I am a full professor and current head of department at a small university in the UK.  My day-to-day work life is shaped by the following forces:

1. The Repetition Compulsion 

Restructuring academic departments and schools as well as professional and IT services has become the norm in UK Higher Education. Entering its third restructure in less than a decade my university serves as an illustrative example. The initial restructuring programme six years ago was meant to solve the financial shortfall due to declining student numbers. As was the subsequent restructure implemented two years ago. And lo and behold, the latest restructuring is also being justified as the only solution to the university’s financial shortfall due to declining student numbers. But it is not just the supposed problem (financial crisis) and the proposed solution (restructuring) that repeats itself again and again across the sector. It is also the (failed) strategic logic: increasing ‘efficiency’ through staff redundancies and the consolidation of departmental-specific administrative services within centralised, de-personalised, and already under-staffed professional service ‘teams’.

These restructures have not solved a thing. Instead, they have wrought havoc, leading to additional declines in student numbers as well as the demoralization of an overworked and exhausted workforce—all while the real (or manufactured) financial crisis persists. But unlike other sectors that learn from past mistakes—and sometimes even hold those who make disastrous decisions accountable—senior management teams in UK universities respond by introducing yet another round of restructuring. These managers are never held to account and, in fact, are often promoted for cutting jobs and creating chaos. The story of the Vice Chancellor who devastated one university only to be hired to devastate another is also part of the compulsion to repeat.

Alas, the repetition compulsion extends to conversations with senior management. Staff make the same (convincing) arguments about why we don’t need another restructure; why more change will cause further disruption and dysfunction, hampering not helping recruitment; why we need to use in-house expertise rather than the exorbitantly expensive consultants who have little to no knowledge of higher education; why the university should not be run like a business; and why ensuring staff well-being and building trust are essential for good governance and student recruitment.  Senior management respond with the same (unconvincing) mantras: the university is in financial deficit; we cannot afford not to cut costs; restructuring cuts costs; and cutting costs is the only way to save the university. These conversations almost always conclude with staff insistence that we cannot ‘cut’ our way out of the crisis, and that there is a logical fallacy in the claim that cutting jobs will save jobs. Though, mysteriously, restructures and cost cutting do seem to save senior management’s jobs and their six figure salaries.

2. The Rubber Stamp + Infantalisation 

Academics’ authority and autonomy as educators have been eroding for some time, while research time, once a pillar of university life in higher education institutions, is becoming a luxury. Increasingly, academic staff are simply given directives and told what to do—often under a pretence of ‘consultation’ and requests for staff input, which are time consuming but are, more often than not, simply ignored. On one level, we are being transformed into ‘rubber stamps’, while on a deeper level we are witnessing the infantilisation of the academic workforce.

Exemplary in this regard is Academic Senate, the body supposed to have the ultimate authority on all matters academic and pedagogical—matters that should be debated and determined by those with experience and expertise: namely, academic staff. At most UK universities, however, these bodies have become little more than rubber stamps for various top-down senior management initiatives, where people with little if any teaching or research experience put forth proposals, produce ‘systems’, and introduce one-size-fits-all moulds for teaching and assessment, and where any disagreement or energetic debate is frowned upon.

Senate members frequently receive hundreds of pages containing proposals for significant policy changes and other initiatives that impact the day-to-day operations of the university less than a week before the meeting. Members are then expected to approve all of these reports and policies within the span of a few hours. Questioning and criticising these different policies are, at best, deemed ‘wasting time’, and, at worst, insubordination.  

The neoliberalization and managerialization of UK universities, where we are expected to rubber stamp top-down initiatives, have led to our infantilisation. These processes have undoubtedly played a key role in the erosion of the universities’ academic community and intellectual life, undermining scholarly authority. But the demise of academic authority also has to do with the fact that there are fewer white men with grey hair among academic staff these days. The Rubber Stamp approach and the infantilisation of staff seem to have become increasingly dominant in exact proportion to the numbers of women and racialised staff and students entering the university.  University leadership, not surprisingly, remains mostly white, male and grey haired.

3. The Shared Mailbox (with a little help from AI) 

Given that the number of dedicated professional staff has been systematically cut and most administrative services have been centralised and de-personalised through restructures, academic staff now spend a lot of time filling in online forms—from IT support to reserving rooms for events. The time consumed by these tasks is considerable because there is often a duplication of labour. We first fill in the form and then, as instructed on the website, we send it to a shared generic mailbox. We then wait. And wait some more. The shared mailbox often becomes a black hole. So, in order to ensure that we receive a reply, we also need to send a request to the person responsible for the specific task. But to find the specific person’s name and personal email takes serious detective work. When we do eventually find the right person and tell them that we have sent the form to the shared address, we are often asked to fill out the form again and send it directly to them.

Managers say these ‘systems’ merely need fine tuning. But the real reason for this duplication of labour is that professional staff are under resourced and so overburdened that they simply do not have capacity to monitor and respond to everything sent to the shared mailbox. The turnover is huge in professional services, and there are often multiple part-time staff who work on alternate days.  

Frequently the shared mailbox is the first contact prospective students have with the university. One cannot help but wonder how students feel when they either a) simply do not receive a response or, b) are directed to the university’s student AI systems. Shared mailboxes and AI are paradigmatic of the ‘systems’ and ‘efficiency’ senior managers praise. In reality, they epitomise what Hannah Arendt called ‘the rule by Nobody’; the new management model in the sector, a form of impersonal, technocratic domination where accountability vanishes.

4. Talk Back and Take Back

Many of us have a good idea of what initial steps need to be taken in order ‘to fix’ our sector—to begin with: a return to public funding (British government spends less than half the average of OECD countries on higher education), student caps, reinstating and expanding democratic processes within universities rather than the ever more managerial and bureaucratic top-down corporate model. This takes us full circle, back to the compulsion to repeat.

As UK universities face their worse crisis in modern history, we need to repeat the perennial question of how we can collectively take back the university so that it serves us, our students, the public, and future generations. But we need to repeat this question differently.

First, through a combination of effective industrial action, collective refusal to take part in rubber stamping exercises, and holding campus assemblies to create coalitions between students and staff, alongside social media campaigns to expose and even embarrass the hell out our institutions, we need to continue to resist the processes that are making us redundant, literally and figuratively. We need to talk back and take back.

Second, but just as importantly, we have to confront head-on the changing role of Higher Education in the 21^st century. Reimagining the university will have to be part of the strategy of repeating differently. With information (and dis/misinformation) at students’ fingertips, when AI can now write essays (and mark them!), and when disciplinary borders—once much clearer—are collapsing, pedagogy and research are not only being altered but are also undergoing an identity crisis.  We need the time and space to ask questions about what we are training our students to become. Managers speak exclusively about employability, completely discounting the university’s crucial role in helping to cultivate informed and engaged democratic citizens. Maybe—just maybe—we need to radically transform our conception of higher education—pivoting away from the idealization of knowledge and truth toward developing young people’s conceptual, critical, affective and practical capabilities that better equip them to nurture rather than destroy human and non-human life and the planet.

The most difficult challenge is translating what we know needs to be done—resisting and collectively reimagining—so that we get to where we need to go. This translation is increasingly urgent and may well be the only way we can disrupt what seems to be the sector’s death drive.