There are two universities trapped inside Victoria University. One wants to free your mind. One wants to free your wallet. Salient discusses the implications of both.
“Oh wow, that’s really interesting. What career track is that?”
This is the question faced by Joel, a Nietzsche-reading, Russian Lit/Slavic Languages double major in the film Adventureland. He sarcastically responds: “Cabbie, hotdog vender, marijuana delivery guy. The world is my oyster.” As well as providing one of the funnier moments in the film, this question highlights a major paradox, which exists at the very heart of every academic institution. A tension exists between the university’s imperative to provide qualifications with vocational outputs (gettin’ us the jobs!) and its role as a space that can facilitate a critique of society independent from external influences. We can talk about this in terms of disciplines. Just compare the respective functions of law and philosophy degrees. Upon graduating with a law degree, it is expected that you will pursue a career in law, or at least will leave the university with a qualification that will guarantee your future employment. As for a philosophy degree, well, Joel’s response might be equally applicable here too, but if he was feeling sincere he might just admit that the liberal arts also play an important role within society. The university has always been a contradictory entity, founded upon a deep-lying set of conflicts.
The Paradoxical University
In November 2010, Victoria University axed its Gender Studies program. To major in Gender Studies now will require students to cobble together papers from a variety of different departments. At the same time, New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce outlined the importance of increasing vocational outputs at tertiary institutions, highlighting what Canadian academic Alison Hearn calls “the central tension between the usefulness of the university to its society on the one hand, and its need for academic freedom from external interests on the other.” Hearn calls this the ‘Paradoxical University’. Her argument is that this tension has always existed within the university, but why is it so especially pronounced today?
One reason is the advent of neoliberal politics: an ideological paradigm that promotes a free market and individual autonomy from state intervention. Neoliberalism can therefore act as an economic and social policy imperative, both at the level of the state and also individual governance. Neoliberalism encourages private enterprise, consumer choice, and transactional thinking—in other words, an undertaking of personal responsibility over general wellbeing, based on the logics and language of the market, and a de-emphasis of government intervention in social welfare.
In light of these initiatives, external influences both public and private combine to unbalance the university’s orienting paradox, and we see this at both levels in New Zealand. John Key has made the government’s policy on tertiary education clear in his constant promotion of vocational output in NZ universities. Likewise, the imbalance in private or industry funding between faculties and schools affects the success and growth of each program. As both government and industry move to play a more prominent role in dictating and defining the operation of the university, the university’s emphases on teaching and research shifts toward those fields with a higher monetary yield, both in terms of research (sciences) and the production of workers (commerce, law, etc).
The Vocational University
In July of last year, Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce outlined the National-led Government’s plan to directly link tertiary education funding to targeted career outcomes. “I want to see funding linked to employment outcomes, not just internal benchmarks. This will send a strong signal to students about which qualifications and which institutions offer the best career prospects. And that’s what tertiary education has got to be about.”
You can trace a clear connection between this policy initiative and developments like last year’s closure of the Victoria University’s Gender Studies department. Faculties with clear vocational outputs like Commerce, Science and Law stand to benefit, while the humanities (and liberal arts in particular) and languages are more at risk—and these aren’t the only changes that are in store for our academic institutions. National has also begun altering the tertiary sector’s funding structure in order to target better student performance. As Joyce puts it, “In short we’ll provide financial incentives for institutions to continually work to improve the educational performance of their students.”
So New Zealand’s universities will be judged on a mixture of performance-related factors, including successful course completion, qualification completion, and progression to further study, starting with an initial maximum of 5% of total university funding being performance based. This might sound like a potentially positive initiative—until one considers how such a policy would likely be implemented. Teaching staff will now be under immense pressure to reduce their fail rates, whilst simultaneously increasing pass marks across the grade spectrum. The question that needs to be asked is whether this will genuinely precipitate an improvement in teaching standards, or whether it will simply mean that marking becomes more generous. For instance, will greater administrative measures be taken to ensure that students at risk of failing a course are encouraged to withdraw rather than attempt completion, and therefore risk receiving a fail grade?
The Corporatised University
With New Zealand universities being under increasing pressure to reduce costs and generate revenues, while catering to a growing demand for tertiary education, as well as to redefine themselves under the contemporary Neo-Liberal paradigm of increasing privatisation and free-market rule, we have also seen a clear movement towards operational practices that are commonplace in the private sector. In 2010 the Wishbone food chain opened a store on Kelburn Campus as part of a redevelopment of the Cotton Building that foreruns the imminent arrival of the Campus Hub, a space which will provide further opportunities for businesses to open storefronts at Victoria University. These developments will do more than simply alter the social and physical spaces on campus. They will also have implications for the university’s orientation as an independent site for cultural discussion and societal critique. How is it possible, asks Hearn, “to successfully teach students to think critically about their consumerist environment, for example, when they are sitting in a classroom named after a corporation?” Although the presence of a multinational corporate entity such as McDonald’s at Victoria University remains unlikely, the sanctified status of the campus as a space free from the presence of private enterprise can no longer be guaranteed.
Major in Yourself
Students are faced with a choice of direction in the type of study we wish to undertake, which is, of course, part of a much larger formation of selfhood. The discourse of personal transformation has always been part of higher education, from the stereotypical freshman to the mature student: both are entrenched in a journey to, as academics James Cote and Anton Allahar put it, either “find oneself” or “better oneself” as “architects of their own destiny.” However, the rise of the promotional, neoliberal university brings with it a language of personal responsibility and a mentality dictated by market logic, where the journey of becoming is much more defined—that is, to pursue a career.
If the university is indeed dictated by an increasingly neoliberal mentality, then what can we expect from the student body? The answer to this question lies in another set of questions that all students, especially first years, should ask themselves: Why am I at university? What do I want from the university, my lecturers? What do I want from my degree? These seemingly simple questions are likely to be met with a predictable, straightforward progressive answer: degrees get jobs, which pay the rent. However, upon scrutiny this mentality challenges the fundamental (albeit idealistic) purposes of higher education. Within this relatively consumerist mentality, students start to appear as autonomous ‘choosers’, perceiving education as what Hearn calls a “zero-sum game, where they get (in the form of grades) what they pay for (in the form of capital or fees)”.
Likewise, the university becomes less a space for the production of knowledge: instead, as Vice-Chancellors’ Committee chairman Derek McCormack commented to Nathan Beaumont in the Dominion Post (16/07/2010), the university “becomes more and more like an employment agency”. Alison Hearn has suggested that this consumerist mentality, prevalent in many universities around the world, can be seen as a major factor in the obsession of ranking and comparing various institutions. Take Victoria University’s current marketing slogan, “Get amongst the best”. This marketing strategy certainly doesn’t mean to be taken literally (the QS World University rankings put Victoria at 225th); rather, it is an imperative for consumer choice. It upholds a predictable neoliberal stance on education—that it is purchased, and added to a list of numerous other qualifications in order to build a well-rounded, productive workforce. If students are encouraged into a “get the most for the least” mentality, then where does that leave student organisations such as clubs, sports and the student community in general?
Clearly, the balance of orientation within the paradoxical university is becoming more and more one-sided, with worrying implications for students, staff, and the nature of tertiary education itself. If the contemporary university continues to be subservient to commercial pressures, then developments like the axing of the Gender Studies programme are likely to become increasingly commonplace. As students, we need to carefully consider our place within the academic institution, as well as that institution’s place within society as a whole.