‘We’re not the hottest ethnicity’: Pacific scholars and the cultural politics of New Zealand universities

ABSTRACT

Academic labour markets around the world are increasingly globalised and tied to transnational circuits of neoliberal capital. Universities in New Zealand are closely aligned with these trends and an academic labour force has developed over time that reflects these economic flows and currents. This labour force is characterised by an exceptionally high number of multinational academic staff, many of whom contribute to research and inquiry aimed at maintaining and broadening the influence of their institutions abroad. Pacific faculty, however, experience the micro-geographies of New Zealand universities in different ways from other migrant scholars, especially those who hail from the global North. They are rarely included in academic ‘prestige economies’ or elite scholarly networks and are often isolated in their academic departments. This paper draws on a study about the experiences of senior Pacific academics in Aotearoa New Zealand and explores how they formulate pan-Pacific solidarities within the neoliberal and settler-colonial milieu of higher education. We focus on the often fraught dynamics of encounters between Pacific scholars, white academic elites and indigenous Māori colleagues as they map academic identities on to institutional space.     

No room at the top? The glass wall for professional services managers in pre-1992 English universities

Pre-1992 English universities are changing the way they appoint their deputy and pro-vice-chancellors (PVCs). Traditionally, PVC posts were filled by internal secondment from within the professoriate, but these days an increasing number are appointed by means of external open competition involving advertisement and/or executive search. So has this ‘opening up’ of PVC positions created new career progression opportunities for professional services managers? Findings from a census, online survey and interviews with a range of senior university managers suggest not. Despite the PVC role becoming more managerial, those getting the jobs remain overwhelmingly career academics. Professional services managers confront a glass wall, excluded from consideration by a non-negotiable requirement for academic credibility. Aware they have little chance of getting a PVC job, they are unlikely to apply. The continued monopolisation of PVC posts by academic managers represents a form of social closure that serves to maintain their elite status.     

Government research evaluations and academic freedom: a UK and Australian comparison

Performance management systems have been an inevitable consequence of the development of government research evaluations (GREs) of university research, and have also inevitably affected the working life of academics. The aim of this paper is to track the development of GREs over the past 25 years, by critically evaluating their adoption in the UK and Australian higher education sector and their contribution to the commodification of academic labour, and to highlight the resultant tensions between GREs and academic freedom. The paper employs a literature-based analysis, relying on publicly available policy documents and academic studies over the period 1985–2010. GREs are a global phenomenon emanating from new public management reforms and while assessments of university research have been welcomed, they have attracted critique based on their design, the manner in which they have been applied, and the unintended consequences of their implementation on academic freedom in particular. Consistent with international research on the impact of GREs, Australian research assessments appear to be undoing the academic freedom that is central to successful research. Further empirical research on the impact of GREs on academics is urgently needed.     

Exploring Academic Identities and Practices in a Competitive Enhancement Context: a UK-based case study

This article proposes that in a context where the roles assigned to academics are increasingly complex, where academic work is visibly managed and monitored with an emphasis on teaching quality and professionalised practices, better understandings of academic identities might emerge from a focus on the teaching dimension of the academic role. It seeks to capture this dimension through a theoretical framework that takes account of the context and realities in which academics operate.
It examines this complexity through a set of policy initiatives aimed at enhancing the teaching function in UK universities, and a brief report on a study of 18 UK academics focusing on the nature of academic labour. It argues that the teaching dimension of the academic role cannot be usefully studied from outside the context in which academics evolve and construct their apprehensions of teaching practice, and without paying attention to the degree of agency available to them in the context where they operate. It points to the negative impact of competing initiatives directed disjointedly at teaching and research.     

Beyond evaluative studies: perceptions of teaching qualifications from probationary lecturers in the UK

Probation is little used as a frame of reference in academic development literature. Frequently, the focus is on evaluating teaching qualifications for new lecturers. Less often investigated is the issue of situating such a course within the overall experience of new academics, to consider the role that teaching qualifications have within wider probationary processes in the UK. This qualitative study sought the views of new academics on various influences shaping their socialisation. Insights from this work can feed usefully into policy and practices for academic developers, and three key themes – equity, impact and congruence – are elaborated in this article.     

