Questing Excellence in Academia

Front matter

IN ACADEMIA

A TALE OF TWO UNIVERSITIES

Routledge Studies in Science, Technology and Society Knut H. Sørensen and Sharon Traweek

Contents

Preface ix

1 Navigating Universities, University Studies, and This Book 1 Introduction 1 Disciplining Universities to Provide Public Goods 5 Universities, the Public Good, and Their Quests for Excellence 9 Navigating the Field of University Studies 13 Reconfiguring University Studies 16 Homeward Bound: Engaging Ethnographically with Universities 18 Questing, Resisting, and Re-morphing Excellence 22 Intervening 23 Locating Two Universities 26 NTNU 26 UCLA 28 A Brief Outline of This Book 33

2 Disciplining Universities: Performance Metrics, Policy Reforms, and Reputations 36 Introduction 36 Distinctions: The Role of National Governments in Governing Universities and the New Metric Managerial Models for Universities 38 Corporatizing and Bureaucratizing Are Not in Opposition 40 Building University Reputations: Branding and Ranking 42 Branding as a Strategy for Building a Distinctive Reputation 42 University Ranking Systems 44 Presences and Absences: Features of the Political Economies of NTNU and UCLA 46 NTNU -a Bureaucratizing University with Government Presence 47 UCLA -a Corporatizing University 54 Conclusion: The Co-morphing of Metrics and ‘Excellence’ 65 vi

Preface

It is hard to say when our collaboration on this book began. We met in 1983 at MIT and since then have been in active conversation about universities, interdisciplinarity, justice, sustainability, teaching, Norway, California, and much more. We regularly surprise, confound, agree, and confuse each other. Finishing this book will not end our provocative dialogues.

Our discussions about the particular issues raised in the book began while Knut was a visiting researcher at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability in 2017 and continued through a series of conversations at the annual conferences of the international, interdisciplinary Society for Social Studies of Science, as well as some visits at NTNU and UCLA. We have had bi-weekly Skype and Zoom meetings for a long time. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we could not meet in person, which has delayed us. During the last several weeks of generating this manuscript we made use of our nine-hour time difference: one would send a draft at the end of a day near the Pacific and then many hours later the other would send a subsequent version from near the North Sea.

This book joins an ongoing, global debate about the crisis in universities and knowledge making. We have benefitted profoundly from that scholarship and are grateful for it. A full, annotated bibliography of that interdisciplinary literature would be a great resource for all of us. We apologize for citing only a tiny amount of the work that has inspired us. We are eager for the conversations we will be pursuing with you about this book and your work.

Knut’s work with the book has benefitted from participating in two ongoing projects both funded by the Research Council of Norway: GENDIM — Understanding gender imbalances among university professors: the shaping and reshaping of epistemic living spaces (grant no. 296173) and Res Publica: Responsibility, practice, and the public good across Digital Life (grant no. 270623). He is particularly grateful for conversations regarding these projects with Ivana Suboticki, Vivian Anette Lagesen and Heidrun Am: Vivian, in particular, allowed Knut to use data from the GENDIM x Preface project. He also wants to thank Margrethe Aune and Nora Levold for year-long exchanges about universities.

Sharon wants to thank five people who have sustained her intellectually, socially, and personally for decades, including during the writing of this book: Kim Fortun and Nadine Tanio of the University of California at Irvine, Diane Yu Gu of UCLA, Jarita Holbrook of the University of Edinburgh, and Wendy Martin of Claremont Graduate University. Kim, Nadine, and Diane are former students and Jarita once worked with Sharon as a postdoc; each began teaching the teacher from the first day we met. Sharon and Wendy met as undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley.

We gratefully acknowledge the economic support from NTNU that has enabled the open access publication of this book.

