Article

Thesis Eleven
2020, Vol. 160(1) 121–128
The corporate menagerie ª The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513620949009
John Hutnyk journals.sagepub.com/home/the
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang
University, Vietnam

Abstract
This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent
austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost
centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an
unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name
the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place
where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and tempera-
ment, of the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid.
With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector
masquerade as education as a social good while the ‘university’ itself is skewered with the
tragic realism of forms.

Keywords
corporate branding, managerialism, oblivion, permanent austerity, privatisation,
technocratic financialisation

I remember a certain college senior research manager saying that, given current
priorities, we should be looking also to research consultancies. ‘John, if you are not
working for British industry, who are you working for?’ (personal communication with
the executive, September 2012). Given my research at the time was on musicians in
opposition to the war on terror, the idea of who might need my consulting expertise –
perhaps MI6 or Islamic State – this advice did not constitute an appealing option. This
was around the time when the research councils turned towards targeted research, for
example, when ‘Islamic radicalisation’ was chosen as a theme for funding priority.
This has been roundly denounced (Spencer, 2010), though some did take up the funds,
justified with alibis such as: ‘if not us, then who’ and ‘we examine comparative

Corresponding author:
John Hutnyk, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Email: johnhutnyk@tdtu.edu.vn
122 Thesis Eleven 160(1)

radicalisation’, meaning a visit to the Midwest to see some good ol’ boys do Christian
Fundamentalist survivalism, and then platitudes about alienated youth in the north of
England. In the UK parliament, a counter-terrorism and security bill, 2nd reading, saw:
‘university staff . . . expected to refer [to police authority] students at risk of being
drawn into terrorism’ alongside the demand that scholars ‘must take seriously their
responsibility to exclude those promoting extremist views that support or are con-
ducive to terrorism’ (Guardian, 12 January 2015). The racialised structure of this faux-
neutral opportunism is of a piece with the structured bullying that doubles down on
black students, lecturers, and the too few professors who endure the run through a
double gauntlet of prejudice and privilege that is required for promotions that come
with relative ease to non-Asian, non-African, non-Puerto-Rican candidates. Even
outside the peculiar intensities of the now allegedly colour-(but not Islam)-blind
corporate research sector, it seems particularly remiss that choices about what is
researched, what is knowledge, what should be studied and what is of value in uni-
versities are made almost wholly with an eye as to what will win a funding competition
run by research councils articulated to industry and government agendas.
The Government in the UK decides funding priority areas for education with one eye
on the electorate, and for a very long time ‘overseas’ students were the bread and butter,
even caviar, of student-led funding in the sector. Over time xenophobic nationalism
eroded the potential for maintaining high-profit international education-tourism and
domestic policy imposed fee-paying programmes onto British students at almost simi-
larly extortionate levels. The consequences of a policy that reduced education provision
to a flustered scramble to attract and satisfy, or at last retain, education ‘customers’
seemed evident then; the reality is that it has become the norm now. The trajectory of
fee-paying privatisation was a contagion that infected all adjacent operations.
Instead of a crisis management division on a war-footing, only able to deploy
impractical austerity measures with at best palliative consequences, with touching
gestures of dedication, might university management be something more? Instead of
excusing those who turn education and its community into things to be sold like sausages
(cf. Marx’s famous Chapter 16 of Capital, where the sausage factory is as viable as the
teaching factory from the point of view of profit [mehr-wurst]),1 we might oppose the
ways every section of the present structure of the university has been required, more or
less rapidly, sometimes in a drift, sometimes radical triage, to comport itself to business.
Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) set out reasons for why turning education over
to technocrats of the market activated his gag-reflex:

The habits of thought induced by workday life impose themselves as ruling principles that
govern the quest for knowledge, it will therefore be the habits of thought enforced by the
current technological scheme that will have most (or most immediately) to say in the current
systemization . . . interpretation . . . generalization . . . use . . . wont, law . . . order. (Veblen,
1918: 4)