A qualitative study of the UK academic role: positive features,negative aspects and associated stressors in a mainly teaching-focused university

The literature demonstrates that stress in the working life of academics has increased over recent years. However, qualitative research on how academics cope with this is very scarce. Using online interviewing with thematic analysis, this paper examines how 31 academics in a post-92 predominantly teaching-focused UK university cope with the stressors of work. An innovation was to ask about both positive and negative experiences at work unlike most stress research which focuses only on negatives. Six themes emerged from the data; administrative loads, coping with stress at work, task preferences, the academic role, and positive and negative feelings around research/scholarship and thoughts around leaving academia. Increases in student numbers, being able to spend less time with students, heavy workloads, increasing administration, poor management, funding cuts and government initiatives threatening the future of education, obtaining research funding, and increasing insecurity of academic posts were all stressors. Positives identified included satisfaction gained from teaching students, support from colleagues, relative autonomy at work and the ability to manage their time more effectively were perceived as factors that can moderate some of the negative consequences of work stress. Overall, academics reported being happy at work because of the satisfaction gained from teaching and research.     

Challenges for University Engagement in the UK: Towards a Public Academe?

This paper considers the changing role of universities in the UK as they respond to an engagement agenda that stipulates a more immersive and visible interaction between academics and the public. It constitutes a survey of attitudes to public engagement in a selection of UK universities drawing on interviews with senior academics with managerial responsibility at the end of 2009. The results of this study reflect a mood of indecision and anxiety among respondents towards a public engagement agenda seen to influence the contours of their professional identities and working lives. The study situates academic accounts that contest the legitimacy of public engagement as a core academic activity and the role of academics in communicating with public groups. Moreover, it reveals a lack of agreement and consistency in the conceptualisation and application of public engagement in higher education contexts, certainly beyond an emergent discourse of research impact.     

Consumerisation in UK higher education business schools: higher fees,greater stress and debatable outcomes

For many UK higher education business schools, the continued recruitment of UK, EU and international students is crucial for financial stability, viability and independence. Due to increasingly competitive funding models across the sector, many institutional leaders and administrators are making decisions typical of highly marketised consumer environments. Thus, this paper explores academics’ perceptions of the impact of consumerisation in UK higher education business schools. To achieve this, 22 business school academics were interviewed within three UK higher education institutions (HEIs) in the North of England. Participants had a minimum of three years teaching experience. Data was analysed using template analysis taking an interpretive approach. The findings indicate that academics perceived the introduction of tuition fees to have been the catalyst for students increasing demonstration of customer-like behaviour: viewing the education process as transactional, with the HEI providing a ‘paid for’ service. It is argued that these changes in UK higher education have created tensions between university leaders and academics, creating genuine dilemmas for those with decision-making responsibilities who must balance academic integrity and long-term institutional financial viability.     

Research and teaching cultures in two contrasting UK policy contexts: Academic life in Education Departments in five English and Scottish universities

The paper explores academic staff and departmental research and teaching cultures in the Education Departments of five universities in Scotland and England, countries with increasingly diverging public policies in respect of education. The relationship between research and teaching, how the purposes of universities are defined and the status of research in Education are current UK higher education policy preoccupations. Data is drawn from interviews with 40 academics, observation of department settings, documentation and websites. The analysis draws on the work of Bourdieu, considering the changing habitus of individual academics, their departmental and academic subject context and the forms of symbolic capital now required in Scottish and English Education departments in response to new policies affecting their academic field. The paper also utilises recent literature on the research–teaching relationship. The career trajectories of respondents, their habitus and the forms of symbolic capital that they bring to academic life are examined, as are the extent to which the teaching and research cultures in each of the five departments studied mirror each other and whether these also reflect the two different policy contexts. The themes how academic cultures are shaped and research/teaching connections viewed have international as UK relevance.     

Research Selectivity and Female Academics in UK Universities: from gentleman's club and barrack yard to smart macho?

This article reports the findings of survey data designed to explore the perceived impact of research selectivity (in the form of the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE]) on academic work in UK universities and examines their implications for women academics and gendered cultures in the light of recent writing on the position of women in UK academia. If at least part of women's disadvantage in the academic labour market is to be explained by their invisibility in predominantly ‘masculinist’ institutions, then it is possible that an institutional emphasis on research productivity combined with explicit, independent and standardised monitoring and evaluation of research output might render visible research contributions hitherto overlooked by male-dominated institutional hierarchies. However, the findings would indicate that whilst it might very well be in the short-term interests of some well-placed women (and men) ‘to play the RAE game on alien terms and win’, in the long term the RAE treadmill is unlikely to create either the institutional space or the cultural will to advantage a broad range of women academics as an occupational group.     

