Marina Warner gives a concerning and depressing account of developments in Universities, their management and likely future in the current lrb
She refers to Three Letter Acronyms - TLAs; forms of language promulgated by the new transactional managerialism that now occupies all public organisations:
whilst the image of 'plaque' clogging the dentures with detritus and corruption is striking, it fals to capture the true toxicity of the "newnewspeak"; a far more telling metaphor is that of the 'prion' - a protein that both misfolds and transmits, and causes lethal deterioration in brain functions in dementia CJD and Alzheimer's Disease .... 'prion' derives from protein and infection so that which should build strength and structure creates decay and weakness invading discourse these agents deny thought and reason, they are chanted in mindless argument with dissenters accused of heresy and 'bad faith' and these agents kill the ability of organisations to hold meaningful discourse about their nature, aims and practices
Warner is chilling; her account of the wreckage created by transactionalism in the University is familiar from the NHS, and imv will be when the BBC future is debated ...
meanwhile ponder this from Collini [recognise the response style?]
Warner describes 'cruel optimism' a form of self delusion
i am not a pessimist [see the future of bbc thread] but i do not wish to delude myself with the cruelty of misplaced optimism and trust ... we have real challenges ... to define promulgate and protect the values that, as Warner has it, cannot be measured .... and to attack and destroy the 'newnewspeak' of brain death and domination
She refers to Three Letter Acronyms - TLAs; forms of language promulgated by the new transactional managerialism that now occupies all public organisations:
As universities are beaten into the shapes dictated by business, so language is suborned to its ends. We have all heard the robotic idiom of management, as if a button had activated a digitally generated voice. Like Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, business-speak is an instance of magical naming, superimposing the imagery of the market on the idea of a university – through ‘targets’, ‘benchmarks’, time-charts, league tables, ‘vision statements’, ‘content providers’. We may laugh or groan, depending on the state of our mental health at the thickets of TLAs – three-letter acronyms, in the coinage of the writer Richard Hamblyn – that accumulate like dental plaque.
Warner is chilling; her account of the wreckage created by transactionalism in the University is familiar from the NHS, and imv will be when the BBC future is debated ...
meanwhile ponder this from Collini [recognise the response style?]
As Stefan Collini says in his trenchant study What Are Universities For? (2012), ‘compelling and often devastating criticisms appear to have had little or no effect on policy-making. The arguments have not been answered; they have merely been ignored. Rather than blaming academics for not speaking out sufficiently strongly, the conclusion … is that those who make policy are just not listening.’
People open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in comes up against a hierarchical authority that is secretive, arbitrary and ruthless. Cruel optimism afflicts the colleague who agrees to yet another change of policy in the hope that it will be the last one.
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