Through a love of what neoliberalism puts at risk

Peter Bansel and Bronwyn Davies graphically portray, and acutely analyse, how a highly successful professor, given the pseudonym 'Professor James', experiences the contradictions and ambivalences in his multiple and indeed privileged positionings as a 'white male, leading science researcher, manager, successful research entrepreneur, and research supervisor'. Their focal question is central to the capacity to govern in universities: how is it that academics are both so critical of, and so compliant with, the principles and practices invoked by governance? Drawing strongly on Foucault's concept of 'governmentality'" which 'foregrounds the technical means through which the ambitions and ideals of any mode of government' are effected through a 'conduct of conduct', made 'practicable through "¦ mechanisms, procedures, instruments, tactics, techniques, technologies and vocabularies'" they bring ethical and affective consequences to light in this case study of one individual. In interviews with Professor James, he talks about his experiences as head of a department where research output manages to thrive within the constraints and possibilities conditioned by neoliberal governance regimes. While Professor James' terms of engagement are framed by neoliberal managerialism, his motivation is to undertake and sustain 'pure research', a desire that 'lies outside neoliberal goals'. He does benefit from neoliberal policy orthodoxies surrounding science, innovation and economics; and he justifies the challenges in terms of virtues of working hard, informed by a sense of duty and a personal sense of Christian morality. Yet frustration is evident in his testimony that 'the very processes that are supposedly assuring quality are actually, possibly, some of the worst impediments we can throw up in people's way'. His academic habitus is 'simultaneously enabled, undercut and unravelled by his position as manager'. Still, although realising that he and the group of researchers in his centre are always vulnerable, and must play the game of outcomes-based performance well, he does not question the discourse of choice that frames his possibilities. Bansel and Davies thus analyse the 'movement and tension between the ambitions and calculations of government' and that of the institutionalised subject, and, in turn, how these 're-alignments and shifting positions are an emergent feature of day-to-day survival'. Within this context of survivalism, conclude Bansel and Davies, the dilemma for academics is 'that the individual whose ideals are in many ways antithetical to neo-liberalism, and who is most vulnerable to it, is the one who will work at making neoliberal forms of government work, not through any love of neoliberalism, but through a love of what neoliberalism puts at risk'.