Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market

Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market

by Ron Roberts
Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market

Capitalism on Campus: Sex Work, Academic Freedom and the Market

by Ron Roberts

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Overview

Capitalism on Campus examines the university’s journey into market hands and the sexual sell-off of students, which has come with it. It raises critical questions about the forces which conjoin higher education to both sex work and declining academic freedom. In so doing it questions the role our institutions of learning have in the cultivation of resistance to capitalism. This is a call to rediscover the emancipatory potential of knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781785358005
Publisher: Collective Ink
Publication date: 11/30/2018
Pages: 164
Product dimensions: 5.62(w) x 8.53(h) x 0.45(d)

About the Author

Ron Roberts is a Chartered Psychologist and Honorary Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University with over 30 years' experience in Higher Education. He is the author of eight other books, including Zero Books' Psychology and Capitalism. He lives in London, UK.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Death of the University

The idea of the University as a place of civic education and critical enquiry has been put to a premature death by a raft of neo-capitalist political rationalities that promote inter alia divisive competition, false economies and philistine instrumentality

Bailey, 2015

Money can't buy a thought, or a connection between ideas or things

Back, 2016, p.23

In the magic realist world woven by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, we learn that the convergence of many chance events makes absurdity possible. This is also true in the real world, though absurdity there can also have ostensibly rational origins. The process of reducing the function of UK institutions of higher learning into one geared to the exchange of commodities, a specialist branch in the art of possessing things, can arguably be traced to the late 1970s (Furedi, 2011). This was the time when Margaret Thatcher and her entourage began setting about the British economy with the sledgehammer principles espoused by the Chicago School of economists – first piloted in Chile, in brutal fashion, via the CIA-sponsored removal of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The imposition of market reforms recognised as quintessentially neoliberal arrived shortly afterwards and disaster capitalism was born (Klein, 2007). In the higher education sector, Thatcher's aim was to introduce an explicit market-oriented discipline into the workings of universities and the people within them. With the lady from Grantham having forsworn the existence of society – in her view "only individual men and women and families" existed – the abstract was sacrificed for the concrete and the hapless student was now "expected to serve as the personification of market pressures" (Furedi, 2011, p.3). Thus was the student as consumer born and a raft of measures designed ultimately to ease money from students' (and their parents') pockets, trailed in its wake. Table 1 below shows a timeline of the key political changes in the funding of UK higher education.

Final confirmation of the triumphant incursion of market values into the UK higher education wonderland arrived just before the millennium in the form of the Dearing Report (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). This set out the UK government's "vision of a learning society", one which envisaged students making "a greater investment in their own futures". Investment, of course, can take many forms – and as the language of the market grows more pervasive – a "deeply shared and transcendent faith", according to Seabrook (1990, p.11), "capital investment" has come to denote a world beyond the purely financial, embracing social, biological, cultural and human resources. The phrase "human resources" carries multiple meanings – from the human "capital" available to an organisation to the individual capabilities possessed by an individual. Normally these two different connotations would point to quite different interests. Sadly, in the environment in which academic staff and students now find themselves captive, the two have merged into one with the result that both academics and students see the need to sell themselves to those who wave the magic money wand. Their respective positions in the hierarchy of power mean that the choices available to them for doing this are not the same. The game, however, is that we are all for sale – perhaps a closing down sale for higher education as it once was or was ever thought to be. The underlying logic of the UK reforms is to replace government block grants to universities and instead loan the money to students as an investment in their own "human capital". In this warped view education is construed as conferring no benefit beyond the individual person who has paid for it. The self-evident absurdity of this proposition should be obvious to anybody who has ever consulted a doctor, nurse, dentist or lawyer to name but a few of the professions which depend on university training.

Changes in the political funding of higher education have been accompanied by the introduction of a raft of "disciplinary" marketing instruments beginning with the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1986, followed by the Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) in 1992, and the National Student Survey (NSS) in 2005. By the time the latter had entered the fray the conversion of universities from seats of learning into profit-making enterprises was complete. The RAE mutated into the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014 while the TQA was exhumed and recast as the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in 2017, reframing university education as something akin to an Olympic sport in which successful institutions could be "awarded" Gold, Silver or Bronze ratings.

