The displacement of the “god professor” by the “god manager” at the apex of university hierarchies in recent decades has not left its academic and student victims silent: there has been an outpouring of scholarly analysis and, often more importantly, polemic, from the staff and students whom neoliberal university managers have, over the last thirty or more years, dragged behind them into their relentless austerity spree. It goes without saying that none of this commentary is enough on its own to turn the tide on the managerial ascendancy in universities, particularly given the complicity with it of alarmingly large swathes of the academic profession itself. As the market hierophants who run higher education turn campuses more and more into unrelieved satires of themselves, the rapidly mounting piles of critical literature against the neoliberal university are simultaneously an expression of the enormous disaffection in contemporary academia, incontrovertible evidence of the severe crisis of managerial legitimacy in it, and a sobering reminder of the yawning gap between political analysis and political effect.

Universities obviously need people to help them run; an administrative, as distinct from a managerial, function is a necessary part of the make-up of a university, as it is of any large organisation. Something that characterised Bruce Gardiner over his many years as a member of the English department at the University of Sydney was his close friendship with many of the highly competent and collegial administrative staff who were crucial to the department’s smooth running. These staff, some of whom had “manager” in their title, are not the ones in question here, and not those to whom the “antimanagerial” status I will attribute to Bruce should be contrasted. Nor are those enlightened academic managers at the university – a small minority, usually at low levels of the managerial hierarchy, and sometimes only present in an acting capacity – who have respected Bruce’s contribution to the English department as much as his colleagues and former students do. What is at issue here, and what makes Bruce the quintessential antimanager, are the standing norms of academic management in universities: the unilateral, coercive direction of scholarly work, as implemented by a class of academic managers – the modern university’s Vice-Chancellors, Provosts, Deans, Deputy Vice-Chancellors, along with the more ambitious subordinates who have chosen to make themselves instruments of their policies at lower levels of the academic hierarchy – who must urgently be stripped of their power if universities are to have any chance of fulfilling a remotely democratic or critical purpose.

Academic management in this sense is, or rather should be, an entirely alien function in a university, at least if we conceive of that institution as a self-governing community of scholars and students dedicated to the extension and democratisation of knowledge. The creativity and open-endedness intrinsic to both research and education make both radically incompatible with the accountancy-logic of managerial power. Managers’ essential role is to perpetuate authoritarian control of the institution, in the name of safeguarding a budgetary bottom line that is, above all, an ideological construction with no other purpose than a self-reflexive one: justification of austerity-based management practices themselves. Reflecting on the University of Sydney in recent decades, one can hardly fail to be struck by its near-perfect exemplification of the devastating analysis of academic managerialism in Chris Lorenz’s classic Critical Inquiry essay from over a decade ago.1 As Lorenz notes, the complete redundancy of the managerial function with respect to universities’ prima facie purpose means that “there are scarcely objective constraints on managers’ freedom toward their employees”; this, along with the absence of any objective measures of organisational “efficiency”, gives managers free rein to impose whatever performance criteria they see fit, and means that their own self-validation becomes the basic rationale of their professional activity. The “pressure, blackmail, divide-and-conquer tactics, and open humiliation” which they deploy to shore up their authority are ultimately guaranteed by their ability to dismiss staff, an eventuality with which Bruce was, as we will see, scandalously threatened in the later portion of his career at the university.2

The terms of academic governance ratified by managerial power in universities do not just make a transformatively critical or democratic vision of higher education unthinkable; they militate against almost any comprehensive project for the university that might depart, even narrowly, from the reigning consensus. In this regime, the managerial function, typically characterised by incoherent and capricious decision-making, frequent financial profligacy and, often, incompetence, is a perpetual-motion engine in which one class of managers fabricates problems for its successors or subordinates to solve, and in which the ideal manager’s horizon is limited to permanent compliance and damage control as a mode of career advancement, optionally accompanied, for those without the stomach for overt or only unconvincingly repressed cynicism, by ostentatious and often self-congratulatory performances of progressivism.

