‘Managerialist’ overreach ‘biggest problem for academics’

The biggest threats to academic freedom are neither corporate muzzling nor mob censorship but “managerialist” overreach from risk-averse administrators, according to a scholar-turned-entrepreneur.

Mike Zyphur, a part-time professor of quantitative methods at the University of Queensland, said the sector’s instinctive method of ensuring quality was to place limits on academics.

“There’s this managerialist culture in many – not all, but many – universities that leads them to see everything that people do as something that needs managing,” he said. “The minute a university starts caring about something, it usually gums it up with red tape, committees [and] oversight.

“In particular, teaching ends up being quite heavily managed. You have to conform with…guidelines and rules. That is actually quite antithetical to academic freedom.”

What can universities do to protect academic freedom?

Professor Zyphur is founding director of the Institute for Statistical and Data Science (Instats), which describes itself as “an open platform for research training and community building”. It enables academics to bring insights from their disciplines – often in the form of material developed for their PhD students – to a much broader audience, either gratis or commercially.

He said he had developed the platform around academics’ needs, and had quit a tenured position in Melbourne to do so. Building the company would not have been possible from within the “bureaucracy and hierarchical control” of a university.

Professional associations are now the only organisations that allow academics to fully harness their expertise, he said.

Professor Zyphur likened universities’ treatment of academics to a restaurant requiring its star chef to “standardise the ingredients” and submit ideas for new dishes to a committee. “What do you think the net result is going to be? The more you try to control something like some of the coursework that academics are offering, the worse it’s going to get.”

He said that instead of trying to “de-risk everything” with rules that rarely stopped things going wrong anyway, universities should “trust people until they screw up”. If that happened, “you try to figure out the cause and how to fix it. You don’t impose restrictions on an entire community and ruin the process for everyone when problems are usually quite localised.”

He conceded that rules imposed on academics often originated from governments, but said university administrators needed to make a “mindset shift” from managing to representing their people.

“The general approach should always be [to] protect the academics. Shield them from as much administration and bureaucracy as you possibly can.”

He said academics’ view of the “problem of universities” differed from the wider “narrative” about institutions failing to meet business’ needs. “The real problem for us, who are in them, is that universities aren’t allowing us to do our work and be more relevant.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com