Ritual and Refusal

Around midday on Wednesday my phone buzzed with an incoming SMS alert. I glanced at it and burst out laughing at the utter predictability and impotence of the message:

FROM NTEU

Sign petition to call on VC John Dewar to find alternative measures to involuntary redundancies

My trade union, after secretly stitching up an agreement behind its members backs to cut our pay by 10% for a year, has had that 12 months to work out what they were going to do when the agreement expired and the inevitable round of 200 redundancies dropped this week. And here it was on full display, their big strategy: a petition asking for unspecified "alternative measures", like supplicants begging a king for mercy.

Universities are sick. In public they talk about "expanding knowledge" and "scientific breakthroughs". In private they fret about h-indexes (academic staff), KPIs (professional staff), and "customer conversion" (student recruitment). There are enough "international rankings" that every institution can be in the "top 20" of something. Petitioning a Vice Chancellor after the rivers of gold ran dry as borders slammed shut isn't going to fix this.

On Thursday I read something exciting that I've been hoping to see for several years. The often-ahead-of-the-curve Utrecht University is abandoning "Impact Factor" in assessments of the work of academic staff. The reduction of worker value to a single "score" based on how many academic authors have cited their work or — in the particularly obtuse version — based on how many other papers published in the same journal as their papers have been heavily cited, is at the core of the majority of problems with how universities and "academia" operate.

Looking at the deep systemic problems like this, and taking them on through a strategy of refusal, was one of the techniques explored in Stephen Muecke's Overland article, "Resistance". Writing of the Goolarabooloo campaign against Woodside, Muecke examines various tactics. His most interesting overall observation though is that in English "resistance" can mean both to stand firmly against all attacks, or — in the electrical sense, for instance — to reduce the power of a thing by creating drag, slowing it down somehow. I don't know how the Utrecht University administration came to their decision, but in doing so they have decided to fight the pernicious effects of competitive rankings-based academia by simply refusing to participate on those terms. This is brave, but not, I suspect, as "risky" as Nature would like us to believe. The current system is, after all, a source of enormous profit for Nature Group Publishing: abandoning Journal Impact Factor is a major risk to their profits.

I think a lot about the best approach to the problems of our time. When should we fight and when should we melt away? Can permitted street marches, online petitions and confrontations with Police lines really achieve anything meaningful, or are they simply empty rituals? I tend strongly towards the latter — never having recovered from the bitter aftertaste of the Iraq War protest marches — but sometimes I wonder if I'm simply looking at it the wrong way. So I liked Muecke's piece. If the cops are looking for a fight, don't turn up for it. If you don't like the rules of the game, play a different one. If it's too dangerous to strike, grind everything to a halt with Work to Rule. It's hard to judge where the line is — "Am I strategically withdrawing, or am I just caving in because it's more comfortable?" — but that, I think, is part of the real struggle. It's easy to be an "activist". It's harder to make real change.

=> Impact factor abandoned by Dutch university in hiring and promotion decisions | Resistance