{"id":126,"date":"2014-04-09T09:14:35","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T09:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/management\/?p=126"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:21:12","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:21:12","slug":"academic-freedoms-and-the-university-ltd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/2014\/04\/09\/academic-freedoms-and-the-university-ltd\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic Freedoms and the University Ltd."},"content":{"rendered":"

Voltaire once wrote\u00a0\u201cTo learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize\u201d.\u00a0Professor of Organisation and Culture Martin Parker recently found out precisely what he meant.<\/em><\/p>\n

I had fundamental differences of opinion with the managers of the place I used to work. After having left \u201cUniversity Ltd.\u201d,\u00a0I decided to outline the nature of these grievances – for whoever wanted to hear about them – by drawing upon research<\/a>\u00a0which I had previously conducted\u00a0into the development of the UK Higher Education. The outcome of this outlining \u2013 ‘University Ltd.’<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 has recently been published. You can read it, if you like, but be warned that it doesn\u2019t really say as much as I would have liked it to have said, for reasons elaborated upon below. A much more significant story can be told about what happened behind the scenes. These, unfortunately, are precisely the sorts of things which I\u2019ve been told I simply cannot write about. Or even mention. So much, it seems, for academic freedom!<\/p>\n

The article in question was to have been aimed at an academic audience. By setting out to write it I wanted to contribute toward an\u00a0established tradition<\/a>\u00a0of evaluating the sort of managerialism which has become increasingly evident within the UK education sector. For those that like their muck well raked, the piece might have come across as relatively benign. It followed established scholarly protocols, it engaged with the relevant literature on the area of concern, it provided evidence to support its central claims, it adopted full anonymity, it minded its\u00a0ps and\u00a0qs, and so on. The editors, for their part, liked and ultimately accepted the piece, thereby providing it with the traditional stamp of academic legitimacy: peer approval. Subseque<\/a>ntly, however, the article was referred on to the publishers for special scrutiny, something which my three decades as a published researcher had not yet prepared me for. The publishers, in turn, referred the article onto a libel lawyer, and it was then that I started to experience the very clear yet often concealed limits of contemporary academic freedom.<\/p>\n

I went three rounds with the lawyer and engaged in an awful lot of email discussions with the publishers. The editors of the journal were eventually told, however, that they could not publish the article. Resignations were threatened and outraged positions were taken. All of this bickering and posturing ultimately proved futile, however. Libel lawyers, instructed by\u00a0Routledge, itself a division of\u00a0Taylor and Francis,\u00a0which is in turn a part of the publishing conglomerate\u00a0Informa, were, in this instance, effectively granted the power to delineate the contours of academic freedom. I\u2019ve come out of the episode relatively unscathed but the broader implications of it are very worrying indeed. If you seek to understand the powerful – as many social scientists do \u2013 it stands to reason that you would model your investigations less on the figure of the sycophant and more on that of the investigative journalist. Why, then, should a critical account of university managers not have seen the light of day?<\/p>\n

The piece, as I\u2019ve already said, eventually did come to see the light of day. It was accepted by\u00a0Organization, a journal which I myself used to be the editor of. It now takes the form of a heavily anonymised piece about \u2018Euro Business School\u2019. Even here, however, there were lawyers involved and a variety of legally informed amendments were made, including a consultation with the university concerned. Read it if you want, like I said, just don\u2019t expect too much. Colleagues still based at\u00a0University Ltd.,\u00a0for their part, aren\u2019t allowed to say anything\u00a0at all\u00a0because they have signed \u2018compromise agreements\u2019 (read: gagging clauses). Others who wanted to say something have been threatened with legal action. That I could say anything at all, it seems, marks me out as one of the lucky ones, because many others are simply not allowed to criticise at all. And this means we need to think hard about what \u2018academic freedom\u2019 means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Voltaire once wrote\u00a0\u201cTo learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize\u201d.\u00a0Professor of Organisation and Culture Martin Parker recently found out precisely what he meant. I had fundamental differences of opinion with the managers of the place I used to work. After having left \u201cUniversity Ltd.\u201d,\u00a0I decided to outline […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[294,295,66,303,2,302,296,304,3,298,300,201,301,299,297],"class_list":["post-126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academic-freedom","tag-censorship","tag-critical-management-studies","tag-gagging-clause","tag-higher-education","tag-informa","tag-libel","tag-litigation","tag-management","tag-managerialism","tag-routledge","tag-social-science","tag-taylor-and-francis","tag-university-management","tag-university-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":130,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126\/revisions\/130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}