Higher education and human vulnerability: global failures of corporate design

Editorial Introduction

Human agency is increasingly vulnerable in systems of higher education that have fully absorbed neoliberal philosophy and practice. Focused on institutional profit, competitive policy makers and professors in such systems often lose sight of the fragility and value of human well-being (Keashly & Neuman, 2010; Lynch, 2010; Olive & Cangemi, 2015). Far too often, corporate culture trumps human dignity, healthy relationships and civic engagement in the twenty-first century university (Giroux, 2015; Hamer & Lang, 2015). The result is an entrenched bureaucracy, diminished collegiality and the abuse of vulnerable academics, in particular those who are early career, adjunct and/or casual laborers (Giroux, 2016; Osei-Kofi, 2012). Untenured scholars are especially impacted, as their capacity to confront irrational, uninformed or malicious decisions by an academic oligarchy is curtailed by fear of reprisal and/or the termination of their contracts (Schrecker, 2012). As faculty get silenced by the ‘University Inc.’ (Washburn, 2005), disadvantaged students lose an important voice for advocacy against marginalization and vulnerability (Oleksiyenko, 2015). Fear of criticism has become particularly evident, insofar as academic oligarchies have hegemonized reputational capital (Lynch, 2015) and fetishized ‘celebrity’ scholars, centers and departments (Nixon, 2010), while neglecting the quality of teaching and learning across greater systems (Clotfelter, 2014). The trend has spread worldwide.

In an Orwellian fashion, academic capitalists look for opportunities to augment their power by redefining such notions as ‘freedom’ (Giroux, 2006) in order to control ‘knowledge workers’ using new norms of ‘mentorship’ and ‘collaboration’ that allow for the extraction of intellectual labor and the maximization of prestige for the benefit of the privileged few (Bilgrami & Cole, 2015; Davies & Bansel, 2005; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Slogans such as ‘freedom is slavery’ and ‘ignorance is strength’ have implicitly become shapers of employment discourse (Commisso, 2013), while corporate stakeholders enhance policing of academic researchers, especially the politically active ones, in order to turn them into ‘servants of power’ (Rhodes, Wright, & Pullen, 2018). To maintain fear and subservience among new faculty members, academic capitalists use various means to foster disunity among the knowledge workers (Davis, 2011; Lorenz, 2012). Corporate managers manipulate employment rules, performance evaluation and organizational norms to favor loyalty and promote cronyism and nepotism (Chapman & Lindner, 2016; Osipian, 2014). They put various groups into conflict or competition with each other in order to enable a ‘divide and rule’ form of governance (Mauthner & Edwards, 2010; Tierney, 2004). Actions of this kind reinforce the concept of hierarchical ownership and control (Deem & Brehony, 2005), spread anxiety, enhance stress, generate burnout and trigger breakdowns in physical and mental health amongst the vulnerable (Ferber, 2017; Gardner, 2012; Gill, 2017). Importantly for their power-retention agenda, academic capitalists strive to keep everyone ‘on their toes’ in anticipation of ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’, notwithstanding the damage such actions do to individual output and institutional performance (Lorenz, 2012).

While the higher education literature has addressed a number of tensions between the corporate institution and human agency, the notion of human vulnerability remains understudied. This special issue offers an array of articles that explore the causes and effects of human vulnerability in academia in the context of global neoliberalism. The contributing authors elaborate conceptual and empirical frameworks to delve into cultural and geopolitical variances of problems related to the collapse of collegiality, corrupted governance, self-censorship, repressed criticism, subjugated freedom of expression and disadvantaged students’ further marginalization. The special issue offers insights about key drivers at the levels of policy-making, institutional administration and individual participation. Scholars with diverse academic and institutional backgrounds examine the philosophies, values and practices that fail to protect liberal values in global higher education. By drawing on qualitative data analysis and their own experiences in Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Mozambique, Russia, Sweden, Tanzania, Ukraine and the United States, the authors featured in this issue contribute to a transnational dialog about the multilateral undercurrents depreciating human agency in modern higher education.

The special issue opens with Liz Jackson’s paper, which considers differences in understanding vulnerability as well as the relational dynamics in corporate academe, where some interpretations are deliberately magnified and others are marginalized. She argues that the communal aspects of higher education often shape vulnerabilities of human relations. While the term ‘vulnerability’ has acquired negative connotations in the literature and popular usage, human interactions can actually trigger positive dependencies, as most people seek opportunities for discovery, development and growth. Vulnerability may be perceived as self-recognition of personal or epistemic limitations, or as an opportunity for improvement. However, human vulnerability can be exploited by institutions lacking or losing a sense of boundaries between benign and malignant endeavors and effects. Focused on effect diffusions, today’s academics often ignore the causes, legitimize power asymmetries, and fail to develop leverage for the powerful to experience the vulnerability that they impose onto others.

Human vulnerability is becoming increasingly reinforced through ‘zones of alienation’ in global higher education, according to Anatoly Oleksiyenko. He illustrates how these zones emerge through the interaction of such anomalies as ‘leaderism’ and ‘soldierism’, which serve the purposes of neoliberal ‘knowledge factories’ in societies that seek integration into a globally-competitive system of research, symbolic powers and rewards. Legitimization of leadership failures and abusive corporate designs is increasingly propelled by neoliberal administrators, who have a competitive mentality and status anxiety. Wrong-headed and malignant, corporate management spreads the fear of losing employment as well as entitlements. Negative emotions are viewed as humane and legitimate, as long as they express top-down dissatisfaction. In turn, a ground-up response is troublesome and perceived by the leaderists as disrespectful: i.e. why should the lower levels of neoliberal hierarchies – foot soldiers and rabotniks (‘workers’, etymologically from the Russian word ‘rab’ – ‘slave’) – have the ability to express anger or other discomforting emotions? Oleksiyenko identifies an ‘army-style’ atmosphere and de-humanization as culprits, legitimizing and propagating toxic relationships and vulnerability in the ‘zones of alienation’ in post-Soviet and post-colonial ‘knowledge factories’ of EurAsia.

