Since I’ve started teaching in Stellenbosch, South Africa, language politics have come to the forefront of my institutional experience. The place I teach is a historically Afrikaans-speaking white university that has historically represented itself as a sort of cradle of Afrikaans language and culture, yet that is now under immense pressure from non-Afrikaans-speaking student populations to teach instead in English, which is a language perceived as more cosmopolitan and as less linked to the history of Apartheid. Already in 1973, the ANC wrote that “Afrikaans — as the language of the conqueror, the administrator, the policeman, soldier, location superintendant, and pass officer — is detested by the non-Afrikaans majority in South Africa.” My initial reaction when I arrived here was that English is also a colonial language, so I couldn’t understand why it was perceived as such an improvement, but I’ve since understood that you can’t just read off the political significance of a language from a cursory image of colonization writ large. In that context — our interests always evolve as our circumstances change, no? — it gets interesting to see comparatively what English means in different sites around the world.

This brings us back to Goodman’s paper about English in a Ukranian university. Goodman rightly departs from the more generalizing versions of Foucauldian political theory that focus on population-level governance technologies or individual-level self-governance. Her methodological point of departure instead draws on modern discourse/conversation analysis, for which social structures is fundamentally the result of negotiation, and in which all alignments between discourse are achievements, not givens. Thus:

Alignment can be explored not only among state institutions but also between the state and the individual, and the individual and the institution. Moreover, I recognize that individuals have space to choose whether to align themselves with governmental processes and that any alignment is achieved through negotiation. (40)

Since English is not the official language in Ukraine and it may have a fraught status given the geopolitical tensions surrounding Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and to the West (EU), the status of English in a university situation becomes a potentially politically controversial choice.

I wondered whether courses are being offered in English in accordance with national policy or in spite of it, or whether EMI is possibly being offered as a way to circumvent the use of Ukrainian as a medium of instruction. (41)

It appears that the university in question — Alfred Nobel University, in central Ukraine — is officially a Russian-speaking establishment, but that there is an “openness and fluidity” that permits switching between Russian and English in nominally English-speaking classes (44). Ukranian was a more marginal language in the context, I gather. Nevertheless — and this was I thought one of the most interesting moments — it seems that teachers at times have to encourage students to speak English, even pretending not to understand other languages to encourage their kids to talk. In that sense, even if students have some latitude in choosing their languages, it seems to be a latitude that only emerges under pressure from above.

In interviews, students were generally indifferent (as far as I could understand) to the national-level geopolitics of language. Goodman asked numerous students if it was somehow inconsistent with the official national language (Ukranian) to study in English. Students generally responded by framing their use of English as a purely individual choice and seemed not to have strong views about national language policy.

Goodman suggests that this individualism is an index of “a broad lack of faith in the current legitimacy and future sovereignty of the Ukrainian government” (47). I did wonder a bit, though, whether even the presence of a more “legitimate” Ukranian government would make students care about state language policies? My experience is that many undergraduate students (especially ones who don’t identify as activists) are not deeply invested in policy questions one way or another, especially given the abstruse and dry language of most policy discourses. I suspect that generally speaking, students are more affected by the social capital (cultural opportunities, work potential, etc) that a language represents than by the national politics thereof. (Thus in France for instance, in spite of very real national resentments about English, most French people of my acquaintance consider English to be a useful asset if they can speak it, rather than a source of political embarrassment.)

At another point in her conclusion, Goodman notes that postsocialist states are in any case aligned with “market principles,” and that this partly explains why English (as the currently hegemonic global language) is a plausible choice for Ukranian higher education:

The authority of the Ukrainian state over EMI at Alfred Nobel University… is aligned with postsocialist market principles of the private university’s need for a foreign language. In the choice between Russian and Ukrainian, however, the national policy seems to silently yield to individual and institutional preferences. (48)

Again it seems to me quite normal that state policy is a very broad guiding discourse, with diffuse and indirect effects on the ground, rather than a totalizing machine that manages to regiment every aspect of daily practice.

But when I think about this further, I end up having a further reflexive thought. Perhaps my feeling of being unsurprised by Goodman’s findings is merely a product of my own socialization in the U.S. political system, where state power in education is traditionally a fairly diffuse and indirect affair. If I had been socialized in the Soviet Union — or even in statist, Republican France — perhaps my expectations about the efficacy of state policy would have been quite different. This in turn makes me wonder whether Foucault’s governmentality theory, which Goodman is in effect responding to, was not itself always a highly culturally specific artifact. Surely Foucault’s theory of politics was partly a response to the Gaullist, state-centered political culture of the 1950s and 1960s, and to the reshuffling of these Gaullist politics after the 1968 uprisings (which were said to have made a big impression on Foucault and his subsequent work).

