Paul Mutsaers is a PhD Candidate at Tilburg School of Humanities. The text below is the online version of an offline speech held for the New University Tilburg on March 16, 2015.
Amsterdam is undeniably the place where momentum has been gathered, a momentum that allows us to exclaim that an alternative is possible. TINA is unacceptable and non-commitment is just another way of accepting the status quo. So allow me to share my perspective, which has its roots in the Deep South where all seems to be business as usual, telling from the virtual absence of protest.
My career at Tilburg University took off in 2009, when I started to sell my labour in the form of bits and pieces of fragmented jobs, mainly as a research-assistant at the Faculty of Humanities. My objective was to become a PhD student affiliated to that faculty, for my wish was to set up an anthropological project on the policing of migrants in the Netherlands. I invested 3 months of labour time in a PhD proposal, which was submitted to the NWO “Open Competition” (which has a “success rate” of, what is it, 7%?). It was rejected. My guess is that about a 100 project proposals were submitted at that time (for Social Sciences only), which means that 93 proposals were rejected. That is 93 times three months of labour time wasted. This boils down to more than 23 years of labour time down the drain, if one person would have done that work. And yet, the argument is that the open market of academic supply and demand is as efficient as it can get.
Recently, my colleagues at the Department of Culture Studies submitted a Horizon 2020 project proposal, one of these huge EU applications. By estimation, three colleagues from our department invested 2 months of full labour time each, as did their partners in the UK, Belgium, Spain and Finland. That is 30 months of labour time invested in a highly competitive funding scheme (with a “success rate” of about 3%), which yielded nothing for us and which do not appear on our output forms that are used to evaluate our “performance” on a yearly basis. Again by estimation, hundreds of consortia (in all kinds of academic fields) did the same thing. Well, you do the math (and be it said in passing that we haven’t even calculated the time of those who commit themselves to the review boards that evaluate all these proposals).
It is high time to throw another light on the neoliberal jargon (“efficiency”, “success rate”, “competition”, “value for money”, “return on investment” etc.) and see what happens when we do so.
The calculations above show that an unbelievable amount of time, energy and resources is “invested” in vain in project proposals that are rated, ranked and reviewed by national or European research councils, because the truth is that it is really slim pickings. Although we must give in to the argument that proposal-writing really helps a researcher to straighten things out and order the mind, a couple of very negative implications must be discussed nonetheless.
First, it seems to have become part of reality that acquisition of new projects has become our primary work process, at the expense of research and teaching (students feel that). Due to all the time invested in the acquisition of new research projects, barely enough time is left for real academic work. As a consequence – and here you can see neoliberals at a winning hand – academic staff increasingly start to act like “strategic investors” who attempt to strike a balance between “risk reduction” on the one hand and a proper “return on investment” on the other. Like the smart stockholder who knows his portfolio management theory and makes sure he has a diversified portfolio of stocks, academic researchers invest in a couple of grant proposals that have a higher success rate (never more than, say, 15%) but generate less income (say, 90,000 euros) and in one grant proposal that has a tiny success rate (say, 3%) but yields more (for example 500,000 euros). We begin to see the successful migration of private sector management techniques to the public sector – to our universities.
Second, as a consequence of all this rating, ranking and reviewing of project proposals (which, I must stress, are disproportionally evaluated on the basis of their “value for money” and “applicability”), barely enough time is available for the actual reviewing of academic output such as journal submissions and books (which, by the way, is also work done by academic staff that doesn’t show up as output in evaluation forms). Writing from my office in Tilburg, I believe I am well positioned to emphasize the effect: Diederik Stapel. Diederik Stapel is what happens when the checks and balances disappear. Just think of the time, energy and resources that the academic community had to invest to regain some of society’s trust in the academic world. Is that efficient? No, it is a waste that could have been prevented if an attack on neoliberal short-termism and shortsightedness was waged earlier.
Third, with new cuts in public resources for academic work being announced almost every year, researchers turn to other resources. Generally, this means private funding. Here too, the consequences are enormous and have to do with what economists call “economies of scale”. I’ll explain. The idea is that open competition is fair because it gives everyone an equal chance. You as an academic researcher, research group, institute or department are free to sell your product (in this case a research proposal) to any other party in the market who is deemed an appropriate buyer (financier of your project). Critical economists have of course undermined this idea by pointing at one, very obvious, difficulty: big players can produce at lower unit costs and can thus easily outcompete newcomers or small parties. We can also look at this from another angle: A PhD candidate in marketing can much easier succeed in getting his project on the marketability of, let’s say, a new ASML product financed by ASML (which has the money for and the interest in such a project) than, let’s say, an anthropologist interested in comparing the linguistic behaviour of the Pathans in Afghanistan and those in Pakistan. Another dimension of the problem we are facing is that as a result of such private funding, research becomes increasingly mainstream. For sure, ASML will not pay for a critical analysis of the social organization of its workforce. On a personal note: my new research project focuses attention on lethal police around the globe and the (new and online) forms of resistance in the face of such. The idea did not even cross my mind (until now) to get police funding for this project. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to work for a faculty that values critical academic work and tries its very best to make such work possible.
