The 'academic career' in the era of flexploitation

Some years ago we conducted a research interview with a man who taught sound production at a college in Sydney, Australia. We asked him whether he had any ethical misgivings about training young people to enter a career in which he had himself had been unable to make a living. Not surprisingly, the question elicited a soul-searching response. When George recounted this conversation to a friend recently, the friend asked: 'Isn't it the same when you supervise graduate students?' This is a reasonable question, but one that few of us who supervise doctoral candidates face up to. A PhD is a more general qualification than a diploma in sound production, of course, and it qualifies graduates for various careers outside academia. However, many, perhaps most, doctoral students aspire to work in universities even though the shortage of academic jobs means their prospects are increasingly remote. Those in this situation of post-doctoral limbo often continue to rely on the guidance of their supervisors/advisors/mentors. But the rise of managerialism means that scholarly communities have a declining ability to replenish their numbers, to recruit aspirants into tenured jobs. This chapter will explore the reasons for this, with particular reference to the example of higher education in Australia, where most universities have grown enormously in recent decades, both economically and in terms of enrolments. Yet the number of full-time academic staff has failed to keep pace with this growth. The same period has seen a rise in the corporate model for running higher education and of the intensification of competition between universities for students and research funding. Staff have endured the turbulence of organizational restructuring, undertaken ostensibly to modernize and streamline the universities, the effect of which is to undermine scholarly communities and the leverage that scholars can exert over university affairs. They become the end point of the chain of line management, increasingly remote from the processes that determine budgets and staffing. Their work is measured with the blunt instruments of key performance indicators and they are subject to various forms of speed-up and ever increasing bureaucratic demands.