'“Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities?' by Deb Verhoeven and Ben Eltham in (2023) Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies comments
Universities and management consultants are locked in a danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. .... The essay argues that consultants and universities are engaged in a mutually dependent relationship designed to sustain each other at the expense of the public.
As a heuristic tool for describing and processing the nature of change in university workplaces, the horror genre leaps to hand. There is a rich literature on the “zombiefication” of academics and academic cultures (Gora & Whelan, 2010; Katz, 2016; Ryan, 2012; Whelan et al., 2013). For Whelan et al. (2013), the zombie serves to describe the lifelessness of contemporary universities that have emerged, staggering, from apocalyptic refinancing and restructuring. They elaborate the figure of the zombie as a sign of “what it means to occupy the field of contemporary higher education” (Whelan et al., 2013, p. 3). The scenes they depict draw feverishly from George Romero’s classic horror movie, The Night of the Living Dead (1968), in which universities are the ramshackle farmhouses harboring haggard academic survivors against marauding waves of voracious bureaucratic zombies … or alternatively, in which academics are unwillingly “infected” by institutionalized zombie processes, designed to devitalize and demonize (Whelan et al., 2013, p. 5).
For Suzanne Ryan, the zombie motif is important, not as an explanation of desperate if doomed pushback against the prospect of corporate contagion, but for making sense of the compliant acceptance of institutional mutation by academic employees. She asks, “Does our active collusion in undermining our own interests indicate the depth of zombiefication to which we have sunk, or is it simply a symptom of a stressed and shrinking workforce?” (Ryan, 2012, p. 6). Ryan answers her own conundrum by suggesting that zombiefication is an individual tactic of withdrawal—a way for academics to survive the cognitive dissonance between their values and their workplaces, or a temporary psychological shelter from the storm of neo-liberalism. Academics, according to Ryan, neither accept nor resist, but are suspended in a lifeless stasis, consoling themselves that one day they might return with a vengeance. As Ken Gelder (2013) notes, these readings are themselves subject to a kind of zombiefication at the level of rhetoric. For Louise Katz (2016), the adoption of “Zombilingo” within universities is as deadening as it is dominant. Katz acknowledges the mutual dependence of Zombilingo and the vampiric rhetoric of corporatization, or “Corpspeak,” in the academy:
Although Corpspeak and Zombilingo are closely related, there are important differences. Corpspeak consists of linguistic imports into education from the business imaginary… Zombilingo, on the other hand, exports the vocabulary of critical or creative thinkers into the business realm; these are then sold back to the academy having undergone a kind of psychic surgery. (Katz, 2016, p. 10)
Whelan et al. (2013) suggest that the gothic towers of colleges past still cast a shadow over the bandaged Franken-universities that have replaced them, in the form of a haunted longing:
The ‘ivory tower’ model of the university, along with most of the other traditional archetypes of the institution, is … an undead, lingering ghoul. Given the changes that have radically reconstituted the sector over the last 30 years, these traditional imaginings are indeed dead, and yet bizarrely still alive. (Whelan et al., 2013, p. 5)
We question the implicit proposal of a pre-history of university innocence corrupted by brutal exterior forces into unrecognizable monstrosities. Rather than see universities or academics as victims of involuntary transformation who have retreated into sordid states of survival, we might wonder at the ways in which universities, and many managerial academics, have actively participated in the systems that now characterize these workplaces. After all, universities have a long history of collaboration, and indeed instantiation, by the forces of capital and extraction. In the US, many of the so-called “land grant” universities were founded on land expropriated from First Nations and embraced principles of white settlement and colonization, as well as rampant real estate development (Ford, 2002; Sorber, 2019; Stein, 2020). Many European universities have likewise benefited from colonial exploitation and slavery. In 2018, for instance, Bristol University estimated that as much as 89% of the funds used to found the institution were derived from donations by wealthy traders with links to tobacco and chocolate cultivated by slave labor in the American south and the Caribbean (University of Bristol, 2022). Australian universities have their own history of “settler colonial epistemic violence” (Bennett et al., 2023).
To conceptualize a less simplistic narrative of imperiled contemporary universities, we turn instead to a different horror tradition: the seductive allure of vampire fiction. The zombie differs from the vampire for its mindless lack of agency and its decrepitude. Zombie narratives are stories about the evacuation of content. In vampire stories, on the other hand, content hemorrhages and contaminates. Vampire narratives are stories explicitly about cultural interpretation and the constancy of revision (see Verhoeven, 1993). Vampires mutate and invoke mutation. The meanings around them are also subject to transmutation. As noted vampire scholar Nina Auerbach (1995) observes, unlike zombies who are without individual personalities, “There is no such creature as “The Vampire”; there are only vampires” (p. 5). Vampires flourish across multiple formats—films, TV shows, novels, music, poetry—and adapt in each of these different forms. Their tastes and talents shift according to different locations and historical circumstances. Vampires are familiar to us, not necessarily because they proliferate in so many cultural formats but because they encapsulate our own, situated desires and anxieties. They are both preternatural and yet contrived by intimate relationships. The vampires we conjure are the vampires we simultaneously want (to be) and want not.
