Neoliberal Bureaucracy: Making the Left Look Bad

No one prints the syllabus for a college class anymore. They’re multi-page tomes, too long to print, and they’re usually posted online. A modern syllabus is essentially a legal document, full of policies about grading, learning outcomes, attendance, classroom conduct, artificial intelligence, academic honesty, learning accommodations, and various services offered by the school. If you’re lucky, you might be able to comb through and find the names of the required books–if there are any. Lots of courses provide all the materials online.

Learning outcomes don’t just prescribe what to teach, but what activities might take place in order to best assess learning–in other words, they set the basic parameters for what an instructor or professor is going to do in the classroom. At the college level, they might typically appear on the syllabus of a required “core” class such as first-year writing or a community college class. The “learning outcomes and assessment movement” started over fifty years ago in K-12 schools and has been creeping upward through the educational system since then. While this effort might seem like a harmless way to make sure learning is happening, it’s best seen as an outgrowth of corporate-style, neoliberal-inspired bureaucracy. It has three components: defining learning outcomes for a given class, prescribing the assessment of those outcomes, and singling out teachers, departments, and schools whose students don’t meet the outcomes. At the university level, it constitutes an erosion of academic freedom.

The movement has been rightly criticized by Michael Bennett and Jacqueline Brady in the journal Radical Teacher. They point out that the push into higher ed has roots in the 1980’s corporate “competency movement” and in the work of conservative groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. As they put it, “ACTA’s report ‘Can College Accreditation Live Up to its Promise?’ makes the link between outcomes assessment and accreditation when it claims that accrediting agencies had historically focused only on inputs rather than outcomes.” Trust eroded in the ability of college instructors and professors to perform the jobs they were hired to do. Rather than assuming that hiring educated, well-intentioned people was good enough, the learning outcomes movement demanded “accountability” and testing, which has resulted in the current paradigm of external oversight.

This wasn’t just an expression of the historical suspicion of teachers and academics by conservatives. It’s a result of the market-inspired mindset in the corporate and public sectors more broadly, what David Graeber singles out as the massive expansion of interlocking public and private bureaucracies that accompanied the rise of neoliberalism and financialization of the economy. Graeber argues in Bullshit Jobs that ultimately this managerialism in academia isn’t about quality in education, saving money, or anything of the sort. At its core, it’s about expanding the sector of administrators involved in purchasing and deploying the latest IT systems, spreading neoliberal rhetoric, creating low-wage non-tenured positions, and channeling large numbers of students into the college loan system. These changes have little to do with thrift, focusing on what matters, or opening college to groups historically excluded from higher learning. It’s about fostering a culture of self-perpetuating managerialism. As Graeber points out, the helping professions like education, healthcare, and public service have turned into top-heavy, tech-saturated bureaucracies that suck money and resources away from the helping that they’re supposed to do.

Deluchi and his colleagues highlight growth at the administrative level in the US from 1976 to 2018. Enrollment went up by 78%, full-time faculty positions increased 92%, administrators increased 164%, and administrative support staff went up 452%. This kind of administrative bloat happens on the backs of students, who pay the constantly rising tuition that results from the growth of personnel 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 a variety of approaches ought to be the norm. Following the proprietary, self-interested ideology at the core of their approach, administrators typically spend a few years in one position before jumping ship for a higher paying gig. Faculty are treated to a revolving door of administrative newcomers who spend much of their time learning how to do their jobs. Before leaving, each has to be sure to leave a footprint in the bureaucracy such as reorganizing a department, initiating a reorganization of campus learning outcomes, or deploying a new software system. Staff are left to navigate the maze that is the sum of these initiatives.

A self-perpetuating administrative superstructure is just one of the many shifts in higher ed policy that owes inspiration to neoliberal approaches in business, government, and economics. In many ways, the anti-democratic thrust of the changes–technological, managerial, financial, legal, and pedagogical–isn’t often identified because in academia the package comes wrapped in a liberal, humanistic veneer. The deployment of humanistic and scientific language makes it all seem palatable. Online learning enhances “accessibility.” AI is a “learning tool.” Learning outcomes ensure an “optimal learning environment,” and “best practices” foster “student success” and “retention.” Bureaucratic proliferation can help provide “academic support” for students. Yet bureaucratic proliferation is making college so expensive that lower income students graduate with a mountain of debt. Students are supporting the management strata rather than the other way around.

The approach is an example of what can only be called soft authoritarianism, an approach that results from Democratic party politics–not to be confused with the hard authoritarianism of the right. The idea that a university might be run according to a collaborative ethic died a while ago. In a collaborative model, each academic department and administrative unit cooperates toward a common, coherent goal: quality education, research, and community service. Now it’s the proprietary model, where each department is seen as a mini company jockeying for limited funds. Every few years each department goes under “academic review,” in which they need to grovel for funding and justify their scholarly worthiness to the administration. From the staff end of things, what might be the simple scheduling of an event becomes a competitive process in which departments like public safety, catering, or facilities get involved to see what piece of the pie they can get. Each unit reviews the proposal and imposes limitations or requirements for the use of their services, which always come with 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 feared dog eat dog America devoid of the concept of community, the public sector run in a bizarre imitation of the market.

Because this system in higher ed–and similar ones in the public and non-profit sectors–comes with liberal trappings, the cold ethos at play isn’t as easy to see. In fact, the modern university gets labeled as “far left” by the right wing. This makes it look in the popular imagination as if “the left” supports a world of endless rules lorded over by a hierarchy of managers ready to discipline you for turning in a form late. It’s “the left” who gets panned for the center’s deployment of what are really right wing neoliberal policies.

Taken together, the corporate-style push by liberals and the book bans, curricular restrictions, and assaults on DEI by conservatives constitute attacks on academic freedom from both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats want higher education to be modeled after a profit-driven company; Republicans share that vision and also want it to be a vehicle for cultural conservatism and transmission of racist values. To the Democrats’ credit, they want higher ed to be a vehicle for cultural diversity and anti-racism. But it’s sad and ironic that these progressive values get embedded in a management structure that might have been concocted in Pinochet’s Chile.

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