Mohan Dutta's reflections on the Academe

The phrase "We are listening" is a cliche in the neoliberal University. It is a cliche because of its usage as a Public Relations (PR) terminology in the hands of University managers. A carefully crafted press release, looked over by a team of over ten managers at different levels of the University bureaucracy, will turn to listening as a rhetorical trope. In its recurrence, listening becomes an empty signifier, distanced from its powerful and transformative role as a communicative act. As I have argued elsewhere, the neoliberal University is the PR University. PR being used in its performative role as spin. The understanding of PR by management therefore is reduced to its role in crafting press releases, developing a crisis response team, setting up crisis response events, and developing digital interventions to address the rapidly changing digital opinion environment. In a digital climate where the experience of a student or the grievances of a staff member ca

I am reviving this "Issues in Academe" blog that compliments the blog on the culture-centered approach (CCA). Because so much of what the CCA grapples with is about transforming structures, the role of the academe has emerged as the ongoing site of structural transformation. As you will note, I have increasingly become occupied with the question of what it takes to transform the academe through democratic processes of student, staff, and faculty participation. Even as our unions have been gutted, faculty participation devalued, and staff collectivization rendered illegal across University campuses, Universities have been re-organized in managerial logics. These managerial logics form the foundational structures of the neoliberal University. University managers, often recruited from within the ranks, other times brought in from the private sector, are trained in techniques of accounting that consolidates the power of the modern University. This consolidation of powe