrong job?

Academic labour relations are the perfect field for gaslighting and undermining the abilities and achievements of scholars who are not in a position of power. They also lead to segregation and isolation. In the highly competitive academic market, people are easily reduced to the amounts of identifiable social capital they can offer. If you represent the elite, why would you associate with the academic proletariat?

Furthermore, I did not want to write this blog post because it is embarrassing. How could I be so naïve as to find myself part of a Ponzi scheme? Universities and full professors profit from the accelerated recruitment of people in lower ranks. The more junior scholars you recruit, the less teaching you have to do; they will do it for you. You have more time for research, publishing, networking, gaining ever more valuable ‘academic currency’ in an exponential fashion. The more PhDs you recruit, the more prestige comes to you and your institution. You can build your clan, your estate, your power. The more post-docs you recruit, the better your publication record (the most important academic currency). The goal is therefore the constant expansion of the pool of dependent early-career scholars. The problem is, how to lure them in? In academia, this is done by the promise of permanent, stable, respectable jobs, and the myth of meritocracy: if you work hard, with talent, if you do everything by the book, you will obtain success. But, as the EASA report clearly points out, this is often a false promise.

And here is the final reason for my initial hesitation to write: I am exhausted. I finally obtained the holy grail of academia: a permanent job! I now have the chance to rid myself of the stigma, move on, forget. So why would I go back now and get myself involved in this discussion, associate myself with rebellion, with a fight that is no longer mine? Why would I throw myself back into this mud? I worked so hard to get out of it!

Yet, I decided to write. Because I don’t want to be part of an academia run as a rat race. Because I know intimately about the suffering of the precariat. For those of you, who have never been in that position, think of your pandemic experience: remember March 2020, overwhelmed with teaching because of the unexpected new rules of the game, having to adjust your teaching overnight. This is how many precarious workers feel every September. Scholars who move between institutions have to learn the new rules of the game all the time, prepare new courses, adjust to new environments. Remember, the frustration when senior (often male) colleagues were excited that they would finally have time to publish, while you were drowning in teaching and caring duties? Did you start to stress about your job security, funding cuts, redundancy? These are the daily stresses and frustrations of those in the early career stages. Was it fun to have Christmas or Easter over Zoom, to not see your parents, grandparents? This is how many international precarious workers have been spending Christmas for years. You might also now be familiar with the pressure of caring for your children non-stop. This is the recurrent reality of many of those in the international precariat who have children, but no family networks at hand to help, and who cannot afford a sitter or day care. Did you feel lonely in the pandemic? Are you fed up talking to friends on WhatsApp and would like to see them in person? This is the constant reality of so many international scholars lured by the myths of the Ponzi scheme that academia is, trapped in a precarious limbo.

Many young precarious workers are international migrants, and as such they make good workers. Uprooted from their personal networks, with no relatives to visit on Sunday, they are available to work extra hours. They also have a lot to lose: they have already made so many heavy financial and personal sacrifices for their academic careers that it is very hard for them to change course, which means they are ready to do anything and everything, especially if they are given the hope of another contract. They are also easily replaceable and disposable as often they are excluded from academic patronage networks. Often, they have little or no connection with an Alma Mater of their own. For their new institutions, they are just foreigners who have arrived for their own gain. There is an unspoken assumption that they will leave. Consequently, few feel a moral responsibility for them. They are also highly vulnerable to discrimination based on nationality or race, both within and beyond the workplace. It is shameful that this exploitation happens in academia, particularly in anthropology, where so many careers were built on researching exploitation, migration, and indeed, precarious lives. 

Ela Drążkiewicz is a researcher at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Institutional Dreams: The Art of Managing Foreign Aid. She specialises in political, economic and organisational anthropology.  

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Cite as: Drążkiewicz, Ela. 2021. “Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia.” FocaalBlog, 5 February. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/02/05/ela-drazkiewicz-blinded-by-the-light-international-precariat-in-academia/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Susana Narotzky: A History of Precariousness in Spain

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers quantitative evidence about a situation which all of those who work in academia are aware of, many experience daily, and which has repeatedly been denounced since the onslaught of the neoliberal policies starting in the 1980s. I will comment on this document from my situated viewpoint as a Spanish anthropologist, a full time tenured anthropologist, and a PI of large collaborative projects.

