Neoliberal Bureaucracy: Making the Left Look Bad

Image by Aditya Vyas.

No one prints out college course syllabi anymore. They’re multi-page tomes that take too long to print and are usually published online. A modern syllabus is essentially a legal document, filled with policies on grading, learning outcomes, attendance, classroom conduct, artificial intelligence, academic honesty, learning accommodations, and the various services the school offers. If you’re lucky, you might be able to skim the syllabus and find the names of the required books, if any. Many courses provide all the materials online.

Learning objectives prescribe not only what to teach, but also the activities that should be conducted to best assess learning. In other words, they set the basic parameters for what an instructor or professor will do in class. At the university level, they might typically be included in the syllabus of a required “core” course, such as first-year writing or a community college course. The “learning objectives and assessment movement” began more than fifty years ago in elementary and secondary schools and has spread throughout the education system ever since. While this effort may seem like a harmless way to ensure that learning takes place, it is best viewed as an outgrowth of a neoliberal, corporate-style bureaucracy. It has three parts: defining learning objectives for a given class, prescribing the assessment of these objectives, and identifying teachers, departments and schools whose students are not meeting the objectives. At the university level, it constitutes an erosion of academic freedom.

The move was rightly criticized by Michael Bennett and Jacqueline Brady in the journal Radical Teacher. They point out that the rise of higher education has its roots in the corporate “skills movement” of the 1980s and the work of conservative groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. As they put it, “ACTA’s report, ‘Can College Accreditation Deliver on Its Promise?’ links outcomes assessment to accreditation when it argues that accrediting agencies have historically focused only on inputs rather than outcomes.” Trust in the ability of college teachers and professors to do the job they were hired to do has eroded. Rather than assuming that hiring educated, well-intentioned people was sufficient, the learning outcomes movement demanded “accountability” and testing, leading to the current paradigm of external oversight.

This is not just an expression of a historical distrust of teachers and academics by conservatives. It is the result of a market-driven mentality in the private and public sectors generally, what David Graeber describes as the massive expansion of interlocking public and private bureaucracies that has accompanied the rise of neoliberalism and the financialization of the economy. Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs that this managerialism in academia is not about quality education, saving money, or anything like that. It is essentially about expanding the sector of administrators involved in purchasing and deploying the latest computer systems, spreading neoliberal rhetoric, creating low-wage non-tenure track positions, and funneling large numbers of students into the student loan system. These changes have little to do with saving, focusing on what matters, or opening up the university to groups historically excluded from higher education. They are about fostering a culture of managerialism that perpetuates itself. As Graeber points out, helping professions like education, health care, and government have morphed into tech-heavy bureaucracies that suck money and resources away from the aid they are supposed to provide.

Deluchi and colleagues point to the growth at the administrative level in the United States from 1976 to 2018. Enrollment increased by 78%, full-time teaching positions increased by 92%, administrators increased by 164%, and administrative support staff increased by 452%. This type of administrative bloat comes at the expense of students, who pay ever-increasing tuition costs resulting from the growth of staff not directly involved in education.

Administrators do their best to create a work environment rich in hierarchy, favoritism, competition, and standardization. In academia, freedom of thought and diversity of approach should be the norm. True to the ideology of ownership and self-interest that is at the heart of their approach, administrators typically spend a few years in a position before jumping ship to a better-paid one. Faculty members are greeted by a revolving door of administrative newcomers who spend much of their time learning how to do their jobs. Before leaving, each must make sure to leave a mark on the bureaucracy, for example by reorganizing a department, launching a reorganization of campus learning outcomes, or rolling out a new software system. Staff must navigate the maze that is the sum of these initiatives.

The self-perpetuating administrative superstructure is just one of many changes in higher education policy that owe their inspiration to neoliberal approaches to business, government, and economics. In many ways, the antidemocratic scope of the changes—technological, managerial, financial, legal, and pedagogical—is often overlooked because in academia, the whole is cloaked in a liberal, humanist veneer. The deployment of humanist, scientific language makes it all palatable. Online learning improves “accessibility.” AI is a “learning tool.” Learning outcomes ensure an “optimal learning environment,” and “best practices” promote student “success” and “retention.” Bureaucratic proliferation may help provide “academic support” to students. Yet bureaucratic proliferation makes higher education so expensive that low-income students graduate with a mountain of debt. Students support the layers of management rather than the other way around.

This approach is an example of what can only be called soft authoritarianism, an approach that is the product of Democratic Party politics—not to be confused with the hard authoritarianism of the right. The idea that a university can be run according to a collaborative ethic is long dead. In a collaborative model, each academic department and administrative unit cooperates toward a common, coherent goal: quality education, research, and community service. Today, it is the proprietary model, in which each department is treated as a mini-business competing for limited funds. Every few years, each department undergoes an “academic review,” in which it must grovel for funding and justify its scientific value to the administration. On the personnel side, what might be a simple event planning becomes a competitive process in which departments like public safety, food service, and facilities pitch in to see how much of the pie they can get. Each unit reviews the proposal and imposes limits or requirements for the use of its services, which always come at a price. An event becomes a showcase for each department to strengthen its institutional footprint, maintain funding, and exercise control. This is neoliberalism at work, Alexis de Tocqueville’s dreaded dog-eat-dog America, devoid of the concept of community, the public sector run as a bizarre imitation of the market.

Because this system in higher education – and similar ones in the public and voluntary sectors – has a certain liberal character, the cold-bloodedness at play is not so easy to see. In fact, the modern university is labelled as “far left” by the right. This gives the impression, in the popular imagination, that “the left” supports a world of endless rules, dominated by a hierarchy of managers ready to punish you if you turn in a form late. It is “the left” that is criticised for the centre’s deployment of what are in reality right-wing neoliberal policies.

The liberals’ corporatist approach, the conservatives’ book bans, curriculum restrictions, and attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion are attacks on academic freedom by both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats want higher education to be modeled after a for-profit enterprise; Republicans share this vision and also want it to be a vehicle for cultural conservatism and the transmission of racist values. Democrats deserve credit for wanting higher education to be a vehicle for cultural diversity and anti-racism. But it is sad and ironic that these progressive values ​​are being embedded in a management structure that could have been invented in Pinochet’s Chile.