Veblen wrote over 100 years ago, and due to sensitivities, even then it was ten years
before his book could be published. Today, we might want to amend his ‘technological
scheme’ to take account of differences in modes of productivity across sectors, global
Hutnyk 123

regions, social services, and functions of, even battles with, branding, corporations,
privatisation and finance. The joy of Veblen’s work is that quite often his satirical turn
of phrase carried with it a deeply effective critical sting. In this spirit, and for fun, I would
risk the charge that following the guiding principles of contemporary commerce only
provides a slightly foreshortened template for university administration, both at execu-
tive and middle management levels. Every administration has a history, as can be
documented in detail (for example in Moser, 2014, in part inspired by Veblen). That
the circumstances appear to almost everyone else as naı̈ve, simplified and even as a
deranged, counter-productive manifestation of commercial principles is barely regis-
tered by those willing to implement such liabilities. With the help of Veblen’s flair for
pithy neologisms and the wit of his participatory observation-based model in The Higher
Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men
(1918), a typology of the different players in the current market version of higher
education can be described. That we recognise the truth of these exaggerations, and are
already familiar with these tendencies, does not make it less important to point and stare
them down. The United Kingdom is the context here, for it seems that their hyperbole
names a larger truth, but this is also a warning for everywhere else in these times of the
corporate menagerie:
The Vice Chancellor – either an assured, super-slick spruiker or, otherwise, if you are
lucky, only a somewhat bumbling raconteur in an ostentatious suit, offering mildly off-
colour anecdotes and jocular meet and greet functionality (meetings catered with mid-
quality hors d’oeuvres). Tasked occasionally with delivering narrative patter barely
disguised as sales-pitch, Veblen characterises the VC as a ‘captain of erudition’ (Veblen,
1918: 221) but we would do better to simplify, so as to name the real danger, as these
blokes are invariably captains of industry, ‘vaingloriously seeking renown for efficiently
carrying on a traffic in publicity that has no other end than renown for carrying it on’
(Veblen, 1918: 174). If any good, they are soon gone.
The Vice Chancellor’s Committee – a gang of not quite up to par industrial captains
(strange military metaphor), necessarily looking for sinecure, imagining themselves
elevated to a kind of educationalist philanthropy. These are the Gradgrinds of the
present day.
The Executives – The four or five slow-moving behemoths of administrative ‘flair’,
who concern themselves with pecuniary gain for the company that is the university.
Focused upon ensuring the orientation towards institutional financial solvency in the
interests of further institutional financial solvency. More or less competent lieutenants of
the VC, often slow to decision despite their ready access to the latest statistical exhibits
from the governance committee, they all wait quietly but enthusiastically for transfer to
their own command (another significant military metaphor).
Academic Boards – The bodies that replaced the old religious clergy of the ancient
university, turned for a period into a clerical forum – usually of the Deans and their
trusted delegates, but usurped of late by the corporate structure. Once had the role of
advising the Vice Chancellor. Now more often than not advised by the Vice Chancellor
and expected to be a downwards conduit of decisions passed from on high when you
need to know. Line-management sidesteps the old collegiate para-democratic forums
and exposes their ancient providence in hierarchy.
124 Thesis Eleven 160(1)