Knut H. Sorensen Sharon Traweek Los Angeles/Trondheim July 2021

Chapter |

Navigating Universities, University Studies, and This Book

For generations, universities have been institutions providing higher education and research. Increasingly, they are expected also to contribute to local and global economies by commercializing research and spurring innovation, while addressing grand social challenges like climate mitigation and social disparities. Arguably, universities have come to occupy a strategic place in reshaping society by circulating research-based knowledge through teaching, professional expertise, and other forms of dissemination. That position makes universities important to study. In this book, we draw on the intellectual resources of science and technology studies (STS) to understand continuities and discontinuities in the making and circulation of knowledge, emerging from changes in the relationship between universities and society. Furthermore, we see the study of universities as vital to addressing unexamined assumptions in STS about this relationship as well as the ways in which it may be governed.

Universities are among the most successful enterprises in modern society with stunning growth. They educate an increasingly large proportion of the population in most countries (Frank and Gabler, 2006; Frank and Meyer, 2007), house a huge share of the world’s growing research activities, employ large workforces, provide expertise to most other institutions in wider society, influence the public, receive large economic resources, and maintain archives of the world’s privileged knowledge. Thus, universities are complex public spaces with a multitude of activities and actors with varying degrees of access that we need to comprehend in order to understand modern societies. Indeed, it is the growing significance and power of universities that have led many others increasingly to seek control over universities’ rapidly expanding resources.

To deal with those challenges and waves of social change, universities have been radically and repeatedly transformed. Above all, they have grown and at the same time been re-organized, while the conditions they offer to faculty and students have been altered substantially. A previous President of

Cornell University has described this transformation in positive terms: ‘From modest beginnings over nine hundred years ago, it [the university] has become the quiet but decisive catalyst in modern society, the factor essential to its effective functioning and well-being’ (Rhodes, 2001: xi). In contrast, critical voices complain that universities have been corrupted and demolished (e.g., Collini, 2017; Connell, 2019; Donoghue, 2008; Evans, 2004; Fleming, 2021; Halffman and Radder, 2015).

The voices of celebration and outrage agree that by now three longstanding characteristics of universities, the traditional boundaries between universities and wider society, academic freedom, and their epistemic authority all have been altered significantly. By epistemic authority we refer to the multiple ways of asserting, managing, defending, thwarting, circulating, and negotiating knowledge claims, perhaps the defining feature of academic work. Those three activities together are central to this book: how are they being invoked strategically and challenged, by whom, for what ends, as the ecologies of universities are changing fundamentally? We also ask about the relationship between new kinds of order and governance, plus the new success strategies brought by an increasing number of administrators, and the older academic ways of evaluating quality and building consensus, along with making knowledge through teaching and research. Has one obliterated the other, or do they coexist like the dual organizations found in some colonized societies where the outsiders believe they are in control and know how to deal effectively with the local leaders, never realizing that there is an entirely different set of social processes at work when the colonizers are not looking, including different leaders (Ortiz 1965, 1969). Have the old ways been reduced to the margins where they survive and morph into new niche ecologies?

Our attention is on variation within and between universities. We have chosen two such places to explore the local practices, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). We do not see uniformity, whether it be general neoliberal ideas or their translation into entrepreneurial, bureaucratic, and corporate practices, but we do see temporary assemblages of them. We examine that variation and find patterns. As cultures undergo massive change, the participants sometimes decide what to preserve and what to change while exploring the possibilities of changing their ecologies, too. We ask what kinds of experimental changes can be observed on campuses and what sorts of long-term adaptations already have been made. We argue that each of the two universities that we study are buffeted by the same extramural forces with many of the same intramural challenges. However, each currently shows a very different mix of strategic responses. We ask about what that variation signals for the future of universities and what immediate tasks lie ahead.

The book builds upon 25 years of scholarship investigating the nature of the widely acknowledged, massive transformation of universities. We engage with the ongoing claims of greatness and desecration, as well as the explanations of why the changes have happened by analyzing what is happening in universities now, given that those changes began about 50 years ago. We do this by looking closely at everyday practices in two universities; both are subject to many of the same forces, but each is engaging with them selectively in complex ways. Understanding the variations between and within them will enable us to evaluate the existing scholarship on the changes, clarifying both what has happened and what might come next. Our goal in this book is to show how our universities are unsustainable and identify solutions.