The above changes have facilitated the corrosive branding of British universities – witness endless, witless mission statements, websites overrun with "badges, stickers and logos" (Scott, 2017) and endless verbiage couched in a higher education version of Newspeak, promising to "enhance" the "student experience" to undreamt of heights. Like Orwell's original in 1984, the present educational dialect functions to suppress independent thought and, as in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, places the pleasure principle at the apex of human achievement. I will return to this issue in subsequent chapters, specifically to draw parallels with that which students who work in the sex and adult entertainment industries are endeavouring to produce in their clients. The community bound together by the new higher education language game is an administrative cohort – "bureaucratic Rottweilers now snapping at all our heels" (Evans, 2004, p.3) able to see nothing beyond the power of money; an elite conforming to Kafka's portrayal as being "fleetingly glimpsed", "unassailable" and seemingly "governed by mysterious laws". As surely as the language game binds management, accountants and advertisers together, however, it alienates and perplexes academic staff.

One of the many absurd aspects of the commodification of student life, though a recurrent and predictable feature of the impact of capitalism on all human affairs, is how activities and processes are turned into things. Verbs usually better suited for talking about these come to be replaced by nouns, a reflection of the tendency for capitalist social relations to objectify and reify all forms of human encounter, an issue which the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1976) critiqued many years ago. The emphasis on "experience" as a product to be bought and consumed, for example, is found in the packaging of adventure holidays and activities in the sport and leisure industry. It is the final frontier of capitalist excess and a sign that the barrier to the internal conscious world of the human "consumer" has finally been penetrated by the dollar.

So it is with the NSS that a student's experience of a whole range of issues connected with higher education will ultimately be reduced to a single score on an ordinal five-point scale: the different subjects they study; the various staff who deliver lectures to them, or mark their work, and who interact with them with varying degrees of efficiency and regularity; the nature of their relationships with these different staff; the efficiency of administrative support; the availability and standard of technological resources; library facilities; availability of up to date and historical literature whether books or journals; the nature of relationships with other students; the availability of leisure facilities, clubs and societies, how their life in general is going and so on. Furthermore, this score is somehow supposed to equate to the quality, depth and breadth of education one is receiving. The reality is that it functions as the universities' weapon of choice in the search for market share (Lenton, 2015). That such a score is divorced from any assessment of what input a student is making into their own learning or the wider economic, social and familial context in which they live only compounds the absurdity.

The NSS process can be likened to judging the outcome of a physical fitness programme on a group of people while ignoring the question of whether anybody ever shows up at the gym. Reading for a degree has given way to "getting" one – an entity that one buys which is delivered after a wait of 3 years. Brown (2006) argues, as have many critics, that NSS scores lack legitimacy, that they mistake access to information with its quality and carry the presumption that students are not just making meaningful judgements about the educational process they are engaged in but that all the significant effects of their university education can be assimilated and appraised before their degree course has even finished. Were it remotely possible to validly condense all the aspects of higher education life into a single score of satisfaction, this score would tell us nothing of any significance. It should not be necessary, but unfortunately, with universities having reached escape velocity from reality, it is necessary to say it: how satisfied one feels with whatever has transpired in almost 3 years of study, cannot and should not be taken as some proxy for intellectual rigour, critical thinking, educational worth, the effort the student has devoted to their study, how well they were taught – nor the relevance and applicability of what has been learnt to life. As if to confirm this, the pursuit of satisfaction ratings has resulted in many institutions investing heavily in landscaped campuses, sports and social facilities, marketing and public relations staff (McGettigan, 2013; Cocozza, 2017) – a case of never mind the quality, pay for the myth. With this the betrayal of the idea of the university is complete.

The TEF excepted, all the above measures have been directed towards ranking university departments and academic staff on a crude unidimensional scale – an "absurd and obscene system" in the opinion of sociologist Les Back (2016, p.63). Central to the audit of research and the hypothetical measure of its quality has been the process of assigning "impact factors" to journals, a dubious practice described as "psychometric nonsense" by Hartley (2012, pp.330-331) and "deeply flawed" by Schekman (2013). Hartley considered the process intrinsic to the "McDonaldization" of higher education while Schekman, a Nobel prize winner, went further and suggested the pursuit of impact factors has "become an end. ... as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking". When assigning impact factors, an oddity seldom remarked upon is that greater weight is granted to publications specific to the North American continent. This arises because of the greater size of the North American market. One consequence of this – certainly in the social sciences and humanities – is that pragmatic considerations dictate that scholars are under pressure to express their views in ways consonant with the tastes of journal editors there. As with the NSS, the obvious conclusion (one to have escaped the attention of successive governments and those members of the academic fraternity who've sold their soul to corporate governance and agreed to participate as judges in this process) is that as instruments purporting to measure "quality" they all lack the one quintessential property which all metrics are supposed to possess – which is demonstrable validity. In one of the few robust analyses of NSS scores Lenton (2015) concluded from the results that the scores should not be used as a method of ranking not least because the students' satisfaction scores appear to be in large part markers of their "readiness and confidence to face the labour market" (pp.126–127).