The Publicity Office – Always in danger of turning research into press release,
encourages turning research into a press release, releases press releases. Zapped for
time, and relatively under-resourced, this unit must obey ‘the exigencies of advertis-
ing’ (Veblen, 1918: 119) and gather press release versions of research for presentation
to the Research Excellence Framework.
Graduate Boards – Fellowships, grants and PhD awards not based so much on merit
as a mix of proximity to the interest of the Graduate Deans, insofar as they can promote
their own ego investments, and commitment to numbers of grants won as a marker of
institutional prestige. Quality of content of such winnings irrelevant. Happy to pursue
business-linked funding without overdue concern for embargos on publishing proprie-
tary knowledge. Indeed, commercial consequences referred with alacrity to the business
exploitation committee, otherwise known as Research Ethics Committee.
The Research Ethics Committee – primarily works to ensure that the university is not
sued while pursuing research for industry or military. Works to guard against the pos-
sibility of lawyers or worse, journalists, getting hold of the details of a suspect project.
Also has a smoothing role on the few occasions the university might directly sell research
to the corporate sector. ‘A truculent quietism is often accepted as a mark of scientific
maturity’ (Veblen, 1918: 129).
Finance Committee – This is the cutting department. Manages budget lines and
allocation of, even protection of, more often withdrawal of, resources though various
tactical – though patently transparent – posturings about austerity; creation of compe-
tition and distrust among contiguous units; threats of rationalisations so as to lower
expectations and curtail just demands; an imperative to shave a percentage from every
allocation, except those to the senior administration itself.
Publications Department – prize-winning brochures that risk the least by saying little,
picturing sculpted entrances, cafés, the well-resourced classroom and multiple pictures
of the diversity of the student body, no matter if this is at all representative. Testimony is
available from an ethnic ‘face’ on campus who was photographed three times in different
brochures as a ‘typical’ departmental candidate, for three different departments (real
story #1). The publicity section choreographs a cabaret show in competition with other
universities, where the only grounds for striving for ‘popular acclaim’ on ‘the part of the
directorate’ is habitual desire, but which in itself does not justify the competitions
(Veblen, 1918: 65). Linked sometimes to the sports department in US colleges, the
publicity department is now responsible for the expansion of university bookshop space
on campuses . . . in order to sell university-branded t-shirts, hoodies, monogramed ties,
cuff-links and coffee mugs.
Events and Conferences – A commercial arm for internal sales of tea and dry biscuits,
and sometimes unpalatable cut-price tannin-infused wine.
Community Outreach – Funding by numbers is seasonal, so this section relies upon
naming buildings after donors as talismans to attract yet more donations, or buildings are
named for the prestigious dead who conveniently can’t critique the contrivance. Nor is it
‘evident that the . . . munificent patrons of learning habitually distinguish between
scholarship and publicity’ (Veblen, 1918: 170). Consider also, celebrity doctorates
conferred at funding rallies cunningly disguised as graduation ceremonies.
Hutnyk 125

Sports Facilities – A subsidiary of both the publicity and the recruitment departments
in effect. This section of the university, copying US examples, seeks to outgrow the
educational setting such that football teams, plus the facilities provided for them, gen-
erate nifty social stories and serve a control function, although Veblen says ‘ill-disposed
critics’ (Veblen, 1918: 87) who might seem ‘gifted with a particularly puerile tem-
perament’ may scoff at the apparatus of ‘sports and letter clubs’ (Alpha, Omega, etc.) in
universities. Of course, allegiance to the rowing team offers a way of managing the
‘irregularities of adolescence’ and should be tolerated in favour of any more necessarily
expensive ‘meddling with personal habits’ (Veblen, 1918: 90).
Estates – Distracted or idealistic architects on sabbatical and jaded urban regenerators
pursuing parallel lives in policy, the cosmetic investment in prettifying the campus
(McGettigan, 2013: 62). The unsuspecting mistake designer forecourts for architecture
and photogenic architectures for universities when this is merely strategic ‘investment in
non-teaching facilities’ (McGettigan, 2013: 4), landscaping for cosmetic appeal,
including those Dyson Hurricane™ hand driers in the toilets (hat-tip Simon B, University
for Strategic Optimism). Should do better.
Human Resources – Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition but this is the com-
mittee for vengeful removal of a ‘thorn in the side’ – an unwanted or uncooperative
critic. Any bureaucratic block upon the march of managerialism incurs an ‘indelicate’
effort to ‘retire’ that impediment. Non-inclusion in research ratings, delays in promotion,
whispering campaigns or a course of ‘vexation and equivocation’ designed to force
‘voluntary’ resignation, no matter what ‘fitness’ for university life there may or may not
be. The tactics involve defamation of character, of domestic lifestyle, of after-hours
recreations or of political convictions (Veblen, 1918: 130) and the recent cases docu-
mented in the press are only a few of many examples which confirm this as a common
process – in the UK, Thomas Docherty, Marina Warner, Stefan Grimm; in the US,
Norman Finkelstein, Joel Kovel, Steven Salaita, Avital Ronell . . . 1
Course Approval Committee – A labour control committee that doubles as a stan-
dardisation forum, ensuring below common denominator interchangeability of formats
and ideas. Teaching functions shaped towards survey courses and filling station info-
banking. Concerned with grade and volume, measurable units of time, and schematics –
aims must be rewritten as outcomes. Documents prepared with unconnected aims and
outcomes are sent back to academic units for redrafting: try just a change of font to get
the returned forms through committee since no real oversight is applied except for delay
(real story #2).
Public Lectures – When officially sanctioned, rarely about ideas, or even generalising
access to higher education, more often sponsored promotional events with dilettante
culture industry celebs invited for prestige and in competition with competitors who also
compete with their own amateur theatricals. The performance end of the malignant and
parasitic take-over of the university by faceless bureaucrats, if ever these star-turn party
pieces take the form of genuine outreach or debate of ideas, the effort to put them on is
not rewarded by the administration, although claimed in REF impact narratives.
Records – Avoiding FOI requests, the retention of data policy is a policy for ensuring
all records are removed as quickly as possible so no requests to challenge decisions or
practices can be brought for historical events. McGettigan worries that teaching
126 Thesis Eleven 160(1)

