As I’ve been engaging more with the hierarchy of structures in UAL through two recent academic conferences, I thought it might be time to read a structural critique of the current state of the university.
Dark Academia: How Universities Die by Peter Fleming was published in 2021, so is a recent addition to the crowded genre of despair for academia. In it, the author presents a damning portrait of the state of higher education today: neoliberal market forces have corporatised and commercialised universities to death. This is both metaphorical as universities are processing more students than ever before and literal, filled with examples of students and staff being pushed to suicide as a result of overwork and lack of support.
One of the symptoms of the bureaucratisation of universities is the disproportionate number of support staff. Fleming says: “In the UK, academics are a minority (compared to managers, technicians, professionals and other non-teaching/non-researching staff) in 71% of the country’s universities” (p. 52).
This particular research comes from here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academics-minority-more-two-thirds-uk-universities from 2015 and upon review presents UAL as very much part of this trend, particularly “when analysis is restricted to staff with white-collar jobs such as managers, “professionals” and “administrative and secretarial occupations” … the University of the Arts London rises to the top of the ranking of larger institutions, with 52 per cent.”
Back to Fleming, who explains, “with the exponential growth of managers and administrators, universities are soon driven by their imperatives, not the academics who teach and research. Deans and Provosts might still assert the importance of academic freedom, public education, and intellectual curiosity. But only if such qualities are subservient to predetermined technocratic targets. Otherwise they’re treated as an impediment to the smooth running of the enterprise” (p. 53).
There is obviously much more in the book, but let’s focus on this issue for a moment. It rings true to me as a student experiencing the institution of UAL: for something that employs more people to run the organization than to teach, it is an extremely opaque and convoluted space to interact with. One thing I find curious is that there is no listing on the website of the administration, so accountability can’t be traced up the chain of command. I’m constantly surprised how little support there is given to students to navigate the warren of resources: beyond that actually, staff also are unaware of the resources. What’s the use of all of this knowledge production and resources if they are inaccessible except through happenstance?
Circling back to my project of supporting cross-disciplinary exchange within the university system, I think this is a useful temperature check. Fleming didn’t offer much hope, in fact he thinks the system might be beyond repair, especially as all of these are tied to funding and thus any critique widens to “problematising the state apparatus itself” (p. 13). One of the few bright points he cites are academics Fred Moten and Stefano Harney book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study as a strategy of undermining from within. I will re-engage with this text when I’m back in LA in August with my personal library.
All of this is relevant as I begin to think about more structural solutions for creating space for exchange within the university system: I suspect the siloisation I have encountered is tied to the architecture of funding within UAL. I’ll continue to explore and map hierarchies within the university, and see if I can find information about budgets within the school.