It is both fashionable to call a university neoliberal and to claim to not understand what neoliberalism is.
The former usually goes that universities operate in a market and by doing market orientated things like recruitment, building accommodation, and charging fees they are neoliberal institutions.
The defence is that they are not neoliberal per say per se but responding to the incentives that are put in front of them. On the latter it’s usually to say neoliberalism doesn’t mean anything because it is so broadly used.
Both versions of this game are hitting a target – but they are entirely missing the point.
For students’ unions and their leaders being called neoliberal is a pretty common slur. At the more constructive end it’s an exploration of the union’s defence of consumer rights and rejection of students as consumers.
At the less constructive end it is a vague rhetoric about elected leaders taking nuanced positions on university fees and student funding.
Where higher education has undoubtedly adopted elements of market thinking, not necessarily neoliberalism as a whole, is in the way it is governed.
Students’ union management often follows in a tradition of New Public Management (NPM). NPM holds that public organisations should adopt the practices of the private sector in order to bring more efficient ways of working. NPM theorist Ewan Ferlie talks about markets, managers, and measurement as the basis of NPM.
NPM is not the same as neoliberalism but it is part of the framework that makes public sector organisations more market orientated. It is so successful as a governing model that most organisations would consider it the normal or natural way of working.
This model prizes things like efficiency measures, measures on intangible things (how do we know what satisfaction is, never mind whether a student is experiencing it?), directive management through KPI setting, and competition such as NSS league tables.
NPM LOL
Like with emergent strategies, there’s nothing wrong with NPM on its own – but it does have limitations. For students’ unions the most obvious is that it introduces market metrics that organisations may attempt to meet for their own sake.
For example, a students’ union can meet their targets for turnover but if their outlets are not serving a wider purpose for students like putting money in their pockets, improving other services, helping students develop skills, or fulfilling a social good, SUs may as well open a bookies.
Emerging from NPM is the idea of New Public Service (NPS) (so many ideas, so few acronyms).
Denhardt and Denhardt’s idea of New Public Service sets out how organisations can serve their stakeholders rather than steering their activities through metric based approaches.
In this model universities and students’ unions would spend much less time trying to fix the problems of their students and instead provide the spaces through which students could learn from each other, provide resources through which students could advocate for themselves, and provide insights that would allow students to more effectively make the case for change to the people in power.
In this model the emphasis would be on how universities and students’ unions open up bureaucratic spaces to allow a greater plurality of student voices to come forward.
From theory to action
Core to the idea of NPS is that public servants, in this case students’ union staff, work with their stakeholders to articulate shared interests. NPS borrows from discourse theory which broadly holds that the way language is used is what forms reality.
A NPS led governance model would borrow from organisational insight in helping to set the terms of the key debates while then bringing students together in a way to allow them to discuss issues and build collective interest.
It’s the difference between surveying students on how their course could be better (NPM) and holding workshops on how student feedback could be more constructive (NPS). It’s about the free flowing conversation within a context that can actually impact change.
The NPS students’ union would still have hierarchies, this is different to community organising, but it would look at resource application differently. To create the spaces for collective powers the NPS students’ union would both expand the tent of people engaging with the students’ union.
Investment in outreach, activity participation, and the employment of staff. And it would seek to devolve resources to those places through measures like participatory budgeting, campaign funds, and collectively decided Union priorities.
The role of the student officer is not to be a hero but to be an impactful convener on student issues through using their expertise and skills. Their role in building collective powers is in bringing greater proximity between their members and their university and in organising with a range of students.
The purpose of NPS is for organisations to concentrate on “serving not steering.” As well as a practical tool, it is a mental leap which asks organisations to acknowledge that their stakeholders are experts in their own experience.
The trick is to take these individual experiences and turn them into collective power in order to impact greater change.
