The Neutered Academic

It is a depressing fact that I started my work life on a factory assembly line, and so I will end my career on an assembly line. Starting out in work-life I worked on a crab processing boat in the middle of the Bering Sea. The only difference between a Detroit assembly line and the crab boat was the former assembled cars, and the latter was devoted to the killing, cleaning, cooking, freezing, packing, storing and off-loading of crab. Yes, in Alaska the assembly line was rising and falling in 10-foot swells, but both are mind-numbing Fordist-Taylorist conveyor belts that Charlie Chaplin captured so brilliantly in Modern Times: the human condition hasn’t changed in 100+ years.

I am finishing my career as an academic in a UK business school which has become an assembly line of human flesh, processing what I call ‘2012s’ – 12-year-old brains in 20-year-old bodies. Ironically, I netted more money as unskilled labor in Alaska then than I do now as an Associate Professor with a doctorate; progress, eh?

The proletarianization of academics is a heinous example of the proletarianization of white-collar workers in Western society. In other parts of the world that still revere knowledge like in Asia it’s a very different matter. But in the land of ‘those who can’t do teach’ and in anti-intellectual Britain business school academics have gone from being citizens, to servants to now slaves. This has happened in my working life of 30 years, and like going bankrupt, the decent started slowly, almost imperceptibly so, and then has rapidly sped up.

So what the hell happened? Well, the cretins that put ‘neo’ in front of a perfectly good word ‘liberal’ happened.

One major element was the free-market fundamentalist Thatcher: to control academics, she hired an accounting firm to design an amoral system to quantify research output. It became known as the Research Excellence Framework, or R.E.F. that is still in use today. Like the Wicked Witch of the East in the Wizard of Oz, Thatcher hired her ‘flying monkeys’ accounts to do her bidding. The bean counters designed a system whereby government money was given proportionally to the number of stars a journal has, so a top 4* journal was worth 100, a 3* journal 70, 2* 50 and 1* 10. In a 4-year period a business school would tabulate the articles by journal rating/stars academics submitted to ‘the REF’ and get government money accordingly.

What determines the number of stars a journal has? Rating agencies. You guessed it: qualitative, critical journals: 1*; amoral quantitative management journals with physics-envy: 4*.

And who owns these journals? They are mostly US owned by publicly traded publishing companies that make money by selling subscriptions to university libraries: bye-bye open-source knowledge. To create scarcity and perpetuate the hierarchy top journals pride themselves on their acceptance rate of 5-10%; in other words, a 90% to 95% rejection rate.

The REF system caused disquiet and disgust, but academics accepted it, and regret it to this day.

The system achieved exactly what it was designed to do: it turned academics into servants to the journals and distract them from getting involved in relevant debates critical to government policy. It neutered academics from critiquing political economy, society and management and instead focused us on getting articles published in highly starred journals that were very rigorous but practically irrelevant to the business world. Ever wonder why it took a CIA Director from Texas, Bush Sr., to criticize Reagan’s economic policy as ‘Voodoo economics’ and not academic economists? Why until it’s too late has academics failed to criticise Milton Freidman’s ‘The business of business is business’ mantra? Why did business school academics champion ‘Neutron Jack’ GE CEO Jack Welsh during his tenure and after? He earned his nick name in reference to the neutron bomb that eliminates employees while leaving buildings intact: 118,000 GE employees were laid off during his tenure earning him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” The system achieved exactly what it was designed to do: make business schools the cheerleaders and prize fighters for the Ruling Class. In this version of the Wizard of Oz, the witch won; it’s been the business school academics that have become subservient flying monkeys doing the system’s bidding.

You get what you measure

As with any measurement system, people game the system to hit their targets. Deans demanded their academics to only publish in 3* and 4* journals to get more public money. Overnight, where you published became more important than what you published. Marxists economists were sacked; Jungian organisational behaviourists were sidelined then deplatformed.

Bifurcation between universities intensified. The universities with big endowment funds (e.g. Oxford, Cambridge) could pay people to sit in dark rooms and do nothing but write 4* articles with no teaching responsibilities. They scooped up the lion’s share of the research and grant money whilst those universities that didn’t have those resources fell further down the tables and became teaching factories.

Business schools started acting like top sporting clubs: buying in well published professorial ‘stars’ towards the end of the REF period whilst the grunts who have been struggling to teach and publish get passed up for promotion, are starved of mentoring and deprived of development.

The human toll has been exacting. I know of someone who was offered a contract at a top university and after 3 years was told they didn’t have enough publications in highly starred journals, and their contract was being terminated. He jumped out of the window of his office to his death.

The research system has now become totally corrupt, as any system that is amoral will, forecast by Adam Smith as long ago as 1759 in his groundbreaking book, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s a book the neoliberals conveniently forget he wrote.

Like monks during the Dark Ages lording over the sacred texts, an insider trading system has developed whereby journal editors play ‘I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine’: ‘I’ll get your paper into my journal if you get my paper into your journal’. It’s getting so that if you don’t include a ‘big name’ as the first author of an article you wrote or co-wrote getting it published is difficult. All editors have two columns of reviewers: the easy reviewers and the impossible reviewers. Editors want the big names to publish in their journals, so they’ll give those articles to the easy reviewer column; the articles from no-names get the Sadists.

Before AI...

AI has been like an earthquake to a business school edifice built on watered down, cheap concrete. The neoliberal perspective of the learner-as-consumer (rather than a product of an institution) and the commodification of a higher degree has further led to academic servants becoming check-out clerks in the supermarket of higher education.

In the UK, the love child of Thatcher, Tony Blair, mandated that 50% of all students should go to university (from 17%) turning a university degree into a commodity. As learners are now seen as customers, Deans’ and Vice Chancelors’ strategy has been to trade long term reputation into short term cash to hit their bonus-related pay rewards.

It has turned learning into a transactional relationship that has led to grade inflation and a lowering of academic standards such that course progression rates are now used in performance reviews of academics such as at my institution. If say 15% of students don’t pass my course as a Subject Area Leader I’ll be beaten up and my course put into ‘special measures’ until my pass rate hits the requisite percentage of 85% pass rate. The powers-that-be want a 100% pass rate.

Lowering admission standards is yet another consequence. Just look at the aberrant self-promoting dingleberries that have graduated from top business schools: W. Bush got an MBA from Harvard Business School, even if it took him special needs support converting his textbooks into connect-the-dots and coloring-in books to get him through. And Mr 4 bankruptcies Trump got a Wharton MBA, albeit by correspondence course from Jeffery Epstein’s Paedo Island. As if we needed AI to turn our business students’ brains even mushier...

AI could be a turning point for business schools, for them to realize knowledge transfer is dead and return to an Odyssean style problem-based, transdisciplinary approach and focus on the ‘so what?’ that AI can’t address: implementation. But alas, like the old Communist system in 1987, two years before the Wall came down, above deck Vice Chancellors and Deans appear to double-down and use managerialism to make their below-deck replaceable front-line conveyor-belt factors of production with doctorates stroke ever more harder into a turbulent and treacherous future.