In the substantial literature that critically discusses how universities have changed, particularly during the last three decades, a widely shared figuration is ‘the neoliberal university’. It is characterized by increased privatization and interventions in the organization of academic activities, inspired by discourses emerging from business and mainstream economics to implement auditing systems, efficiency measures, new financial management practices, costcutting, and so-called excellence measures. Critics argue that these changes undermine traditional democratic practices and academic freedom while employment becomes increasingly precarious and academic work is repetitively intensified (Collini, 2017; Connell, 2019; Fleming, 2021; Gill, 2014).

While these critical contributions are important, we want to explore the widespread idea of ‘The Neoliberal University’ as a singular phenomenon, to be understood as the outcome of a globalized political economy. Of course, there is considerable isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983) among universities. Largely, they engage with the same tasks, are subject to the same discourses about excellence and public goods and learn from each other with respect to organizational change. Therefore, the label ‘university’ is meaningful when navigating the terrains of research and higher education across countries and cultures. According to DiMaggio and Powell, isomorphism is produced through processes of coercion, such as government policies and regulations, mimesis — copying practices from other universities — and norms, setting professional standards for administrative work. Such processes are clearly present in the development of universities, which we analyze primarily in Chapter 2 but also in other chapters. At the same time, as we also show that when we look more closely, there are striking and important variations that indicate countervailing forces to those that drive isomorphism, as well as significant differences in the political-economic contexts and academic traditions of universities.

Many scholars have highlighted such diversity, pointing to the importance of local and national influences (Berman and Paradeise, 2016; Hiither and Kricken, 2016), and contrasting American, European, and Asian specificities (Scott 2017). Paradeise and Thoenig (2013) find that universities may pursue quite different strategies in the face of expectations regarding excellence and reputation, due to diverging views related to what universities ought to achieve. In this book, we focus on differences regarding political-economic contexts, as well as the diversity of epistemic politics and epistemic practices that shape, but also emerge from everyday university activities. Such diversity may also create distinct and significant differences within any one university. This variation needs to be considered when developing strategies to challenge neoliberal transformations. We want to contribute to such endeavors. Related to these concerns, we want to emphasize enactments of academic freedom that are embedded in common academic practices related to research, teaching, and outreach. We think that such enactments are important, but frequently overlooked sources of power and resilience. They differ considerably, not the least within the universities, but they are vital parts of the strategic possibilities of faculty and students to shape university politics in the face of various neoliberal interventions. On the other hand, academic life is definitely not without frictions, harassment, and conflicts. These are prominent issues in the book, in addition to the political-economic and cultural concerns in which universities are situated.

At the center of our concerns is the everyday life in university departments, with a focus on enactments of epistemic politics and epistemic practices, where there is tension among the many ways of making, transforming, and circulating important knowledge. Departments constitute the turbulent spaces where university work in all its diversities is conducted. It is in this space that the core tasks of teaching, research, and engagement with society are performed, as well as all the invisible work of planning, communicating, and debating that is a precondition of performing the core tasks. Moreover, the related social interaction is shaped by distinct traditions, routines, and conventions, which means that departments may offer rather different conditions for the conduct of academic work. It is also important that they decisively influence processes of hiring and promotions. While the basic activities of university departments are the same, they are performed and experienced differently. We are exploring some of the underlying dynamics of these activities in the book, particularly in Chapters 3 and 4. This involves analysis of how relevant actors — university leadership, heads of departments, faculty, administrative staff, and students — mediate and enact the multivocal, potentially contradictory concerns that are raised in university settings. Such concerns include funding practices, research excellence initiatives and measures, teaching methods, service work, and learning strategies. We also explore engagements with important social challenges, such as climate change, environmental degradation, innovation, economic inequalities, health, and issues related to gender, class, ethnicity, racialization, sexuality, and other ways of differentiating and dividing people and communities.

We believe our concerns have become even more pressing after the Covid-19 pandemic made universities worldwide close the activities that involved physical interaction, replacing them with online, mediated interaction. Overnight, faculty, staff and students were forced to turn to digital tools to continue to do their work from home. At the same time, the pandemic rendered more visible some of the faultlines that have resulted from the neoliberal policies in many countries (Traweek, 2000). An important example is how the pandemic has demonstrated the financial risks involved when universities depend on tuition and other student fees as a major source of income. Another alarming issue is the layoffs that reveal how university employees increasingly have been subjected to precarious conditions of work. Recovery from the pandemic will require a lot of effort; overcoming neoliberal policies that intensified during the pandemic even more so. We intend this book as an intervention in the debates that must emerge, scholarly as well as politically.