As a report produced by anthropologists for anthropologists, my first surprise was to find it not very anthropological. Although the report acknowledges that situations are very different among countries, we do not get a picture of what those differences are. The ‘methodology’ cannot deliver that picture. First, the assumption that EASA membership represents anthropologists working in Europe, and in particular the most precarious anthropologists, is probably inaccurate. In Spain, many of the part-time non-tenured teaching positions have extremely low salaries and their holders juggle a plurality of jobs that make research difficult. As a result, membership in EASA –which is fundamentally tied to participation in the biennial conference—is rarely sought. Therefore, a large contingent of (probably) the most precarious voices, many of which are not proficient in English, is not represented in the survey. This may also explain why a large majority of respondents work in Northern institutions which have more resources than those in other countries.

Second, what does the fact of choosing to produce a ‘survey’ rather than an ‘ethnography’ of “The anthropological career in Europe” say about the discipline of social anthropology, about its trust in the ‘evidence’ produced by our main methodological tool? Why does EASA as an association of social anthropologists thinks that it needs quantitative evidence in order to make its point about precarious anthropologists’ situation in the academy? We have countless ethnographies about labor precarity in Europe, but we have scant detailed ethnographies about precarious anthropologists teaching and doing research in concrete university environments. This has not been an obstacle to insightful and important articles being written from two perspectives: on the one hand, contributions based on personal experience; on the other hand, contributions based on statistical secondary sources enabling theorizations about the neoliberal transformations of the university in general or in a particular country (often in the Global North). As Pérez and Montoya (2018: A5) propose, personal experience should “reveal research paths for future ethnographies of academic precarity”, but it cannot substitute for them. I suggest that producing ethnographies is an urgent task if we want (1) to understand concrete ongoing processes of exploitation, domination and dispossession, and (2) to organize in a collective manner to overturn them.

Third, context and history. The survey does not provide any tools for historical and political context. Rather, it generalizes the neoliberal process as if it developed in the same way everywhere. We know from anthropological investigations into other domains of life, however, that the rolling back and rolling out of the neoliberal state is modulated by concrete historical circumstances.

In the mid-1970s, as a result of an increase in the number of university students, Spanish universities resorted to hiring a large number of non-permanent faculty. The figures vary slightly according to each university but, on average, 80 per cent of the faculty in Spanish universities were non-permanent in the mid-1970s (Profesor No Numerario) (Moreno 2019, Castillo 1982). According to statistical records of the Ministry of Universities, the figure of non-permanent faculty has stabilized at around 45 per cent in the past four years. Precarity, then, was part of an undemocratic university system where hierarchies of patronage dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure. Precarity, now, is part of an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources, forcing universities to seek funding from other sources (e.g., research grant overheads) or public-private partnerships. This has important implications for our understanding of the neoliberalisation of Spanish academia; as much as it sheds light on the long history of academic precarity and the struggle against this.

In the 1970s, as part of the general struggles for democratization of the university, a nationwide movement of the No Numerario’s developed. Based on assembly meetings in faculties and universities, it was not attached to parties or unions and was coordinated at the national scale by a committee of representatives. They demanded the same treatment as the permanent faculty, together with access to decision making committees in the university and other democratic requests. They organized long strikes and threatened the continuity of teaching and exams. Yet, their demand of stability and equal treatment sought to obtain a well-paid labor contract and to abolish the life-long tenure of the Profesor Numerario, subjecting all professors to periodic evaluation of their teaching and research and, implicitly, to the possibility of ending their contract. In the end, this radical position –the generalization of “non-tenured” academic labor contracts– was disabled by a law of university reform issued by the first socialist government in 1983, which promoted a process of rapid stabilization of most PhD-holding No Numerario’s through access to lifelong tenure  (Carreras 2004).

Today, the privatization of the public university system is based on the elimination of that life-tenure system and its substitution by tenured labor contracts in a context where the existing labor regulations have deregulated most rights and protections. Precarious faculty today in Spain are represented only partially and by various unions demanding stability, but there is no equivalent movement, organization and coordination to that of the No Numerario’s in the seventies. Why is that?

Local patronage networks are still very much in place, and one of the major assets to access a permanent job is to remain close to one’s Alma Mater, rather than to publish or get an international post-doc position abroad. In public universities 87% of teaching faculty (tenured and non-tenured) have a PhD from the same Autonomous Community, and 73% from the same university where they defended their PhD. Simultaneously, an increasing contingent of young academics who have been competitively selected to post-doc positions in research projects, have generally been able to publish in ‘impact’ journals and have expanded their international networks.

As a result, two very different kinds of precarious academic exist nowadays. They are often pitted against each other in competitions for tenured positions. When committees have to decide the value of teaching or research experience, the value of the local or foreign (i.e. from outside the university) candidate, they often tend to favor the local candidate with teaching experience. Rather than moralizing this as being ‘bad’ or ‘good’ for the university, my point here is to underline the diverse positionalities of precarious academics in Spain and the difficulties that this fragmentation entails in terms of collective organization and mobilization. In a context with more precarity and minimal research opportunities, within an ongoing struggle for democracy, the No Numerario’s movement collectively organized and achieved stability. Why not now? What needs to be done?