Finally, with cutthroat competition all around us, academic work can increasingly be seen as a form of organized distrust. When I started my academic career in 2009 I really thought that knowledge sharing, collaboration, mutual trust and reciprocity were the rule, not the exception. I was wrong. The recent debates on Open Access of academic output again show that it’s all about the monopolization of knowledge – not about sharing. If you have a brilliant idea, you better keep it to yourself until it is published, lest someone else walks away with it and steels your thunder. You work together with a couple of people and compete with everyone else. While writing these lines, my thoughts immediately drift towards Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) in which he already warned for the corrosive effects of monopolizing knowledge and information.
Another consequence of this competition is “neophilia”: a fetishism of the new. Every research proposal, every journal submission, every book is first of all judged on the basis of innovation and creativity. If it’s nothing new, chances of publication or acceptation decrease tremendously. That some of the best works – say Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent (1979), a restudy of Donald Roy’s work on a Chicago factory, thirty years earlier – are in fact restudies is simply ignored. This means that a crucial dimension of academic work is lost: the confirmation or falsification of previous research. The result is niche-research – scholars fighting over the tiniest niches, which they appropriate as their own. Not only will research become ever more technical as a consequence (technicalities become more important than macro-reflections on broader developments); it also means that numerous scholars are likely to work on similar issues without knowing it, because they only operate in their own niche. One could argue that it is exactly here where the confirmation and falsification occurs, but that argument is only valid when one assumes that these niche-researchers are able and willing to reflect upon one another’s work. But this barely happens because the academic market knows literally thousands of journals. Despite complaints about the output and performance of researchers we’re in fact facing overproduction and we’re not able to consume all these products. Hence, again, the title: Academia in its neoliberal form is a land of waste.
In her illuminating book How Institutions Think (1986), the British anthropologist Mary Douglas analyses how institutions direct and control our memory, i.e. a public memory that she sees as the storage system for the social order. The current institutions that mould and shape our universities have been successful in having us forget what research – scientific and humanistic alike – actually is: a collective enterprise. Already in 1986 she observed what we now witness in the extreme: ‘The interpersonal relations of scientists are governed by an institutionalized competition in which everyone loses something: otherwise magnanimous scholars are belittled by their own destructive anger when they learn of a competitor to their claim to be first; they are baffled to meet discordant facts that do not fit their categories; the profession loses from practices of secrecy, which contradict intellectual openness; and science policy is misled by the fallacy that duplication is avoidable and wasteful’ (p.75). She wrote these words when the politics of the Iron Lady were in full swing, but she kept believing in an alternative. And so should we.
Amsterdam is undeniably the place where momentum has been gathered, a momentum that allows us to exclaim that an alternative is possible. TINA is unacceptable and non-commitment is just another way of accepting the status quo. So allow me to share my perspective, which has its roots in the Deep South where all seems to be business as usual, telling from the virtual absence of protest.
My career at Tilburg University took off in 2009, when I started to sell my labour in the form of bits and pieces of fragmented jobs, mainly as a research-assistant at the Faculty of Humanities. My objective was to become a PhD student affiliated to that faculty, for my wish was to set up an anthropological project on the policing of migrants in the Netherlands. I invested 3 months of labour time in a PhD proposal, which was submitted to the NWO “Open Competition” (which has a “success rate” of, what is it, 7%?). It was rejected. My guess is that about a 100 project proposals were submitted at that time (for Social Sciences only), which means that 93 proposals were rejected. That is 93 times three months of labour time wasted. This boils down to more than 23 years of labour time down the drain, if one person would have done that work. And yet, the argument is that the open market of academic supply and demand is as efficient as it can get.
Recently, my colleagues at the Department of Culture Studies submitted a Horizon 2020 project proposal, one of these huge EU applications. By estimation, three colleagues from our department invested 2 months of full labour time each, as did their partners in the UK, Belgium, Spain and Finland. That is 30 months of labour time invested in a highly competitive funding scheme (with a “success rate” of about 3%), which yielded nothing for us and which do not appear on our output forms that are used to evaluate our “performance” on a yearly basis. Again by estimation, hundreds of consortia (in all kinds of academic fields) did the same thing. Well, you do the math (and be it said in passing that we haven’t even calculated the time of those who commit themselves to the review boards that evaluate all these proposals).
It is high time to throw another light on the neoliberal jargon (“efficiency”, “success rate”, “competition”, “value for money”, “return on investment” etc.) and see what happens when we do so.
The calculations above show that an unbelievable amount of time, energy and resources is “invested” in vain in project proposals that are rated, ranked and reviewed by national or European research councils, because the truth is that it is really slim pickings. Although we must give in to the argument that proposal-writing really helps a researcher to straighten things out and order the mind, a couple of very negative implications must be discussed nonetheless.
