Reconfiguring the Academic Dance: A Critique of Faculty’s Responses to Administrative Practices in Canadian Universities

Abstract

This article explores and critiques Canadian academics’ responses to new administrative practices in a variety of areas, including resource allocation, performance assessment and the regulation of academic work. The main argument is that, for the most part, faculty are responding to what administrative practices appear to be, rather than to what they do or accomplish institutionally. That is, academics are seeing and responding to these practices as isolated developments that interfere with or add to their work, rather than as reorganizers of social relations that fundamentally transform what academics do and are. As a result, their responses often serve to entrench and advance these practices’ harmful effects. This problem can be remedied by attending to how new administrative practices reconfigure institutional relations in ways that erode the academic mission, and by establishing new relations that better serve academics’—and the public’s—interests and needs. Drawing on the work of various academic and other activists, this article offers a broad range of possible strategies to achieve the latter goal. These include creating faculty-run “banks” to transform the allocation of institutional resources, producing new means and processes to assess—and support—academic performance, and establishing alternative policy-making bodies that operate outside of, and variously interrupt, traditional policy-making channels.