As anthropologists we need ethnographies of academic precarities, we need to historically situate the various forms of precarity and to compare them. To act effectively, we need to understand the structures of feeling and the conditions of possibility for collective mobilization. We know the numbers, now we need to know the souls.

Susana Narotzky is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Bibliography

Carreras, J. 2004. Evaluación de la calidad docente y promoción del profesorado (IV). Legislación universitaria española (b): de la Ley de Reforma Universitaria (1983) a la Ley Orgánica de universidades (2002). (1ª parte.) Educación Médica 7(1): 9-23

Castillo, J.J. 1982. Universidad: O todos o ninguno, El País, 12 de abril 1982

Fotta, Martin, Mariya Ivancheva and Raluca Pernes. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Moreno, I. 2019. Interview with Prof. Isidoro Moreno, Anthropologist, Universidad de Sevilla. 20 March, 2019. http://tv.us.es/el-movimiento-de-los-pnn-y-la-democratizacion-de-la-universidad-y-el-pais/

Pérez, M. & Montoya, A. 2018. The Unsustainability of the Neoliberal Public University: Towards an Ethnography of Precarity in Academia. Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, LXXIII(1): A1-A16

Cite as: Narotzky, Susana. 2021. “A History of Precariousness in Spain.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/susana-narotzky:-a-history-of-precariousness-in-spain/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Giacomo Loperfido: On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

Covid19 is producing a crisis – both sanitary and economic – of global structural proportions, threatening the very existence of society as we know it. All precarious segments of society have become more precarious. But even before now, a growing precariat, eating into larger and larger segments of the middle classes, was emerging. Isolation, alienation, precaritization are not a novelty. Looking at the PrecAnthro/Easa survey (Fotta, Ivancheva, Pernes, 2020), one can see that the transformations of the academic system are an integral part of the process of middle class precaritization that started long before the current crisis.

I am an unemployed anthropologist (and have been so for more than two years). I am also a member of the PrecAnthro collective/union. At the EASA conference of 2018 I had the pleasure to be part of Alice Tilche’s initiative to bring together junior and senior anthropologists (precarious and otherwise) to reflect critically on the implications of the current trend of funding academic research through “big projects” (see Tilche and Loperfido, 2019). Before then, I had been a “privileged” (Matos, 2019) precarious researcher, employed as a postdoc in one of those big projects. For four years, I enjoyed the chance to participate in a solidly funded team under the expert coordination of a senior researcher who was also able to embed our collective research among her high level contacts in global anthropology. Despite fundamentally benefitting from having been part of a “big project”, I would like to use my space here to express a critical stance on what seems to have become one of the hegemonic mechanisms of research funding in the European and global arena.

The “big project” trend relates directly to the occupational transformations within social anthropology highlighted by the survey: precaritization, constant competition over funding, growing separation between research and teaching, vertical polarisation of academic hierarchies, de-professionalization of academic labor through multiple contracts, the imperatives of – often restless – international mobility, to cite but a few.

In the 1990s, the extension of New Public Management policies to the university system enforced the managerialization of administrations, introduced performance requirements, and set up unbridled competition. What emerged was a new trans-nationalized educational arena, in which “excellence” and “competition” became not only fundamental key words and real-world access keys to tenured careers. As an effect, an increasing number of tenured positions were proletarianized as a collective body, “and the number of short term or part time contracts at major institutions increased (with the concomitant participation of a handful of highly paid stars)”, as a worried Bill Readings had already stated 25 years ago (Readings 1996: 1). He noted how the university was beginning to be spoken of in the idiom of “excellence” rather than of “culture”. His explanation was that “the university no longer has to safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation-state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself” (Readings 1996:13).

About ten years later, the establishment of the European Research Council was saluted as “a European Champions League” (Winnacker 2008: 126), and the new way of funding research through big grants was established as part of the EU’s 7th framework program. Here again, “individual excellence” and “competition as the prerequisite for the formation of excellence” were becoming key principles in overcoming the “startling parochialism fostered in Europe by the reality of Nation States” (Winnacker: 124-25).

In much less enthusiastic terms, PrecAnthro’s action has focused on those very processes of increased internationalisation, escalating competition, and the new global imperative of “excellence”. With the above-mentioned event at the EASA conference 2018, we wanted to problematize the ways in which the international academic arena has been transformed into a market, where “scholars who are able to secure large grants have become football stars openly traded in the academic league” (Tilche, Loperfido, 2019:111).  A “Champions League”, indeed. Yet, on the dark side of that seemingly glamorous moon, a less visible academic precariat silently took shap; and became exposed to all the profound challenges and hardships in academic careers and personal life that the EASA/PrecAnthro report brings to light for the EASA membership community.