Figure 1. This is ‘advanced technology’; this is a ‘park’. Copyright the author.

resources are being ‘diverted to data management and maintaining statistics’ (McGet-
tigan, 2013: 60). He is right to worry. Even to complain about this leads to a waste of yet
further resources (McGettigan, 2017).
Fees – A banking system working on a sub-prime crisis scenario for the future
(McGettigan, 2017). Overseas fees – a fleecing system of agricultural proportions (see
Ahmed, 2012).
Security – Wardens of surveillance. But underpaid, underclass and under surveillance
themselves – among the poorest paid, most regulated, worst hours workers doing shop
store detective work, caught between managerialist cutback and security fear.
Accommodation Office – Gated communities for the children of the local and inter-
national bourgeoisie. Delegates nanny state activities without any of the nanny state
support – staffed by low-pay adjunct moonlighters. Ensure every square foot of local
pavement is covered by a security camera, but having read Foucault for beginners, do not
bother to actually staff the video banks or provide support for house-monitors or dorm-
tutors.
Student Services – Underfunded crisis management division. Only able to deploy
impractical remedial measures with at best palliative consequences, with touching
dedication, but at worst excusing those who turn education and its community into things
to be sold like sausages (cf. Marx’s ‘sausage factory’, noted above).2
Business Development Office / Technology Transfer Office – Commercialisation
incubator designed to siphon off any visible gains out and away from the university into
Hutnyk 127

the profit column of corporate business. Always promoted as the ‘green’ part of the
campus, with new hi-tech conductor research never mentioning the toxic hinterlands that
the mining of hi-tech minerals necessarily leaves in far-off lands. Internationalisation of
attention to advanced technologies, but myopia of consequence. Science, in a park (see
Figure 1).

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. For the wider malaise of higher education worldwide there are too many cases that deserve
attention. A universal list would need to interweave the general critical assessments, starting, as
in this essay, with the work of Veblen (1918). Then, in Germany, Max Weber’s widely
available essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1919) should be read. In France, Derrida’s ‘The
University in the Eyes of its Pupils’ in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (1983). In
America there are many examples, after Veblen, including Wright Mills criticising the mis-
placed ‘faith that individuals can advance their life chances and personal fortunes through
increased vocational and “social” competence’ (Wright Mills, 1969: 60), through to Sunaina
Maira and Piya Chatterjee’s edited collection The Imperial University and its advocacy of a
decolonized curriculum (2014: 11). We are never short of critiques of crisis in the university –
what should be taken into account is the suppression of these critiques through over-familiarity,
or coercion, bludgeoning bureaucracy and excommunication. David Graeber’s polemical book
on bureaucracy of course influenced this writing, and many points are to be amplified from that
work (Graeber, 2015). The process of agreeing upon and securing a radical widespread shift
away from the limited forms of accountability research is, however, not easily conjured into
existence. We perhaps as yet do not have sufficiently diverse models of critique, besides
Veblen, Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins (1996) and Marilyn Strathern’s Audit Cultures
(2000). Campus novels might also serve to lampoon university practice, if they could be
updated: recall Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man
(1975), through to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) and Suzette Mayr’s Dr Edith Vane and the
Hares of Crawley Hall (2017). More critical and challenging volumes that should inspire
something more than contemplation include Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Under-
commons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), and Apoorvanand’s The Idea of a
University (2018) on the corporate and communal transformation of Indian universities.
2. It now seems more than obvious that ‘a schoolmaster is a productive labourer, when, in addition
to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor.
That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, does not
alter the relation’ (Marx, 1867: 444).

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Author biography
John Hutnyk is author of a number of books, most recently Global South Asia on Screen (Blooms-
bury, 2018) and Pantomime Terror: Music and Politics (Zero Books, 2014). He is Associate
Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam.