Guest talk by Professor Cris Shore: “Under New [Public] Management: University Reform, the Knowledge Economy, and Academic Capitalism”

Over the past four decades national higher education systems seemingly everywhere have been subjected to a series of reforms aimed at promoting economy, efficiency and effectiveness, improving quality and societal impact. Government ministers and universities leaders have actively promoted the idea that public universities should be more responsive to industry and commerce and should be directed more towards increasing national competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. These measures, together with the introduction of various New Public Management techniques and practices for restructuring academic institutions into more streamlined and governable organisations, have produced major changes in the mission and meaning of the public university and in the culture of academia itself. Drawing on examples of university reforms in the UK and Australasia, this lecture reflects on these processes and their implications for the public university. Managerial reforms have severe implication for academic autonomy and democracy.

• What are the effects of opening universities up to (and for) business?

• What are the implications of these managerial reforms for academic autonomy and democracy?

• Do all this herald the death of the public university and if so, what can be done about this?

Cris Shore is Professor of Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London. He is also currently affiliated with the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies (HCAS) at the University of Helsinki. His research lies at the interface of anthropology, politics, law, higher education and organisational studies and uses ethnographic perspectives to examine questions of power, governance and social change. His current project explores the rise of audit culture, academic capitalism and university futures. This research combines research on performance measurement, ‘audit culture’ and higher education reform to develop a new framework for thinking about universities in the global knowledge economy. Professor Shore's current research examines these processes and their effects by studying public universities at the forefront of experiments to develop new management models, methods and metrics to solve these challenges, and the problems that these solutions create."

The event is organized by the research project "Democracy in Finnish Universities: university autonomy and the crisis of representative democracy” at Tampere University.