From all the above, I can only infer a general decline in the perception of the value of public institutions as something being endowed with more than just ‘competition’, such as social equality and cultural reproduction. Certainly, we all love excellent scholarship. Yet, there is a difference between a public action that promotes academic excellence so that it helps everybody to improve their scholarship, and an excellence that comes as a single-minded competition mechanism where only those that already have the label of excellence will benefit. 

Personally, I did benefit from the opportunities offered by participation in a big international grant. But we should refuse to assess collective problems on the grounds of our personal interests only. If we are to do something about “the current tragedy of anthropology as a discipline” (Kapferer, 2018) – and these are, once again, words from a time before the current pandemic – it is important ask, from a political and economic angle, where the public money that I benefitted from did not go. How many more non-tenured positions, how many more fixed-term research contracts and how many part-time teaching contracts does each €2,5 million grant produce? Who shoulders the costs of those grants? The PrecAnthro survey offers important answers to these questions. Now, what happens if we put together the scary picture portrayed by that survey prior to the current pandemic with the projections we have on the impact of Covid19 on the global economy and precarity in the academy in particular? There is enough evidence now for an honest and serious discussion on social justice; and to question where the current organisation of “big grant” transnational research funding fits into the escalating inequality in academia.

Giacomo Loperfido is an independent researcher, member of PrecAnthro. He is currently working on his first monograph, A Birth of Neo-fascism: Cultural Identities, the State, and the Politics of Marginality in Italy, thanks to the generous help of the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, CH.

Bibliography

Fotta, Martin, Ivancheva, Mariya, Pernes, Raluca. 2020. The anthropological career in Europe: A complete report on the EASA membership survey. European Association of Social Anthropologists. https://easaonline.org/publications/precarityrep

Kapferer, Bruce. 2018. “The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 9 July. www.focaalblog.com/2018/07/09/bruce-kapferer-the-hau-complicity-an-event-in-the-crisis-of-anthropology.

Matos, Patricia, 2019. “Precarious Privilege. Confronting Material and Moral Dispossession”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117.

Readings, Bill, 1996, The University in Ruins. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Tilche, Alice, Loperfido, Giacomo, 2019. “The Return of Armchair Anthropology? Debating the Ethics and Politics of Big Projects”, in Forum: Politics and Precarity in Academia, Social Anthropology 27: 97-117

Winnacker, Ernst-Ludwig, 2008. “On Excellence Through Competition”, European Educational Research Journal, 7:2, 124-30.

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2021. “On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money.” FocaalBlog, 29 January. http://www.focaalblog.com/2021/01/29/giacomo-loperfido-on-excellence-precarity-and-the-uses-of-public-money/

Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Natalia Buier: What sample, whose voice, which Europe?

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’ report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on and the critical scrutiny of which is indispensable for formulating minimally shared lines of action. The report is likely to stir discussion both through its inclusions as well as through some of its inevitable silences. It is some of the latter that I want to briefly touch upon here.

Continue reading →
Debating the EASA/PrecAnthro Precarity Report, Features

Don Kalb: Anthropological Lives Matter, Except They Don’t

This post is part of a feature on “Debating the EASA/PreAnthro Precarity Report,” moderated and edited by Stefan Voicu (CEU) and Don Kalb (University of Bergen).

The PrecAnthro Collective within EASA has shown staying power and bite. That is what the EASA precarity survey demonstrates (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). Mariya Ivancheva has turned her elected stint in the Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists to good use. She, her co-authors, and her multiple collaborators and supporters in and outside of EASA should be applauded. This is Europe-wide anthropological collective action at work, and it goes far beyond business as usual.

Continue reading →
Blog

Mariya Ivancheva: The casualization, digitalization, and outsourcing of academic labour: a wake-up call for trade unions

1 Comment

Mariya Ivancheva, University of Liverpool

The UK higher education sector has seen decades of escalating injustices that academic trade unions need to confront head-on. As one of the biggest, most visible public higher education systems in the world, the UK is ahead of the curve in a global process of commercialization of higher education. The main academic workers’ trade union, University College Union (UCU), has been on strike for 22 days in total over two periods since November 2019 with demands to end casualization, increase pay, and abolish gender and minority pay gaps. Yet, the strike also coincided with the outbreak of coronavirus, which has pushed universities around the world into online teaching. In light of these unfolding development, this article reviews increasingly established injustices in UK higher education and shows the links between casualization, digitalization, and outsourcing of academic labour.

Continue reading →