In any case, Goodman’s paper is quite useful data for scholars interested in the geopolitics of language in higher education, and I wish I had time to draw out the comparison with South African language politics in more detail. It left me wondering, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of comparative theoretical exchange. To what extent can micro-linguistic analysis, with its focus on extremely short strips of social interaction, effectively be in dialogue with much larger-scale conceptual genealogies of modern power, of the kind that Foucault sought to develop? Is there not a disjuncture of theoretical scale that is hard to bridge?

See also our small but growing bibliography on academic language policy.

Here’s the English-language abstract of her paper:

Since the 1990s universities have seen a proliferation of methods for quality assessment and management. Borrowed from the New Public Management business model, they impose a definition of quality on universities which is radically opposed to their traditionally held values of quality of knowledge and professional autonomy. This unprecedented movement can now be seen as participating in the capitalist absorption of a non-commercial public sector. We endeavour here to analyse its origins and the uses of quality measurements and management techniques in the process. We assess where this transition could lead according to the recent British government White Paper (May 2016) which intends to establish a market open to all providers, for-profit and non-profit, granted equal access to the public funding of students’ loans. This market would be regulated by a single non-departmental quality agency, concerned only with students’ value for money.

What I like about her paper is that it considers a set of policies and trends that are familiar to anthropologists working on “neoliberal” European higher education, but from a quite different angle and a higher level of abstraction. As a point of terminology, Vinokur generally uses the European category “New Public Management” (NPM) instead of the more ambiguous term “neoliberalism.” I agree with her that NPM is a much more precise category and that “neoliberalism” can become a fraught term, but I will freely use both terms here because both have been widely used in the literature on this topic.

Much of the work on neoliberal policy in Europe has been broadly influenced by Foucault, and as such, has treated discourse — neoliberal policy discourse in particular — as the chief cause of a number of other social effects. As this literature has shown (I can provide citations if anyone wants them), these effects would include:

• Reshaping everyday academic work practices (often making them more grant- and ranking-focused).
• Creating more entrepreneurial and calculating (but also more stressed, anxious and precarious) subjective stances among academics.
• Declining support for permanent, tenured academic work, which gets replaced by precarious, temporary, grant-funded and contract-based forms of labor.
• Withdrawing public funding and increasing tuition burdens on individual students.
• Making public universities more subject to contract and incentive-based forms of management (instead of direct management by the state apparatus).
• Shifting the image of higher education as a public good into a private good. (For students, education becomes an individual investment in their own human capital and workplace skills. For European public universities as institutions, they may find themselves transformed into something like publicly owned corporations, owning their own real estate, running their own budgets, managing investments, etc. In France, this system has already led to a number of budget crises…)

I don’t mean this list to be comprehensive, but just to give a quick overview of phenomena usually associated with European university neoliberalism. What Vinokur brings to those of us steeped in this literature is, in essence, a high-level view of a non-Foucauldian analysis of this situation. For Vinokur, policy discourse is an intermediate effect, not a first cause. What is primary, meanwhile, is a large-scale structural analysis of conflicts between labor, capital and the state as they confront a given historical moment. This enables Vinokur to usefully retheorize a series of seemingly disconnected policy moments — those relating to Quality Assurance in this case — as fitting together into a coherent process.

Let me make a quick aside about theoretical causality in this literature. I am not saying that anyone participating in this research is committed to a clear metaphysical view about first causes and secondary effects. This is social research, not philosophy. You very rarely get a clear a priori claim that X is the cause of Y, whether X is “capital flows,” “discourse,” or anything else. (With apologies to philosophers, this is probably a good thing, since static metaphysical claims about social reality have a way of causing more controversy than they avoid.) What you find instead, as a reader of this literature, is that in the process of doing social analysis, scholars always end up having to treat some phenomena as primary and others as secondary, classifying some things as causes of other things. So my observations about neoliberal discourse being a primary cause for some people and an intermediate effect for others are only meant to describe the way they attribute causality in particular cases, not to attribute a metaphysics (whether Marxian, Foucauldian, or whatever other kind).

It is a purely academic exercise to compare theoretical approaches in the abstract. The real question is: what new knowledge can you produce, given your presuppositions? At its most basic, Vinokur’s argument is that the proliferation of Quality Assurance methods is “participating in the capitalist absorption of a non-commercial public sector.” I’m not a Marxian economist, but my impression is that Vinokur draws here on a longstanding view in critical (~Marxian) political economy. The underlying thought there is that as capitalist firms search continually to maximize profit, they see opportunities in every non-capitalist sector of the economy, such as the post-1945 welfare state university system. Needless to say, in the post-1945 period, higher education has been increasingly integrated into systems of social and professional reproduction that themselves are necessary prerequisites of corporate enterprise, but there is a clear difference between higher education as a reproductive prerequisite of corporate enterprise and higher education as a corporate profit center.