While Jackson and Oleksiyenko focus on the academic profession, Paula Mählck examines how vulnerability emerges for Tanzanian and Mozambican PhD students funded by the Swedish development programs. She illustrates how transnational mobility becomes gendered for the peregrinating female PhD students when the host environments are wrongfully conditioned for accommodation and supervision in the receiving universities. When ‘important others’ in the lives of these women do not comprehend the vulnerability of gendered transnational mobility, the young female students are often left to cope with a double burden-mitigating challenges at the hosting place, as well as taking care of families left behind. Only the exceptional few get an advantage while building capacity in the state of vulnerability. Mählck refines the concept of glonacality of ‘important others’ by exploring how vulnerability is torn apart by divergences of institutional and human agencies, each working toward meeting their interests across the global, national and local domains.

Explicating the tensions between young learners’ vulnerability and local culture, Gaurav Pathania and William Tierney point out how asymmetric powers turn into a major concern in higher education when traditions of social hierarchy continue to segregate students by opportunities in higher learning, socialization and social mobility. The authors vividly depict the tensions between and among castes on campuses in India, where social mores prescribe that people’s prospects are dictated (and depreciated) by nothing other than their heredity. While Mählck’s argument focuses on transnational dilemmas of female scholars, Pathania and Tierney recount the stories of male students on Indian campuses, where youth remain marginalized by their social status and their peers’ biases. While younger generations of Indians make efforts to escape from lingering status ghettos, the asymmetries in powers, wealth and perceptions override their aspirations for equity. Human vulnerability seems to be unavoidable for low-caste students who strive to resolve the problem, as much as it is for their peers from higher castes whose benevolent acts receive limited appreciation and resonance in the larger community.

Resolving the problems of disadvantaged students is also difficult in North America, as the idea and practices of college access have been exploited to extort resources from vulnerable populations. In their case study of higher education in the United States, Suneal Kolluri and William Tierney explain how the evolution in the idea of college access has been transforming the value of university education and the role of academic institutions. A benevolent purpose in the struggle for democracy, college access in America has turned into a profit-making machine for quasi-privatized university units as a result of efforts to placate the powers of the markets, competition and corporatism. While quality in higher learning usually implies the development of critical thinking and freedom of expression, that aspect of quality has largely vanished in the neoliberal discourse of higher education. Focused on numbers and accounting in the pervasive framework of accountability, college program providers are often anxious to meet the expectations of managerially-minded stakeholders – no matter how weak, dubious or unsustainable their proposals are.

Deficient integrity and hidden agendas have also spread on the campuses in countries that once championed social justice and equity. McCartney and Metcalfe discuss Pathway Colleges that emerged to bridge gaps for students lacking sufficient skills for higher education in Canada. Similarly to the ‘College for All’ programs in the United States, Pathway Colleges in Canada offer opportunities for corporations to make money, rather than affording disadvantaged students with opportunities for social mobility. Under the pretext of internationalization, Pathway College programs opened their doors to vulnerable students from abroad, who have neither the knowledge nor the skills to cope with advanced academic or economic systems. While seemingly benevolent creations, the entrepreneurial initiatives are actually self-serving in that they capitalize on the education of vulnerable students and immigrants. As do Kolluri and Tierney, McCartney and Metcalfe argue that various corporate bodies exploit higher education, claiming to increase students’ well-being. Students are widely regarded as a resource for income-oriented universities and industries seeking to refine, reuse and redistribute these resources globally, in order to enable the growth of corporations, capital and wealth. The corporate powers of industries and universities collude, while neoliberal higher education money-makers idealize the notion of increasing access to higher education. Notwithstanding their liberal rhetoric (e.g. life-long learning, greater access, quality of education for everyone), many universities prioritize the undisclosed agenda of revenue generation. The hybrid reasoning underpinning the aims of university education often leads to ambiguous outcomes. Utilitarian objectives and economic sensibilities overtake the exploratory needs of an individual; the result is that neoliberal universities are unable to secure the ubiquitous alignment between equity and quality.

In pulling this volume together, we have intended to bring attention to the faulty designs of global neoliberalism that increase human vulnerability. Faculty and students often become victims of mindless industrialization of the academe. While corporatism thrives, this special issue calls for more profound critical thinking and exploration of human disadvantage. Our hope is that cross-border mobility serves as a harbinger of a more open and tolerant world, rather than as a transmitter of illiberal practices and values. Calling for a more thoughtful design in global higher education, this issue denotes a need to restructure the purposes and commitments of academic workplaces, college access and mobility strategies in favor of enhanced liberal practices, open communication, ethics, integrity and democracy-oriented solidarity. Achieving such ambitious goals requires that we examine not only what university teachers and students say with regard to the literature that they read and produce, but also what they do unto others in everyday life. Teaching, research and service should contribute to the termination of zones of alienation and de-humanization. This special issue marks a step in that direction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank the editor of this journal, Malcolm Tight, for considerate response and support of this special issue. We also received thoughtful comments and suggestions from colleagues who blind-peer reviewed the articles for us. While their contribution was indispensable, all responsibility for shortcomings in the papers stays with the authors of the papers and the editors of this issue.