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.

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David Howarth says Liberal Democrats should attack Brexit, not just "the Tories' botched Brexit deal".

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Louise Murphy explodes three myths about NEETs – young people who are not it education, employment or training.

Pete Paphides celebrates Madness and their song The Liberty of Norton Folgate.

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Sheep in nappy spotted on Polish high-speed train

The judges were in no doubt: Notes from Poland wins Headline of the Day.

There will, as they observed, be dancing in the streets of Kraków tonight.

Anti-Trump tactics in Portland recall the opposition to Poland's Communist regime

The Frogs of Portland challenging Trump's goons and their occupation of the city remind me of the tactics adopted by the opposition of the Communist regime in Poland.

The quotation below comes from the East European supplement included in issue 7/8 of Here and Now, a Situationist magazine published in Glasgow between 1985 and 1984. The article is written by Danny Branchflower and issue 7/8 appears to date from January 1989:

During the referendum on social policy held on November 27th, Orange Alternative demonstrated and called for Wroclaw to be the city with a 200% turnout; "Vote 'yes' twice". 150 people were arrested and detained for a number of hours. 

Again on 7th December the streets were flooded with Santa Claus's: "Bring Christmas decorations, fir branches to decorate the subway. Let's help the administration in this noble task ... Let the new existence shape the new consciousness!!! Only Santa Claus can save you from poverty".

Confusion reigned as the police tried to round up the Santas, arresting many official Santas in the process. A crowd of more than 2000 called for the release of Santa and pressed in on the police, later surrounding the district Police HQ, before being dispersed.

You can read more about Orange Alternative on 99% Invisible.

Lech Wałęsa likens White House treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a Soviet-era interrogation

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The former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Wałęsa has written to Donald Trump, condemning the US president’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine.

His letter, reports Notes from Poland, was co-signed by 38 other former political prisoners of Poland’s communist regime:

"We watched your conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with horror and distaste," wrote the group, referring to Trump’s meeting with Zelensky in the White House on Friday, at which the pair were expected to sign an agreement but which instead turned into an angry confrontation.

"We were also horrified by the fact that the atmosphere in the Oval Office during this conversation reminded us of the one we remember well from interrogations by the Security Service [SB, the communist secret police] and from courtrooms in communist courts," they added.

"Prosecutors and judges, commissioned by the all-powerful communist political police, also explained to us that they held all the cards and we had none," wrote the signatories. "They demanded that we cease our activities, arguing that thousands of innocent people were suffering because of us."

Wałęsa is something of a controversial figure - he has made illiberal statements on refugees and gay parliamentarians - but, unlike Donald Trump, he knows the cost of political courage.

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Sian Norris meets the Polish activists supporting Ukrainian women fleeing war horrors.

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Adam Bychawski on how the Tories have driven local council services into bankruptcy: "Britain is so broke that it can’t afford lollipop people any more. Councils are having to turn off the fountains in Nottingham and dim the street lights in Birmingham. In some areas, public toilets are a thing of the past. Libraries might soon follow them."

"Since 1997, the number of black professional cricketers in England has dwindled by 75 per cent. A 2020 report by Sport England found that whereas approximately 36 per cent of adult involvement in recreational cricket is ‘non-white’, black participation was so low as to be statistically irrelevant, apparently lower than golf and tennis." Michael Collins researches the reasons for this very English collapse.

Vladimir Putin has cast his soldiers as the liberators of Ukraine from domination by Poland. As Luka Ivan Jukic explains, it's a distorted historical vision, but one with deep roots.

Rachel Pronger watches Copa 71, the film about the unofficial Women’s football world cup of 1971: "There’s plenty of inane misogyny on display in the vivid footage – the press are reassured that the player’s uniforms will be 'as close as possible to hot pants' - but the astonishingly petty actions of Fifa, who objected to the tournament then used it as an excuse to systematically shut down women’s football around the world, are anything but laughable." 

Lestari has a literature review, photo essay and podcast series on the social and cultural value of trees found outside woodlands.

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Timothy Garton Ash says Poland is learning that restoring democracy is even harder than creating it.

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...which is an outcome for which Matt Carr, itemising the strange death of Tory England, yearns.

"When we were taking players from union – Jonathan Davies, Offiah – it was a real psychological body blow that forced them to change. We gutted Welsh rugby union. They fined Davies for saying he wanted to be paid so he could get a mortgage! Now it’s completely flipped." Anthony Broxton is interviewed about his book Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher's Britain.

Richard Williams reviews an album that celebrates Les Cousins, the Soho folk and blues club that flourished between 1964 and 1972: "It is, as you’d expect, a splendidly varied selection, starting and ending with big names — Bert Jansch and the Strawbs — and containing both even bigger ones (Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Nick Drake, Roy Harper and Cat Stevens) as well as many more of those whose reputations never really escaped the folk world, like the brilliant guitarists Davy Graham, Mike Cooper, John James, Sam Mitchell and Dave Evans."

"A good place to start is by acknowledging the snobbery - and misogyny - inherent in this question. Christie’s success tends to be viewed as a phenomenon, a freak of literature, which rarely happens with more highbrow writers, especially when they’re male. How often do people ask why the heck we still read F. Scott Fitzgerald? Or about the secret to Raymond Chandler’s continuing popularity?" Kemper Donovan responds to those who ask why Agatha Christie has sold so many books.