Since mystification of the real conditions of universities is essential to keeping the show on the road, senior individual university leaders are rarely shy in articulating what they amusingly present as their distinctive “vision” of higher education, usually couched, with disarming naivety, in predictable and uncritical clichés.3 For reasons that are mainly material, but which also speak to the considerable reserves of complacency and credulity to be found in white-collar professions, academia included, a remarkably large proportion of the university workforce – largely those who haven’t bothered unionising – is only too happy to leave these vapidities unchallenged. Nonetheless, the ideology of managerialism and the policies of particular managers have regularly been the subject of critical analysis, with Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America – a book that inspired Bruce – a striking early instance.4 Less frequent, however, are accounts of managers’ adversaries – the university dissidents working to resist the submission of education to the demands of the managerial class, and to preserve the ideals of scholarship and education in the heart of a system that is determined to crush them whenever possible, one academic, program, department or degree at a time.

This is why there is, hopefully, some point in a few brief and necessarily personal remarks about Bruce Gardiner, whose colleague I had the honour to be from my first arrival at the Sydney English department in 2005 until Bruce’s retirement in 2022. I will concentrate on my experience of Bruce as a senior colleague – someone whose room was around the corner from mine, someone I regularly spoke to, drank coffee or ate lunch with, frequently appealed to for advice, asked to read my work, and shared teaching with. Other chapters in this volume give a much better picture than I can of Bruce’s qualities as a literary scholar and teacher. Here, it is his presence as a colleague that will be the focus.

It so happens that Bruce’s retirement from the university, at the end of the distinguished and distinctive career to which this volume pays tribute, coincided with the outright abolition of the department structure of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the university, and the dissolution of the previously autonomous departments, including English, into “disciplines” even more heavily under the thumb of academic managers. Designed, as I have written elsewhere, to break academic autonomy as decisively as possible and to sever once and for all the link between the university’s organisational structure and its intellectual and educational purposes, this was a highly symbolic reform which only confirmed the impression that Bruce’s retirement marked a state-change in the nature of the organisation.5 The reform exemplified university managerialism in an unadulterated state: masterminded by the university Provost, Professor Annamarie Jagose, it is best contextualised as one in a long series of institutional choices by which university management gratified forces from the economic or social right.6 It was ratified as the first significant decision of “Professor” Mark Scott, the newly appointed university Vice-Chancellor, and, in a consummation of the triumph of managerial form over academic substance, the first non-academic Vice-Chancellor of the university. Scott is a professional bureaucrat, recruited from outside higher education, who lacks any experience in teaching or research, and whose “Professor of Practice” title was conferred on him in a bizarre attempt to keep up the academic appearances which are readily sacrificed almost everywhere else, including in his appointment itself.7 At the time of his retirement, Bruce was described with great accuracy by the then-head of English as the soul of the department (as it then still was). Its abolition at the time of Bruce’s departure meant that that soul had now been lost in more ways than one.

He would no doubt not have defined himself in those terms, but Bruce nonetheless was, and is, an antimanager in every respect. His principles and conduct have constantly put him at odds with the managerial world view and the practices that go along with it, and so with the senior management of the university and the norms they enforce. Never among the crowd of flatterers, he was a permanent reminder of the ideal of erudition, humanism, and the spirit of critique to which academic life in a discipline like English should aspire. But he was more than this. To Stanley Fish’s all-too-accurate generalisation about academics, that they “present an irresistible target [to politicians], not simply because they are highly visible, but because, by and large, they will not fight back”, he was an unequivocal exception.8 Just how exceptional he was is best gauged by some anecdotes from the last decade Bruce spent in the department.

In 2014, a point at which he had been in the English department for thirty-three years, Bruce was summoned to a meeting with a senior faculty manager, on the subject of his alleged shortcomings in research “performance”. This underperformance could ultimately have led to his being dismissed from his position at the university, but in the meantime the proposals being made to redress it were meant to function as a powerful and humiliating mechanism to bring an obviously dissident staff member under managerial control.

I accompanied Bruce to this meeting as a “support person”, and witnessed a ferocious and unrelenting attempt to discipline him, discharged by a manager whose academic work is surrounded by a nimbus of intellectual and political radicalism. We were both shaken by this interview, which was harrowing in the manager’s sheer investment in correcting a disobedient subordinate. I have never encountered a more principled or honourable resistance to the insolent logics of university managerialism than the one Bruce offered in response. In the face of an outright threat to his integrity as a scholar, to say nothing of his livelihood, he simply refused each ultimatum about how he had to work – what and when he had to publish and how he had to do so, contesting the manager’s impertinencies with the greatest dignity. In a totalitarian academic environment conditioned into the systematic perversion of terms like “research”, this resistance, Bruce’s refusal to be timetabled and his insistence that proper work takes the time it takes, was breathtaking in its frankness and oppositional daring. Managerial success in universities is built on compliance and depends on the compliance of subordinates. In the context of a disciplinary procedure dressed up in the cynical euphemisms of collegial “support”, “guidance” and “resources”, Bruce’s refusal to play the game was more than disconcerting, and it deeply rattled the manager in question.

