Content area
Full Text
Now we just need to get rid of the racist Australian flag on top of state parliament and get a red one up there and my work is done. (Facebook post, 2016, Roz Ward)
Universities have become bastions of managerial arbitrariness.[1] The trends began some time ago, when money became the ultimate pursuit, and the Dollar became chancellor and chief. Bill Readings, Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter have already penned works identifying this tendency in various manifestations. Readings had already noted in the 1990s the parting of ways between teaching and research, the latter distant, and getting more so, from the former. The university, he argued, has been detached from the nation-state, one no longer connected to 'its role as producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture' (Readings 3). The cultivated obsession with obtaining grants, grant awarding panjandrums, the siphoning of funds, underwriting projects, have all made the academy disposed to matters of a financial worth and notions of market share. Slaughter and Rhoades are particularly salient here in their aptly titled work, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (See also Slaughter and Leslie). Since universities now obsess about having a 'marketing unit', the idea of making education a matter of commercial viability rather than educational worth in of itself has become all important. This entails 'enabling individuals as economic actors' (Slaughter and Rhoades 20).
An important factor in this managerial revolution are the potential threats and opportunities posed by evolving forms of social media communications. The scope and interest of such managerial control over such 'enabled economic actors' has come to include channels previously unknown to the academic field. These are sometimes acknowledged as double-edged swords, important to promote the university's activities and research on the one hand, and dangerously public and provoking on the other. Such methods form a rapidly growing field that has itself become the subject of tertiary education and provision of certificates (Division of Continuing and International Education).
The use of social media to express opinions bypasses such control, punching a hole through orthodox forms of regulation. It keeps managers at arm's length; public relations personnel at a distance. (The useful illustration here is the way that the Donald Trump presidency has been functioning.) The universal nature...