Why do UK academics become Associate Deans and what are their future career plans?

The role and number of Associate Dean posts in UK universities has grown considerably in recent years. Despite this, relatively little is known about the reasons why individuals take on such roles and how it fits into their career trajectories. The purpose of this article is to explore these issues by drawing on data from the first national study of Associate Deans in the UK. Adopting a two-staged mixed methods approach, data were collected from semi-structured interviews (n = 15) and an online survey (n = 172). The findings suggest that academics take on the role for a number of reasons such as the challenge of working across the University, making a difference to staff and students, or being asked to take it on by a senior member of staff. It is argued that these Associate Dean roles are part of new and emerging academic career pathways within the higher education sector.     

Doing Good and Feeling Bad: the work of women university teachers

Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 27 women academics in faculties of education in Canada, this article explores some of the consequences of the gendered division of labour in universities. Jean Baker Miller's phrase, ‘doing good and feeling bad’, characterised the women in the study. They reported working excessively hard, taking responsibility for supporting others, including colleagues and students, and being ‘good department citizens’. Yet they seemed disappointed by the results. Their ‘feeling bad’ is related to the reward system in academic life; a sense that there is an unequal division of labour, with women ‘working harder'; and an expectation that women will take greater responsibility for the nurturing and housekeeping side of academic life. The article explores ‘individual’ and ‘structural’ explanations for the findings and raises further questions about caring in university teaching, the situation of tokens and outsiders in university departments and the prospects for altering university priorities in these times of cutbacks and retrenchment.     

Academic perceptions of higher education assessment processes in neoliberal academia

Neoliberal higher education reforms in relation to quality assurance, managerialist practices, accountability and performativity are receiving increasing attention and criticism. In this article, I will address student assessment as part of the technologies that increasingly govern academics and their work in universities. I will draw on Foucault’s theories of governmentality and subjectification, and discourse analysis that have framed the research conducted with 16 academics in one university in the UK. While academics in the study expressed frustration with neoliberal reforms in general, and assessment policies in particular, they tended not to demonstrate overt resistance within their university systems. The reasons for this will be questioned and analysed in relation to a neoliberal mode of government where power relations shaping academic subjectivities are diffuse and pervasive. I will discuss the ways in which academics understand and act within these power relations, and I will also demonstrate a variety of covert practices that academics tend to apply when coping with the neoliberal technologies of government such as assessment.     

The proletarianisation of academic labour in Australia

Australian universities over the last 25 years have been unified, internationalised, corporatised and become mass educational providers. This process is replicated globally as a response to rapid mass enrolments and marketisation. In the light of these changes, a corporate and managerial model has been identified, which has been the subject of growing discontent within the academic workforce. However, from a political economy perspective there is a lack of understanding on how and by what means academic labour has been commodified in this process. This paper, using Australia as its case study, argues that the managerial culture has alienated academics from their labour. This has resulted in them losing control over their skills and thus becoming disassociated from the educational purposes of their work. Higher education has been subjected to systemic regulatory governance that has fundamentally transformed the nature of academic labour. We contend that the regulatory state has reached so deep down into the university that academics have effectively become a de-professionalised and proletarianised labour force.     

The transformation of academic ideals: an Australian analysis

This article explores the role that universities play in shaping the relationship between academics and their work. Drawing on Miller and Rose's interpretation of our present era as being characterised by ‘Advanced Liberal’ governance, this article demonstrates how discourses seeking to govern academic labour enrol ideals about the academic and subjectify academic staff within strategies to govern their conduct. Entrepreneurial conceptions of ‘good’ academic conduct are valorised through such initiatives as performance evaluation, interdisciplinary research programmes and Graduate Certificates of university teaching and skills development. Drawing on the past literature and an analysis of three Australian public universities, this article proposes three ideals through which academics are enrolled into strategies to govern their conduct: ‘the career academic’, ‘the tribal academic’ and ‘the celebrity academic’. The centrality of an entrepreneurial sense of self within academic ideals contributes to the production of insidious effects within academic practices. The subjectification of academics, as entrepreneurial knowledge managers, may potentially produce strain within academics who fail to close the psychological distance between their self-perceptions and academic ideals. This article proposes that future investigations of the development of academic ideals and values should engage with an analysis of modes of self-government. The utility of self-government is explored in an analysis of the dynamic production of academic ideals within policies and programmes aimed at governing the behaviour of academic staff.     