First, it seems to have become part of reality that acquisition of new projects has become our primary work process, at the expense of research and teaching (students feel that). Due to all the time invested in the acquisition of new research projects, barely enough time is left for real academic work. As a consequence – and here you can see neoliberals at a winning hand – academic staff increasingly start to act like “strategic investors” who attempt to strike a balance between “risk reduction” on the one hand and a proper “return on investment” on the other. Like the smart stockholder who knows his portfolio management theory and makes sure he has a diversified portfolio of stocks, academic researchers invest in a couple of grant proposals that have a higher success rate (never more than, say, 15%) but generate less income (say, 90,000 euros) and in one grant proposal that has a tiny success rate (say, 3%) but yields more (for example 500,000 euros). We begin to see the successful migration of private sector management techniques to the public sector – to our universities.
Second, as a consequence of all this rating, ranking and reviewing of project proposals (which, I must stress, are disproportionally evaluated on the basis of their “value for money” and “applicability”), barely enough time is available for the actual reviewing of academic output such as journal submissions and books (which, by the way, is also work done by academic staff that doesn’t show up as output in evaluation forms). Writing from my office in Tilburg, I believe I am well positioned to emphasize the effect: Diederik Stapel. Diederik Stapel is what happens when the checks and balances disappear. Just think of the time, energy and resources that the academic community had to invest to regain some of society’s trust in the academic world. Is that efficient? No, it is a waste that could have been prevented if an attack on neoliberal short-termism and shortsightedness was waged earlier.
Third, with new cuts in public resources for academic work being announced almost every year, researchers turn to other resources. Generally, this means private funding. Here too, the consequences are enormous and have to do with what economists call “economies of scale”. I’ll explain. The idea is that open competition is fair because it gives everyone an equal chance. You as an academic researcher, research group, institute or department are free to sell your product (in this case a research proposal) to any other party in the market who is deemed an appropriate buyer (financier of your project). Critical economists have of course undermined this idea by pointing at one, very obvious, difficulty: big players can produce at lower unit costs and can thus easily outcompete newcomers or small parties. We can also look at this from another angle: A PhD candidate in marketing can much easier succeed in getting his project on the marketability of, let’s say, a new ASML product financed by ASML (which has the money for and the interest in such a project) than, let’s say, an anthropologist interested in comparing the linguistic behaviour of the Pathans in Afghanistan and those in Pakistan. Another dimension of the problem we are facing is that as a result of such private funding, research becomes increasingly mainstream. For sure, ASML will not pay for a critical analysis of the social organization of its workforce. On a personal note: my new research project focuses attention on lethal police around the globe and the (new and online) forms of resistance in the face of such. The idea did not even cross my mind (until now) to get police funding for this project. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to work for a faculty that values critical academic work and tries its very best to make such work possible.
Finally, with cutthroat competition all around us, academic work can increasingly be seen as a form of organized distrust. When I started my academic career in 2009 I really thought that knowledge sharing, collaboration, mutual trust and reciprocity were the rule, not the exception. I was wrong. The recent debates on Open Access of academic output again show that it’s all about the monopolization of knowledge – not about sharing. If you have a brilliant idea, you better keep it to yourself until it is published, lest someone else walks away with it and steels your thunder. You work together with a couple of people and compete with everyone else. While writing these lines, my thoughts immediately drift towards Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) in which he already warned for the corrosive effects of monopolizing knowledge and information.
Another consequence of this competition is “neophilia”: a fetishism of the new. Every research proposal, every journal submission, every book is first of all judged on the basis of innovation and creativity. If it’s nothing new, chances of publication or acceptation decrease tremendously. That some of the best works – say Michael Burawoy’s Manufacturing Consent (1979), a restudy of Donald Roy’s work on a Chicago factory, thirty years earlier – are in fact restudies is simply ignored. This means that a crucial dimension of academic work is lost: the confirmation or falsification of previous research. The result is niche-research – scholars fighting over the tiniest niches, which they appropriate as their own. Not only will research become ever more technical as a consequence (technicalities become more important than macro-reflections on broader developments); it also means that numerous scholars are likely to work on similar issues without knowing it, because they only operate in their own niche. One could argue that it is exactly here where the confirmation and falsification occurs, but that argument is only valid when one assumes that these niche-researchers are able and willing to reflect upon one another’s work. But this barely happens because the academic market knows literally thousands of journals. Despite complaints about the output and performance of researchers we’re in fact facing overproduction and we’re not able to consume all these products. Hence, again, the title: Academia in its neoliberal form is a land of waste.
In her illuminating book How Institutions Think (1986), the British anthropologist Mary Douglas analyses how institutions direct and control our memory, i.e. a public memory that she sees as the storage system for the social order. The current institutions that mould and shape our universities have been successful in having us forget what research – scientific and humanistic alike – actually is: a collective enterprise. Already in 1986 she observed what we now witness in the extreme: ‘The interpersonal relations of scientists are governed by an institutionalized competition in which everyone loses something: otherwise magnanimous scholars are belittled by their own destructive anger when they learn of a competitor to their claim to be first; they are baffled to meet discordant facts that do not fit their categories; the profession loses from practices of secrecy, which contradict intellectual openness; and science policy is misled by the fallacy that duplication is avoidable and wasteful’ (p.75). She wrote these words when the politics of the Iron Lady were in full swing, but she kept believing in an alternative. And so should we.