The taboo against the vampire, then, is also a proscription against the recognition that the desire for the other might also be a desire to become the other (and vice versa) …[V]ampiric desire is both self-reproducing and incorporating of its object-choice. You are what you (rep)eat. (Verhoeven, 1993, p. 203)
This aporetic impulse at the heart of vampire tropes may help us understand the febrile impulse of university executives, and sometimes even the layers of academics beneath them, to countenance the predatory underside of institutional ideation. For Auerbach, “Vampirism springs not only from paranoia, xenophobia, or immortal longings, but also from generosity and shared enthusiasm” (Auerbach, 1995, p. vii). In this sense, vampires work together to reestablish the systems they menace, and this makes them especially useful for understanding the mutually beneficial role of consultants in the processes of corporatization of public institutions like universities. As Brunsson and Olsen (1993) have written, the goal of management consultancies is almost always identified as change, but the most obvious effect is in fact affirmation of the status quo. “Change” becomes simultaneously excavated and rich with possibility. University managers, emboldened by strategic planning consultants, extoll their newfound prowess at “agility” and “transcending boundaries,” their appreciation for the sublime wonder of untrammeled “expansion” and “bold transformation,” their rapacious appetite for “inclusion,” giddy with excitement for tomorrow and the vertiginous thrills of ever-deepening “impact” and ever-rising “rank,” always moving inexorably forward. Their snappy missions and glossy strategic plans, almost without exception recall the postwar scientistic triumphalism of Vannevar Bush’s “endless frontier” (Bush, 1945)
Our own respective universities are pointed cases. The University of Alberta’s 2023–2033 Draft Strategic Plan abandons gravity, and launches like the opening credits for a Star Trek Enterprise episode:
Our mission is to advance education and research to the benefit of Alberta and beyond. We prepare new generations of thinkers, builders and leaders who will help our province thrive into the future… Over the past three years, the University of Alberta has undertaken a bold transformation, building a new academic structure that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. We stand ready for the future: to accelerate collaboration across disciplines, focused on collective priorities; to educate students to solve problems and collaborate for real-world impact; to embrace partnership, collaboration, and community like never before. (University of Alberta, 2023a, p. 4)
Monash University pitches a similarly expansive vision:
“In every age, people grapple with realizing hopes, surmounting testing circumstances and quelling threats. Universities have a role in understanding and providing ideas and solutions to shape and respond to the challenges they, their partners and communities experience” (Monash University, 2021, p. 6).
Universities often reserve their widest over-reach for research promotion:
“Think enterprising and you think Monash. We have a long and proud distinguished history of ground-breaking translational research, that together with our partners, has changed the world” (Monash University, .d.).
These pithy mission-ary statements are intended to illustrate imagined points-of-difference between universities in an intensely competitive higher education “market,” and consequently they have most meaning to other proximate universities. Take, for example, the pyrrhic battle-of-the-brands being slugged out between the rival universities of Alberta which has all but reached the rocky point of peak-provincial. The University of Alberta landed the first blow with its forward-facing, history-effacing suite of strategic planning documents gathered under the catchphrase “U of A for Tomorrow” (University of Alberta, 2023b). In response, the University of Calgary counter-punched with the derivative, yet more insatiably frontward strategic plan titled, “UCalgary: Ahead of Tomorrow” (University of Calgary, 2023). This motto, which seems to stem from overactive use of a thesaurus, doesn’t bear a nuanced semiotic analysis; being either oxymoronic or palpably impossible. Nothing, however, quite matches the inadvertent repercussions of Deakin University’s 2012 rebranding, at breathtaking expense, as “Worldly” (hint: it doesn’t actually mean global).
Such slogans and sentiments do not spring up unbidden in the minds of university managers. Consultants are assiduous tradespeople of these brazen institutional imaginaries. Just as the marketers hone polished brochures and clickable social media tiles, consultants assist university managements in the construction of a vision of the university as contemporary, competent, and efficient—the very model of a modern major institution. Mazzucato and Collington (2023), drawing on a phrase coined in the 1960s by NASA procurement manager Ernest Brackett, call this a type of imaginary “brochuremanship” (p. 166). In this respect, Marginson’s (2000) telling phrase of the “enterprise university” has never been more appropriate than in the context of management consultants advising on metrics, cost controls, and organizational efficiencies. Consultants burnish the university’s self-image, providing talking points for leaders before their “change management” video addresses (Parker, 2002), and assisting the comms team with their packaging of organizational upheaval, in a process that Alvesson (2013) has compared to “the image” construction work first explored by Boorstin (1971), and the simulacra of Baudrillard (1994).