In any case, given its point of departure, I found Vinokur’s paper quite “good to think with,” as it went on to deploy a sort of high-level taxonomical thinking about this ongoing re-integration of public higher education into corporate capitalism. For instance, she organizes different moments in New Public Management policy into three logical “stages” in the capitalist appropriation process:

1. After “the liberation of international flows of capital and the deregulation of finance in the 1970s-80s”, university management is redone to conform to the NPM style of governance by incentive and contract. (The state correspondingly gets out of the business of directly providing public services.)
2. Universities are pressured to conform more directly to the “new needs of the economy” as a post-industrial “knowledge economy” becomes trendy, and university organizations become subject to quality assurance regimes that put universities in competition with each other on international markets. (Though as Vinokur suggests elsewhere, arguably the real function of universities is to systematically produce a surplus of graduates who end up unemployed and keep down wages among the skilled workforce…)
3. After the 2008 financial crisis, “the overabundance of global liquidity is in search of rents” (as she puts it) and seizes on education as a major market opportunity.

In the French case, I note, pressures to make universities “conform to economic needs” date back at least to the late 1960s. (In October 1968, for instance, one French legislator complained publicly about the “insufficient effectiveness of the adjustment between the education system and working life,” as Romuald Bodin and Sophie Orange have recently reported.) Vinokur is providing a high-level schema, not a detailed history. But I found it clarifying to think of some of the earlier managerial and ideological reorganizations of public universities — which in themselves do not entail privatization, per se — as prequels to new forms of for-profit higher education. The more universities are standardized and rationalized, the more they are rendered into abstract competitors on a globalized educational market, the more – arguably — they are ripe for further competition from non-public entities. At least, this would be the hypothesis that one could explore in more historical detail.

Vinokur also draws out a useful set of types of academic “quality control” and helps us see their connections to fundamentally capitalist forms of international standardization. She distinguishes (I’ll translate from §3):

• Quality of the product: bibliometrics, patents, standardized tests, measurement and certification of “skills”, “tuning” the norms of the European system of credit transfer, universal grading standards, etc.
• Quality of the production process: ISO 9000+ quality assurance standards, audits, “best practices,” quality assurance frameworks, etc.
• Quality of the producer: H-index, ratings, rankings, benchmarking, grading institutions by credit rating agencies, job placement and income of graduates, amount of grants [volume des contrats], etc.

Again, what I liked about this list was that it evokes the eerily totalizing nature of what might otherwise seem a very disparate set of academic practices. Common grading standards seem very different from grants and credit ratings. Bibliometrics (assessing the quality of research products) seem very different from skill certifications (which measures the qualities of students-as-products). Yet, as Vinokur points out, these can all be seen as partaking in an educational system where products are measured for quality, production processes are measured for quality, and producers are measured for quality.

Vinokur’s paper is largely devoted to a general overview of the historical schema that she brings up. I do, though, want to highlight a couple of specific institutional moments that she mentions. It is well known that organizations like the OECD have sought to subject higher education to market standards, but I hadn’t been aware that UNESCO, a seemingly more “cultural” organization, had also been an organ of this process. Yet Vinokur cites a remarkable 1998 UNESCO conference that declares that higher education must adapt itself to “the logic of risks,” and that “the effective independence of the university depends more and more on its capacity to demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency.” She also emphasizes that the ISO (International Standards Organization), usually known (if at all) for fairly dull standards for encoding country names or dates, also has a set of process quality guidelines, the ISO 9000 series, that seem to have inspired European projects of educational standardization, such as the ones introduced by the Bologna Process. As Elizabeth Dunn has noted in another context, “Because standards such as the ISO’s 9000 series dictate not only the qualities of the finished product but also the manufacturing process itself, they offered the possibility of disciplining firms from the inside out” (2005:176). Though I am still not completely clear on the ISO’s role in European higher education, it is interesting to see how some New Public Management instruments have private sector origins, rather than being, say, a pure invention of state authorities.

One last note on an American comparison. Inasmuch as Donald Trump represents anything in education, I would suggest that he has been the vehicle for a process of trying to extract symbolic value from elite higher education while also trying to crassly hijack higher education as a new source of potential profits (both symbolic and monetary).  This at least is what I learned earlier this year about his own educational history and his ill-fated Trump University project. As the Trump administration’s educational policies have been devoted almost solely to critiquing public schools and offering renewed “choices” of for-profit or religious education, one can only wonder whether this policy direction will also come to affect U.S. higher education (which already has a large and complex private sector, to be sure).

