The Guardian posted an article on Friday called Why we should bulldoze the business school. It raises a number of issues but is generally about how Business Schools perpetuate neo-liberalism by not challenging the status quo. I think that there are two issues here: the university as a business and the criticism of society/the status quo (which I shall call radicalism).

Overall I think that this is a bit unfair on Business Schools. I would argue that actually the issues raised are the modus operandi of the modern university and that Business Schools are just where this is most prominent. Whenever I raised dubious work based management practices with friends one academic I know from another department (and another university) would comment that in time everybody would be treated like this.

The key issue is that the modern university is now run as a business. This is evident from the every increasing student numbers particularly in taught postgraduate courses. All university departments are keen to put on new MSc’s to generate new revenue. This is big business. The university as a business affects the activities of the university (not least institutions are not going to teach the opposite of what they do).

Visible radicalism is dead in the modern university. One criticism that is sometimes heard of universities is that they are full of left wingers being critical. This represents a bias in the views of academics. I would argue that a lot of academics see being critical of (and within) society as one of the roles of the university. If the dominant model of organisation is society is right wing then such criticism will inevitably appear to be left wing. I suspect that pre-WW2 that universities were quite conservative in a time of great social change (particularly with respect to gender and class). That said a lot of that radicalism is gone. In my time working in academia I don’t think I came across anybody in my institution being publicly critical of society. In 1988 tenure was abolished in the UK. This means that academics have less opportunity to discuss big ideas due to increased accountability in all aspects of their job. Within a research context this leads to bite sized research rather than the exploration of broader ideas. How can a debate about or criticism of society be evaluated? Is it REF-able? Within a teaching context the danger is that students are treated as customers with a specific link to outcomes; specifically assessment (“Is this going to be on the exam?”). How do you assess a broader discussion about such issues?

Radicalism still exists in some form although the type of radicalism advocated by the article is rare. Most staff do not see the university as a business. Take teaching for example. In a business context teaching should be delivering the material at the lowest cost. For an academic the key cost is time. A business approach to teaching would revolve around memorisation of facts, the use of multiple choice exams and the use of group assignments. In the US this is called The Hidden Contract. The key principle of The Hidden Contract is that everybody is happy but nobody learns anything.

Most people do not teach like this and in some ways this could be considered radical. That said, active criticism of society or the status quo is rare in the classroom. Some students do not want to discuss politics. I remember somebody attempting, with two international students, to discuss the political aspect of business in their home country. The two students were not going to discuss the matter and umm-ed and ahh-ed until the subject was dropped. If the university is to be an international institution how can radicalism exist when such radicalism poses a big challenge culturally? Would certain countries still send their students to the UK if it was known that they would be exposed to views highly critical of the status quo. There’s a lot of talk about teaching students to be critical but should universities require them to point out the elephant in their own living-room?

The type of discourse asked for in the article is something that is good for society but is something that no longer exists in UK universities (assuming it existed at some point in the past). It would take a big change of view within UK society regarding what universities are for to move universities in that direction.