Disciplining Universities to Provide Public Goods

In general, universities have been established to provide public goods through teaching and research. We may question to what extent the contributions of universities benefit the public, but we cannot understand university-society relations without considering the expectations from policymakers, industry, social movements, and so on, of those social benefits. These expectations are the girders of public policies, the enrollment of students, endowments, and initiatives from other stakeholders. They are also, as we shall see, important drivers of the transformations of universities initiated by university leadership. Thus, we consider universities as subjected to disciplining measures to ensure that expectations are met. However, we need to analyze what these measures are and what they amount to in different contexts, as well as what kind of disciplining is threatened and inflicted for non-compliance. We cannot assume the disciplining practices to be similar everywhere.

This view of universities as disciplined is grounded in historical analysis. According to William Clark (2008), the so-called modern research university emerged in Germany in the late 16th century and onwards as a response to a long series of disciplining interventions by the Prussian government. That government began to see universities as a resource on par with the mining industry; what mattered was to make universities realize their potential for supplying goods. The resulting interventions seems strange today, such as visitations to the universities, but some are well known, such as the bureaucratic tools for suitably reporting activities to the authorities. University policy changes in the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st century followed the same path as 17th-century Germany, but on a more comprehensive and intensive scale. Björn Wittrock (1993) argues that the expansion of research and later the emergence of mass universities through growth in the number of students have been the main transformative forces. The more recent expectations of universities to provide new kinds of public and private goods, such as innovation, spin-offs, and engagements with a variety of social actors, represent yet another set of drivers of change. The instruments of governance and the actors involved in the processes of transformation seem to vary from country to country, but neoliberal visions of effectiveness and efficiency have been widely shared and implemented through new management regimes and audit systems (Strathern, 2000), albeit with distinct local adaptations. These adaptations are of particular interest to us.

A main articulation of neoliberal policies is the so-called New Public Management (NPM) policy, a set of ideas to transform the public sector — including universities — to make such institutions more efficient and publicly accountable. Hood (1995) claims that NPM is based on seven doctrines. They include the belief in the benefits from implementing private sector-style management, more emphasis on visible, intervening top management, the use of explicit, formal, measurable standards and measures of performance, along with greater emphasis on ‘output controls’ (p. 96). Similar change doctrines may be found in other manifestations of neoliberalism. For example, NPM is not explicitly referred to in US university discourses, even if most of the measures have been implemented, if modified substantially by the use of corporate software management systems developed in the 1990s. Such policies represent efforts to transform universities into organizational actors (Kriicken and Meier, 2006; Whitley, 2008, 2012). The resulting shifts have contributed to the significant expansion and empowerment of university leadership and administration and an increasing public focus on their strategic navigation of external and internal relations. It has also led to quite fundamental changes in the organization of universities, with growing emphasis on practices where instructions flow from university leadership arenas, at the expense of traditionally dominant collegial practices. We may recognize many of aspects of public policies that are described by Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson (2000) as efforts to construct organizations, which include the construction of boundaries, specialness, hierarchy, and rationality.

However, this does not mean that universities have become homogeneous actors, with departments and research units always acting in step and in line with the grand strategic plans of the institutions. Rather, as we show in Chapter 3, teaching and research, including the writing of research grant funding applications, remains largely at the discretion of faculty. Universities may appear as organizational actors, but with respect to vital practices they are not. This book demonstrates the complexity that still reigns, and which make universities more like what Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson call arenas — ‘incomplete’ organizations (p. 734). Arenas are characterized by its members and what they do ‘are legitimately guided by external interests, values, norms, and standards’. Thus, ‘members perform their task relatively free from control by the local leadership’. If we consider universities as arenas, we see them as controlled to a considerable extent by transnational disciplinary norms and standards, not the immediate institutional goals. However, local context and academic cultures are at least as important.

