Changing University Discourses, Changing Spaces for Academics – Reconfiguring External Conditions for Being an Academic Subject

Abstract

This chapter traces the emerging, new external context and conditions that provide the framework for thinking and talking about academic workers in legitimate ways. As the purpose of the university has changed, academic subjects and their identities and working conditions have been changing as well. A gradual transition is identified in discourses about the purpose and identity of academic subjects in a Danish context, moving from what I label a receding ‘democratic and Humboldtian university discourse’ to an emerging ‘knowledge economy university discourse’. Seen from the point of view of the academic subject, these processes have become visible through a host of floating signifiers and political technologies that have coded the meanings of the university and its academic subjects in new ways: universities have become organisations with ‘self-ownership’, which has allegedly increased their ‘freedom’ of operation in the research and education ‘market’. Academic subjects must now operate within the university’s ‘strategic priorities’, which are negotiated in ‘development contracts’ with the Ministry of Higher Education and Science. This has taken place as practices and procedures that referred to floating signifiers like ‘democracy’ and ‘participation’ have been dislodged. This process entailed closures as well as new openings for constructing academic subjectivities. It is stressed, however, that historically, academic subjectivities have always been plastic entities embedded in changing conceptions of the university.