Our universities aren't just managerialist: they're authoritarian

Britain's universities aren't just getting rid of the arts and humanities: they're getting rid of collegiate governance too.

Here's Krzysztof Nawratek, senior lecturer in humanities and architecture at the University of Sheffield, writing in Times Higher Education:

I started my university career in Poland in 1988, a year before communism collapsed. I joined an underground anti-communist student association, went on strike and saw my hierarchical, conservative university slowly crumble.

However, even within the oppressive communist regime, Polish universities held on to one core belief: the university belonged to its academic community. Rectors and deans were elected. Senates and faculty councils had real authority. Leadership was temporary and accountable to those it served. The university did not belong to its managers; in fact, it’s hard to say if there was any real management at all.

When I moved to the UK in 2008, I expected universities not just to be more autonomous but more democratic. Instead, I found institutions that were independent from the state but whose autonomy lay with their executive teams and governing bodies, not with the university as a whole.

British universities are clearly part of the late capitalist system,¹ and critics typically point to their neoliberal agenda and managerialism. But I think that description no longer fits. British universities are becoming not so much managerialist as authoritarian. 

This might sound harsh but I am not talking about dictatorship. The atmosphere of fear and expected obedience reminds me of my time as a student in Poland but the reason I use the word authoritarian is more banal: leadership is immune to any actionable feedback from below. Consultation still exists but nothing anyone says can change the decision or remove those who made it.

This trend away from democratic decision-making towards managerialism and ultimately authoritarianism can be seen across British society, not just in universities, but in local councils, professional bodies and even sport.

At the heart of it lies the belief that democracy, discussion and consultation are inefficient, but that belief is mistaken.

As it's Karl Popper's birthday, let me quote again his greatest British populariser, Bryan Magee:

Before Popper it was believed by almost everyone that democracy was bound to be inefficient and slow, even if to be preferred in spite of that because of the advantages of freedom and the other moral benefits; and the most efficient government in theory would be some form of enlightened dictatorship. 

Popper showed that this is not so; and he provides us with an altogether new and deeper understanding of how it comes about that most of the materially successful societies in the world are liberal democracies. 

It is not – as, again, had been believed by most people before – because their prosperity has enabled them to afford that costly luxury called democracy; it is because democracy has played a crucial role in raising them out of a situation in which most of their members were poor, which had been the case in almost all of them when democracy began.

That comes from Magee's intellectual biography Confessions of a Philosopher.

Notes

1. I am suspicious of the expression 'late capitalism': it suggests a claim to knowledge of the future, or at least a confidence in how it will turn out, to which the writer is not entitled. I fear that what will come after late capitalism is even later capitalism.