Musselin (2007) claims that universities are different from other organizations. ‘In few other workplaces, is it as frequent to ignore what colleagues next door are doing and observe so little influence of the activities of those colleagues on one’s own tasks’ (p. 70). She also notes how difficult it is to describe teaching and research in a concrete, simple, and meaningful manner. Moreover, the relationship between effort and outcome is unclear. These difficulties provide some protection against management of these activities. However, Musselin’s arguments about the specificities of universities does not mean that their practices are similar, independent of local context. Rather, she identifies some of the forces that counter isomorphic pressure, emphasizing the complexity of teaching and research. Musselin’s observations are intricately linked to a diversity of enactments of academic freedom and the importance of self-management among faculty. Disciplining efforts notwithstanding, the arena character of universities has helped faculty to retain considerable autonomy in their organization of their everyday work. Indeed, it is that autonomy that the new managerial systems try to contain. We discuss this more in greater detail in the book, particularly in Chapter 3, where we also investigate preconditions of academic freedom and how it relates to collegial relations.

In this book, we are concerned with collegial organizing rather than organization, following developments in organization studies (Czarniawska, 2008). We use the gerund form to emphasize the processual and specific features of collegial configurations, assignments, assessments, and decisions. Many studies of higher education, as well as critical university studies, along with public discourse uses the terms bureaucracy, corporation, capitalism, and entrepreneurship as singular generics, which of course they are not, in practice. Many employ the singular generics to suggest some sort of abstraction without clarification; others use them paradoxically to invoke as wide a range of meanings as possible to not limit their claims. Both singular generics and polysemy indicate that epistemic politics are at work. Neither vague abstraction nor polysemy is useful for us. In this book we are arguing that understanding specificities, locations, and practices matter so that we then can identify more fundamental patterns. The processes we find at work are domesticating, co-morphing, meshworking, and faultlines, all of which suggest strategic action to locate new solutions by domesticating and co-morphing of extramural models, demands, and challenges, along with the meshworking of managing everyday practices, while working within and around the concealed but powerful faultlines. Therefore, we are using gerunds, not singular generics.

These are important epistemic distinctions that also imply the application of constructivist perspectives to inquire, for example, into how collegial relations are made, enacted, and imbued with meaning. Collegial organizing represents a way of performing work that involves a considerable degree of self-management and providing for local decision-making. Such collegial principles are often believed to have been predominant at universities in the past, but the principles are seldom specified in any detail. Rather, they are usually implied with reference to both meritocracy and collegiality, ideally characterized by decision-making based on scholarly criteria, in which all faculty participate. In addition, according to Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist

(2016), there should be some degree of internal representative democracy to cater for larger issues, with participation also from students and administrative employees.

However, as we show in Chapter 3, collegial forms of organizing are not necessarily democratic, even if they in principle allow for such ways of making decisions. Moreover, collegial relationships may well be hierarchical, biased, and involve conflicts, confrontation, harassment, domination, and subordination. Academic life may consist of power games and struggles over positions and reputation (Bourdieu, 1988). We want to contribute to further debates about the features of collegial organizing and what it will take to improve such practices to avoid the counter-productive struggles many academics experience because of dysfunctional collegial organizing. Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist point out that collegial systems at universities increasingly are intersected by practices such as the setting of goals through strategy plans, new standards intended to regulate work and performance measurements, delimiting autonomy. Whether based on NPM or other corporate ideas about governance, these organizing efforts intend to change academic work. For example, they may encroach upon the collegial systems, reducing decision-making discretion among faculty and even removing internal councils with participation of faculty and students. However, as we show in Chapter 2, neoliberal ideas of transformation may be mediated differently in different situations and in different discursive contexts. In this chapter, we explore some of the contingencies of neoliberal policies that may allow for diversity with respect to these epistemic politics and epistemic practices.