It speaks volumes about the crudeness of managerial culture that this was not the first time that Bruce had been the object of an attempted purge at the University of Sydney. Some years earlier, he had been targeted, along with hundreds of other staff, by a different university manager, Michael Spence – a Vice-Chancellor later notorious for having spent thousands of dollars of university money on renewals of his membership of the Oxford and Cambridge club9 – and threatened with dismissal for “not pulling his weight”. A petition against this dismissal gathered hundreds of signatures, many from luminaries of the scholarly world, and a widely read article on the news website Crikey by Sydney Review of Books editor Catriona Menzies-Pike called the university to account for its short-sightedness in dismissing him: “I can’t imagine,” wrote Menzies-Pike, “how [Gardiner’s] contribution to his students and colleagues at Sydney, and to the intellectual life of the city could adequately be measured.”10 As in 2014, Bruce was, in the end, spared from any sanction.

In these recurrent efforts to rid themselves of him, the management of the University of Sydney showed its characteristic blindness to everything that gives a university value as an educational and scholarly community, and consolidated Bruce’s own status as a beacon of antimanagerialism. When reviewing this sequence of aborted purges, it is hard to know what had more influence in the antidemocratic black box of university processes – the public manifestations of support for Bruce, or his own dogged practices of resistance. My own assessment is that Bruce’s principle and lack of compromise was decisive. Public petitions and denunciations are ubiquitous in university life, more often ignored than accepted, and little match for large universities’ powerful media and marketing machines; but when they are doubled by intense local resistance on the part of their beneficiary, it is a different story.

These deplorable episodes should be put on the record, but they should not be allowed to overshadow Bruce’s remarkable antimanagerial contributions to the department over many decades. As many others have noted, this was nowhere more evident than in his teaching. Bruce always spoke of teaching as the domain which demanded the most intensive effort and originality: his extraordinary, highly memorable lectures, their delivery often punctuated with sips of Diet Coke, rested on an encyclopaedic grasp both of the subject in question and of current scholarship on it, and were intended to provide students with analysis they could find nowhere else, more exhaustive than anything yet available in published form. In a culture conditioned by teaching overwork, the consequent pressure towards minimally prepared, just-in-time and just-good-enough classes, this single-minded devotion to pedagogy was an act of significant dissidence. It was thanks to Bruce that generations of students were exposed to an ideal of erudition, rigour and scholarly imagination that they would rarely have encountered elsewhere.

Managers’ contemptuous attitude to academics like Bruce contrasts with his own permanently respectful attitude to his students. As Rodney Taveira discusses in Chapter 6, the comments that Bruce made on students’ essays were celebrated for their length and for the seriousness with which he engaged with even lazy and slapdash efforts, in which he was able to identify the flickerings of real ideas. Reading these comments must have been a jolt for many students, and confronted them with the shock, and the compliment, of actually being taken seriously. They were certainly extremely memorable. Elias Greig, a former PhD student in the department, says that he now thinks of Bruce every time he marks. In reference to a comment by Bruce on one of his undergraduate essays that he shared on Twitter (as it then was), Elias observed that Bruce’s comment “says, essentially, that my essay was under-researched, impressionistic, and wrong – and he [Bruce] loved it”.11 This quality of generosity and attention did not just extend to undergraduate work: Bruce ran the English Honours program for many years – now likely to be another casualty of managerial vandalism12 – and served for many years as the supervisor of last resort for Masters and doctoral students in the department – those students whom no one else could or would supervise. All research is collective, even when it has a single author, Bruce reminded me once. The research he shepherded into existence with his inimitably rigorous, kind and conscientious supervision constitutes one of his most important contributions to scholarship and to literary culture in Australia and beyond it.