If so, it will be interesting to revisit Vinokur’s general thesis that NPM’s quality assurance sets the stage for a full corporate takeover of higher education. The U.S. case could not be directly comparable to the European case, since New Public Management does not really exist in the United States. (As Bonnie Urciuoli points out, neoliberal ideologies that work through state policy in Europe often work in the U.S. through market and publicity mechanisms. Davydd Greenwood also has a useful comparative paper, “Bologna in America,” that is worth re-reading here.) But since the U.S. federal government controls massive revenue flows in higher education, by administering the student aid apparatus, one has to wonder whether Vinokur’s glum scenario could get realized in the U.S. by alternative institutional means.

Peacock’s empirical case is that of the German Max Planck Society, a scientific research organization which comprises more than eighty separate institutes, which are further subdivided into research departments headed by directors. Interestingly, the administrative and technical staff tend to have permanent positions, while the scientists themselves have term contracts and are thus precarious. (Such a labor structure contrasts with the situation at many “neoliberalized” universities, where administrative and service workers are commonly precarious, temporary or outsourced.) Peacock’s study thus focuses on precarity among the scientists, who serve, she remarks, “‘at the pleasure of’ the director” (98). Peacock argues basically that these scientists’ precarity has to be understood not merely as a result of neoliberal economics but as a product of a longstanding German cultural logic of academic “kingship,” which creates a relationship of non-stigmatized and even “potentially desirable” dependence between ruler and ruled (99).

As Peacock usefully documents, this system of cultural values has changed over time. The Max Planck’s keywords are no longer a former era’s “kingship” or “patriotic supremacy,” but “the more contemporarily acceptable values of autonomy and excellence” (101). Nevertheless, drawing on the work of Louis Dumont, Peacock insists that academic dependence always fits into a larger system of cultural values. (No doubt, this retro gesture towards classical anthropological theory is partly why her paper found a home in Hau, whose editors advocate this sort of return to classical anthropology.) Adopting the structuralist view that culture is organized by logical oppositions, Peacock proposes that “dependence” for the subordinated scientists is the cultural corollary of the “autonomy and excellence” embodied by their directors. Institutional autonomy for the top and precarious dependence for the bottom — it has a painfully familiar logic, does it not?

The more richly ethnographic section of the paper shows how a series of three male scientists negotiated their dependent relationships with their director. Peacock particularly emphasizes the force of personal relationships in career outcomes (in a section that echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s observations in Homo Academicus about professors’ power to control their disciples’ time). From this she draws some unexpectedly political conclusions:

“If a position of precarity in the form of temporary employment is equivalent to a social condition of hierarchical dependence, then it can no longer be an epiphenomenon of impersonal neoliberal forces. In fact, it would suggest that the framing hitherto, of precarity as somehow impersonal works in practice to exculpate the specific actors driving its distribution across the world” (113).

In other words, when we talk about “precarity” as a sort of epochal force or “wave” sweeping across the neoliberal academy, this may absolve prominent academics for their own personal involvement in managing and fostering precarious work. “It’s the way things are these days,” one pictures a department chair saying as they hire or fire yet another contract worker. Peacock’s paper thus has the great merit of reminding us of the personalized nature of precarious employment. It reminds us that academic precarity is not coextensive with neoliberalism, since precarious academic work and “kingly” clientelism long predate the post-70s neoliberal moment. And it emphasizes that precarity is not only a moment of abject inferiority, but also a sphere of agency and strategic opportunity — at least for some.

A few questions do come to mind for Peacock, building on the intriguing critical commentaries already published alongside her paper. Given that economic precarity is a highly stratified space, how much is her theory of precarity shaped by her focus on what we might call precarious elites? Surely precarity has a different cultural valence for relatively prestigious mid-career scientists than it does for, say, a temporary secretarial worker in a campus call center. Secondly, what is at stake for Peacock in maintaining a realm of “culture and social relations” as something separate from what she calls “economistic thinking” or “sociological categories”? From the North American perspective these distinctions seem increasingly hard to maintain, but I wondered if disciplinary categories may have different valences in Peacock’s UK context, given the heritage of British social anthropology. Finally, is it altogether fair to see the existing literature on precarity as being so one-sidedly sociologistic or economistic? Or is there something more to be said about the work that treats precarity as a matter of affective flows and existential vulnerabilities? Peacock’s finding that dependence can be desirable would seem, in this light, to raise questions as much existential (or psychoanalytic) as ethnographic in nature.