Academic managerialism in the art and design school

Abstract

As the United States (US) financial sector experienced 'meltdown' in 2008, a different but not unrelated 'meltdown' continued its decades-long impact on art and design education in the US. Seemingly hanging in the balance has been culture itself, rationed so that it becomes a source of conformity, not critical dissent. Symptoms of ongoing 'meltdown' in US art and design education at the tertiary level are many. Rising costs have continued to threaten access. This has come just as the recent economic reshuffle, largely manufactured in the US, has led to a decrease in student bursaries and student employment opportunities used to defray cost. Delayed progress towards degrees and diplomas--if not complete cessation--has followed. Also, central administration's talk of 'financial exigency' has hung in the air along with the possibility that 'shock' treatment--as Naomi Klein (2007) might describe it--will follow. This 'shock' has included academic management unilaterally taking drastic steps, like abolishing tenure, increasing teaching loads and institutional service requirements, all while actually and effectively cutting pay, hiring contingent faculty to do what tenured or tenure-track academics once did, and feverishly introducing new online courses (even in art and design schools) in the name of 'efficiency'. That these challenges confront students and faculty at US art and design schools should not be surprising. Managerial changes in US higher education fall well within what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed the 'essence of neoliberalism' (1998) operating at a global level, where managerial 'flexibility' underlies managerial decision-making. This 'flexibility' helps to constitute a rationale in which the basis of 'quality' in teaching, research and production can be quantified via almighty 'metrics'. The trend towards managerial flexibility in US art and design schools has included a heightened vigour for translating for-profit sector management techniques into not-for-profit higher education. Responsibility-centered management (RCM, sometimes referred to as responsibility-centered budgeting (RCB)) is one technique from the for-profit sector now at home in not-for-profit tertiary education in general, including even art and design schools. (On RCM, see Nelson & Watt 1999: 221-224.) RCM, as its proponents argue, permits more alignment between authority and responsibility. In terms of authority, administrative units receive more (but not ultimate) day-to-day control of their own affairs. It is basically a kind of devolution, in which the day-to-day running of an administrative unit, like an academic department, nominally reverts back to that unit. Power supposedly moves from a central source, like a central administrative structure, to a site closer to the actual administration of 'product', like a department of writing or visual communications. (RCM managers actually use this 'product' terminology, along with 'entrepreneurial', 'enterprise', 'investment', 'market', 'value', while designating students as 'clients'.) While academic units closest to the delivery of 'product' receive more authority, they also become more responsible for their own resource disposition. For example, an academic unit like a photography department assumes responsibility for the generation of its own resources. These resources come in the form of, for example, grants and fellowships as well as the generation of student credit hours (which translates into revenue via student tuition and fees), all of which largely means more cash for that academic unit. There is, in short, a reward for 'creating value' that funders want, or that art history or ceramics students want and for which they pay tuition and fees. For permanent academic staff this theoretically means higher pay, more funding to pour metal casts, release time from teaching, more support staff, travel funds, new equipment, or a better desk or studio space. There is a catch: if an academic unit earns its keep, and then some, it keeps the booty. …