In this as in other aspects of his professional life, Bruce was characterised by a penetrating and mercurial intelligence, driven by a deep commitment to the value of written texts and the ideas they incorporated. This was nowhere more evident than in his syllabuses, which embraced a kaleidoscopic variety of authors, genres and periods. Equally comfortable teaching A.E. Housman, Lacan, history writing in English, or Romantic philosophy of language – to name only a small selection – Bruce seemed at ease across the whole spectrum of European and American literatures and their philosophical and cultural backgrounds. As Adam Gall, Susan Thomas and Ben Miller note in Chapter 4 of this volume, he seemed to know everything. He was proud to have taught many Anglo-American, African American and Native American works, and many works by women. One of the most deeply cultured people I have encountered, viscerally attached to music and art – and, in passing, a great connoisseur of the natural world, always able to identify trees or birds – he was also anything but a snob. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey argued that most celebrated Western intellectuals have had a deeply contemptuous attitude to ordinary people.13 Nothing could have been further from Bruce’s sensibility. Equally engaged supervising work on Romantic poetry or fantasy literature, there was no aristocratic veneration of the canon with him, just an intense enthusiasm and respect for the creative intelligence in all its manifestations.

For all its pretence of sober rationality and deliberative decision-making, the managerial function in universities is fundamentally servile, implementing a world view sponsored by politicians, international consultancy firms and higher education employer organisations. It follows that academic managers express, as we have seen, a relentlessly dirigiste sensibility. Since power isn’t real unless it’s arbitrary, this sensibility combines a highly authoritarian exercise of institutional authority with a directionless, continually shifting set of ideas about what the university should be like and what its members should be required to do. Rigidity of the command-and-control structure compensates for a meretricious opportunism and a flagrant absence of principle about the most fundamental questions in academic life. At one moment, research-led teaching is the watchword; at another, teaching and research are to be separated. In one year, academic functions are to be centralised; in the next, they are to be devolved. Structures and processes are hastily erected, only to be pulled down again shortly afterwards. This authoritarian style of management is empty at its core, filled only by managers’ overarching commitment to maintaining the hierarchy from which their status derives. Their subordinates, like their students, are, most fundamentally, little more than cells on spreadsheets, objects whose value only lies in their contribution to their managers’ KPIs. Bruce exemplified the opposite combination of qualities. Highly committed to his own intellectual and pedagogical principles, and always ready to defend them, his attitude to students and colleagues was libertarian, premised on the conviction that people can, and should, choose their own direction, free of coercion.

As well as its authoritarianism, managerial culture in universities is also, as I have already suggested, highly irrational and very frequently chaotic. This is another point of contrast with Bruce, whose rationality and punctiliousness in all his professional activities were legendary. His dapper sartorial style, in which there was never a thread astray, was mirrored by his meticulous attention to detail in everything he did. Many times, after a conversation, I would find an email sitting in my inbox with a recommendation of an author or text that he – almost invariably rightly – thought it would be useful for me to read. Bruce transformed everyday administrative tasks into art forms. In his hands, ordering books on behalf of the department for the university library became a theoretical project underpinned by a rigorous theory of collection and bibliography; in a similar vein, preparing a guide for students on citation practices and plagiarism resulted in a meticulous and intellectually stimulating treatise.

No portrait of Bruce as antimanager could be complete without mentioning that most of his remarkable and enduring contribution to education and scholarship was made under conditions of debilitating physical illness after he contracted HIV/AIDS in 1987. This event was determinative: it was the likelihood that he did not have long to live that led him to devote himself exclusively to his students. His ability, for so many years, to serve scholarship and education, to resist one managerial attack after another, while all the time enduring significant incapacity, reveal an out-of-the-ordinary fortitude. And, for all his investment in the life of the mind and spirit, he understood that resistance needs to be collective, and concrete. Of all my interactions with him, one image in particular sticks: that of Bruce picketing the entrance to the university on Carillon Avenue during a strike in 2013. Bruce was a loyal member of the National Tertiary Education Union, the only real counter-force to managerial power in Australian universities. Even though he was sick at the time, Bruce joined other union members on strike in defence of better conditions. Most union members content themselves with striking but stay away from pickets, which can often be confrontational. In the course of this campaign, which involved six separate days of strike action, picketing staff and students were assaulted by strike-breakers and members of conservative student organisations and charged by violent riot police. Bruce was sick, but he came anyway. This was typical, and just one of the many reasons for the esteem in which he is so widely held – a sign that, despite everything, managerialism in universities has not triumphed yet, and doesn’t have to.

Bibliography