A curious side note in the history of these metrics concerns the notorious publisher and former owner of The Daily Mirror newspaper, Robert Maxwell. Maxwell was a key player in the global expansion of academic publishing, turning it into "a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society" (Buranyi, 2017). He managed this through his ownership of Pergamon Press prior to its later acquisition by Elsevier, currently the largest scientific publisher in the world. Maxwell's unique contribution was to recognise the enormous potential for profit in academia, driving up prices and convincing scientists that a given field required a new journal to showcase their work. With the number of journals proliferating, Maxwell's next trick was to insist on grand titles for them – "The international journal of ..." was a favourite prefix. This public relations trick helped to cement the idea of a publishing hierarchy – so that whereas at one time all journals were held to be essentially equal, after Maxwell's intervention it was a case that some were "more equal than others". The notion of an "international" standard of research became a badge of honour and in due course was incorporated into the metric used in the first RAE. What this meant in practice, however, was far from clear, nobody being quite sure what counted as "international excellence" or what was understood by quality of research (see Alldred and Miller, 2007 for a summary of the confusion). By 2008 the phrase "international excellence", in common with most advertising slogans, had lost some of its earlier vitality and found itself relegated to a lower place in the hierarchy of esteem – to be supplanted by a new gold standard of "world leading", this being no better defined than the benchmark it replaced. One can only suppose that in years to come the descriptions will, like the Starship Enterprise, head out into the galaxy to set a new benchmark of cosmic excellence and take the insatiable hunger for profit to where no one has gone before.

Understandably, researchers have felt compelled, for the sake of their careers, to conform to the "market discipline" which these metrics impose. This has had a far-reaching influence on the nature of academic discourse itself. The University and College Union (UCU), which represents academic staff throughout the UK, considers this to have had:

a disastrous impact on the UK higher education system leading to the closure of departments with strong research profiles and healthy student recruitment. It has been responsible for job losses, discriminatory practices, widespread demoralisation of staff, the narrowing of research opportunities through the over-concentration of funding and the undermining of the relationship between teaching and research. (UCU, 2008)

Under this system, viable research is that which attracts the attentions of academic entrepreneurs and corporate sponsors. As Naomi Klein (2010) noted in No Logo, resistance to this market dominance of the campus has been minimal. In my own discipline of psychology "brain research, forensic psychology and behaviour genetics" are pre-selected for favourable ratings while investigations in the social arena are out of favour. Thus, the "psychology of political protest" and research directed towards the misbehaviour of political elites would be scored badly.

The changes in the UK environment are echoed in other parts of Europe. Faced with a restructuring of global capital markets and the birth of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s, many European governments decided that the university is obliged to become a partner in the wholesale transformation of capital markets. The ostensible aims were to increase the proportion of graduates in the population so that a more skilled literate workforce would be on hand to meet the challenges flowing from the changing (global and technological) nature of economic production. This, so the argument went, would serve to enhance national and international competitiveness. This philosophy is enshrined in the Lisbon declaration of the European University Association (2007). While this document calls for greater autonomy and diversity on the part of universities, it has if anything produced the exact opposite – having become a key driver of the restructuring of university life throughout the European continent towards a business-friendly bureaucratic agenda.

The document explicitly called for a bigger role for private finance, one that went hand in hand with a greater input from employers into the strategic aims of universities. These were accompanied by exhortations to promote "mission statements", "enterprise" and "knowledge exchange" paving the way for a radical transformation in the view of education. The once prevailing view that study and learning was of intrinsic value has been replaced by one in which its value is instrumentalised and costed. Within this framework the corporate mission reconfigures the role of students. In this pedagogical prison, thinking, learning, creating and performing serve only to produce graduate jobs or corporate profit. "Student outcomes" is the new mantra, both within and outside the university. Thinking for oneself and understanding the nature of the society we live in are reduced to externalities in this model. In the classrooms and lecture theatres, precise "learning outcomes" must be specified in advance and listed in the curricula like items on a fast-food menu, to be later spat out undigested at exam times and then forgotten. No unexpected surprises are permitted. The micromanagement and surveillance of teaching and learning does not stop there. After graduation, monitoring systems continue to track employment rates – information to be assimilated and incorporated into next year's brochure.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Capitalism on Campus"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Ron Roberts.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents

Preface 1

Acknowledgements 5

1 The Death of the University 7

2 Economics, Politics, Student Sex Work 31

3 Researching Student Sex Work: Academic Freedom, Market Values 55

4 Psycho-Politics and The Body Politic: The University and the State 79

5 The Re-invention of Education: Political Resistance and the Future 103

Endnotes 125

References 132

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