Neoliberal policies have clearly been intended as measures to discipline, and sometimes punish universities into supplying public, as well as private goods more extensively and more efficiently. Thus, such policies are coproduced with ideas of the kinds of goods that universities are expected to provide. These ideas can be a mixed bag of concerns. For example, the research policy of the European Union presently calls for so-called Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). RRI represents requirements that span research ethics, gender balance among researchers, open science, and engagement with the public. The RRI policy expects research to be guided by social problems and the anticipated future needs of industry (Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten, 2013). Thus, RRI measures make researchers — and by implication universities — responsible for producing social goods in particular ways that clearly go beyond the traditional practices of universities. RRI may not be effective in influencing academic work (Am, 2019). However, it serves as a reminder of the need to investigate empirically how universities engage with the making of public goods and what role social responsibility concerns play in their epistemic politics. What expectations do universities face with respect to the kind of public goods they should provide, how they should be provided, and with what qualities? In short, how do universities — or rather, their leadership, including their boards — articulate their societal obligations, their responsibilities toward society?

To emphasize the pluralities and heterogeneities of institutions of higher education and research and to identify spaces of action, we have chosen to limit the scope of our empirical analysis by focusing on the juxtaposition of two large, public universities in two national contexts: the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and UCLA. What we offer is a multi-sited analysis, not a comparative study or a single-site ethnography. According to Marcus (1995), using a multi-sited approach means ‘to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, identities and objects in diffuse timespace’ (p. 96). We have chosen to base this book on our studies of these two universities because they exhibit, between and within them, considerable diversity regarding practices and discourses, as well as the political economies in which they are embedded. We think that it will be helpful to explore and juxtapose these diversities through a multi-sited analysis to understand key features of how universities are constituted in the current context of neoliberal policies and ideology and how universities may enact relations with larger society. We return to related methodological issues at the end of this chapter, where we also provide a brief description of the universities.

Both UCLA and NTNU are large public universities in the formal sense of state ownership, questing for excellence within the locally very prosperous political economies of California and Norway. However, NTNU is nearly completely funded by the government and there is no tuition. UCLA, on the other hand, depends substantially on student fees, donor endowments, and payments for its services, including research and campus-based events. In Norway, the government actively develops policies and initiatives to shape the institutions of research and higher education. The US national government has little direct engagement with universities and the State of California is far less active than the Norwegian government. There is still considerable isomorphism between NTNU and UCLA, but the different political-economic contexts allow us to investigate the implications of these differences for both isomorphism and diversity.

Universities, the Public Good, and Their Quests for Excellence

In the previous section, we argued that universities are disciplined to produce public and possibly also private goods. This raises questions about the sources and the instruments of this disciplining. We address these questions at some length in Chapter 2, while also considering how NTNU and UCLA process expectations from policymakers and other stakeholders. Some clues regarding the latter issue are found in the isomorphism of public statements that we observe from universities worldwide about their goals. The wording may differ, but the ambitions and the promissory discourses seem without limits. For example, the University of Edinburgh’s vision is “To recruit and develop the world’s most promising students and most outstanding staff and be a truly global university benefiting society as a whole.’ Similar ambitions are expressed by Cornell University in its statement that it aspires to be the exemplary comprehensive research university for the 21st century. Faculty, staff and students thrive at Cornell because of its unparalleled combination of quality and breadth; its open, collaborative and innovative culture; its founding commitment to diversity and inclusion; its vibrant rural and urban campuses; and its land-grant legacy of public engagement.

In a more compact statement from another continent, we learn that ‘Xiamen University Malaysia aspires to become a university with a distinct global outlook, featuring first-class teaching and research, and embracing cultural diversity.’

Such ‘vision statements’ and the usually accompanying ‘mission declarations’ tend to be variations of a trope that highlights a social mission of ‘questing excellence’ while also pursuing social relevance in research and teaching. Implicitly, this suggests that the trope expresses how universities aim to provide the best possible public goods without any need to prioritize or consider interferences between various kinds of goods. Clearly, in practice this is problematic. For example, Craig Calhoun (2006) argues that we may unpack the abstract idea of the demanded and promised public goods by juxtaposing two key words: ‘excellence’ — related to the quality of research and teaching — and ‘accessibility’ that refers to the possibility of acquiring higher education. Both terms are ideological, and Calhoun claims that there is an intensified tension between them. We have looked for such tensions and their consequences.