Three pathways to support the professional and career development of casual academics

Almost half of current academic staff will need to be replaced within three years in the Australian academic workforce. Literature suggests that casual academics are a potential solution, yet they are frequently excluded from the career development opportunities that would allow them to fulfil an ongoing academic role. Most academic development programmes designed for and delivered to casual academics are constructed by academic developers with little or no input from casual academics themselves. This paper documents what casual academics determine to be their academic development needs and how they could be addressed using three pathways of professional and career development.     

Academic mobility,transnational identity capital,and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism

Academic mobility has existed since ancient times. Recently, however, academic mobility—the crossing of international borders by academics who then work ‘overseas’—has increased. Academics and the careers of academics have been affected by governments and institutions that have an interest in coordinating and accelerating knowledge production. This article reflects on the relations between academic mobility and knowledge and identity capital and their mutual entanglement as academics move, internationally. It argues that the contemporary movement of academics takes place within old hierarchies among nation states, but such old hierarchies intersect with new academic stratifications which will be described and analysed. These analytical themes in the article are supplemented by excerpts from interviews of mobile academics in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Korea and Hong Kong as selected examples of different locales of academic capitalism.     

Why was the QAA Approach to Teaching Quality Assessment Rejected by Academics in UK HE?

This article will review and evaluate the response of academics working in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK to the experience of teaching quality review. It will do so by gathering the viewpoints and opinions of academics from a particular source over a specific time period: the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) between January and August of 2001. Before presenting and then evaluating these viewpoints, the paper will discuss the development of teaching quality assessment methodologies in UK HE within the context of the increasing importance and embededness of quality assurance and enhancement values and processes within the practices of HEIs. It is argued that this is both a recent and contested phenomenon. The article finds that the concerns of academics with the teaching quality review exercise fall under a number of headings: (1) administrative/cost burden; (2) grade inflation/gamesmanship/ organisational learning; (3) elitist bias within the system; (4) system impact of quality review; (5) reliability of the system; and (6) philosophical objections to the system. The implications of these concerns are discussed. The article's conclusion is that if academics are not convinced of, or do not actively support, the values and methodologies associated with teaching quality review, then there is little chance that these will either produce accurate or meaningful assessments of teaching quality, or act as a spur to the quality enhancement of this aspect of individual and institutional activity. This is an important point within the context of the recent review of the Quality Assurance Agency's Subject Review methodology, and the new institutional audit methodology.     

Locked out,locked in and stuck: exploring migrant academics’ experiences of moving to the UK

Current understanding of international academic mobility tends to view migrant academics as career-oriented actors who can follow opportunities across borders with relative ease. This paper offers a more nuanced reading of international mobility in academia by analysing how the professional context influences migrant academics’ decisions to come to and remain in the United Kingdom (UK). Drawing on data from 62 semi-structured interviews with foreign-born academics employed in the UK, the paper argues that the availability of (relatively) good-quality employment shapes international academic mobility more than country preferences. However, academics may become ‘stuck’ in the country of residence even when employment conditions deteriorate, not only because they are gradually tracked into country’s higher education system and culture but also because they lose the credentials, work experience and networks that may be needed to make another international move. This paper therefore shows that ‘stickiness’ in international mobility involves not only being ‘locked into’ a country but also being ‘locked out’ of another, and in so doing contributes to knowledge about the ways in which migrant academics become stuck whilst working abroad.

     

Constructing academic identity in the changing Russian higher education context: preliminary perspectives

ABSTRACT

Currently, Russian academics are facing significant demands because of a new, urgent requirement to pursue their research in accordance with international standards. Until recently, these academics were used to working within a familiar community and communicating their research via the Russian language, but now, they are expected to move beyond that and function on a global level, which can challenge their academic identities. A qualitative study was carried out in a research-intensive Russian university. The aim was to explore academics’ experiences and perceptions of the dynamic changes in their academic work with a particular focus on the limitations and pressures they meet in their career path towards global research. The data were collected by means of reflective journals during a course on English for academic purposes. Thematic analysis was employed for data analysis. The results showed that global trends turned out to be unachievable for Russian academics due to the lack of specific knowledge, attributes and skills required to do research globally. This might be the first study from Russia contributing to the literature on academic identity construction. The article provides insights into the experiences and perceptions of Russian academics and offers a research agenda for further investigation to bridge identity shifts in academia. In terms of practical purposes, the results will be used as a source of preliminary data within a broader research project aimed at supporting Russian academics in their research in an international English-speaking academic context.