Abstract
There has been a long discussion in Critical Management Studies and Critical Management Education about the erosion of fundamental values of academic work (such as democracy, collegiality and freedom) that have been badly affected in the recent years by the neoliberal reforms. Management Learning in 2020 published the whole special issue symptomatically titled ‘The Performative University: “Targets”, “Terror” and “Taking Back Freedom” in Academia’ to discuss this topic. Increasing pressure to compete for academic merits, precarious working conditions for junior scholars, bullying, sexual harassment, gamification of academic work or attacks on academic freedom are discussed. As Peter Fleming writes in his powerful book ‘Dark Academia’ (Fleming, 2021), such neoliberal principles lead to psychological hell in academic cultures, in which students and scholars experience burnout, mental illness and alienation. The concrete example of such disaster has been recently discussed in the book ‘Shaping for Mediocrity’ (Burrell et al., 2024), where Gibson Burrell and other authors reflect on the neoliberal attack on academic freedom in the University of Leicester. ‘The University of Hope’ contributes greatly to these discussions with the concrete solutions and hopeful actions that can help with restoring academic values and with regaining the control over the labour by academic scholars.
As Monika Kostera writes in Introduction, ‘several times in my working life I have been witness to and participant in the same recurring sequence of events in several countries, in several types of academic institutions’ (p. 18). This sequence of events represents observable changes in human behaviour under the influence of neoliberalism: communicative people who have worked together in a collegial way become perpetrators, whose aim is to compete with others and to eliminate colleagues (quite often: very good friends) in a sick game for university trophies: publications in excellent journals, research grants, academic titles or positions. Who start ‘dressing and behaving like corporate employees’ (p. 19), using corporate newspeak, engaging in mobbing, plagiarism and replacing discussions about research with presentations of research excellence strategies. The author reflects on possible solutions to neoliberal academia and she dedicates this book to ‘victims of this mindless institutional devastation’ in which academics no longer have responsibility for organizing their own work (p. 19).
Each chapter is inspired by the importance of a particular academic virtue–kindness, diligence, patience, temperance, chastity, humility, and charity–and begins with a beautifully written, powerful story from university life. Kindness (Chapter 1) is an antidote to envy, for example kind mentoring of PhD students or being kind towards others’ work in reviews or discussions might be one of the ways of reclaiming hope in the university. Kindness requires challenging the oppressive hierarchies in which academic feudal ladies and lords work on the assumption that ‘power is all people care about, be they young or old’ (p. 37). Such assumptions transform scholars into cynicist who do not trust each other and who only take strategic actions to advance their career opportunities. Kindness, that challenges such instrumentality, needs to go hand in hand with diligence (Chapter 2) that requires slowing down and eliminating the publish-or-perish culture since currently ‘we never had so little impact on anything other than our own burnout’ (p. 48). Slow reflection and learning from others can help to give a voice to valuable research outcomes, and to challenge the culture of excellence in which we hear only the loudest and the most charismatic voices. Meanwhile university is a space of different purpose, in which ‘we do not produce – instead, we learn, we become better at something’ (p. 58).
In contemporary academia, and especially in the case of unethical actions such as bullying–often naturalized by university management as a side-effect of necessary changes–we should be guided also by the virtue of patience (Chapter 3). Toxic academic workplace ‘takes away clarity of vision’ (p. 74), blur moral judgement and brings hyper-confusion to targets and bystanders. It also disconnects people from each other – mentally but also bodily. Quite often understanding what exactly happened in academic predatory culture requires leaving the abused workplace and finding shelter in another place, to protect life and heal the wounds (see Zawadzki and Jensen, 2020). It requires distance, time and patience to understand what is happening when being unfortunate to meet narcissistic persons. In this context, as Monika Kostera observes, being patient in academia means also taking better care of our bodies, since ‘we are not machines; our bodies are part of our social context’ (p. 81). Being patient, however, would be perhaps quite difficult for academic sociopaths and psychopaths, trained to become perpetrators (such as Brendan in the powerful story at the beginning of Chapter 3) who ‘lose touch with feelings and reactions that could help them to connect with others’ (p. 82).
Being patient goes hand in hand with a virtue of temperance (Chapter 4) that requires saying ‘enough’ to academic productivity and excellency in order to increase the quality of attention towards students, our colleagues and our own lives. In the neoliberal system of flexibility we need stability, which means challenging the norm that ‘no achievement feels final or even sufficiently real’ (p. 103). Temperance doesn’t mean, however, strengthening the hierarchy and following the rules of academic feudalism that leads to exploitation of disadvantaged groups in academia. It requires, as the author observes, developing a culture of Swedish fika, where people meet in a friendly atmosphere, drink coffee, eat cake and talk. Joining small circles of mutual recognition, in which we read and discuss our work, might be a perfect way to cultivate temperance in a good way.
In Chapter 5, ‘Chasity–Celebrating Desire’ Monika Kostera writes about those who use ‘the other as an object in order to gain power’ (p. 117) and who ‘do not feel any deeper worth of their work unless they are showered with money, admiration, and fame’ (p. 138). Such a culture of academic lust enables the appearance of sexual harassers and bullies, who eliminate others in order to follow their ‘calculocratic obsession’ (p. 124). Challenging harassing culture is difficult, but we can try to resist the fundamentals of it, namely, a culture of excellence and competition. Organizing reading and writing circles, during which we engage with interesting ideas, engaging with electrifying teaching or becoming a trade union representative could work as a good alternative to neoliberal academic culture. Finally, and what I personally love most, we should try to find the courage to be someone eccentric, someone who does not fit into the standardized culture of academic perfection, since ‘it is human to be imperfect: it is inhuman to be perfect’ (p. 130).
To challenge the culture of ‘neroism’ that promotes ‘ambitions of being on the top of the world’ (p. 139), we could also follow the virtue of humility (Chapter 6). As Monika Kostera observes, ‘drive to succeed does not result from deep self-love, but from an inner emptiness’ (p. 138), and such a drive needs to be challenged by the norm of ‘constructive humility’ (p. 142) that gives an opportunity to acknowledge that we, academics, are part of something bigger than ourselves, namely: a common good of university. Indeed, we need to find a way to regain control over this common good and to resist our workplace alienation caused by neoliberal management. To find alternative forms of organizing academia, a good idea is to engage with art that ‘has always brought forth a new reality and a new form of perception’ (149). Art provides empathetic language to describe academic workplace, and serves as remedy against narcissistic pride. Writing haiku together, reading poetry or performing artistic interventions in research and education could be a good way to resist alienating individualism (see Jensen and Zawadzki, 2025).
Finally, restoring control over university as a democratic public space and common good requires a reinforcement of the virtue of collegiality (Chapter 7), and especially collegial governance in academia. Collegiality requires a constant effort to follow democratic principles, but it also requires actions from people socialized to collegial values and from those having a calling to work in academia. Without those actions, collegiality can become another feudalistic tool in the hands of the academic managerial elite that would use this norm as a way to control academics (see Fleming and Harley, 2023). Counteracting elitism in academia, strict hierarchy or micro-steering by metrics through acting in line of collegial values might be a way to restore university as a public good.
Monika Kostera’s book is a great source of knowledge for organization scholars and management students interested in how different forms of organizing (from collegial to neoliberal) can shape people’s moral compasses and behaviours. This publication is also a valuable compendium for higher education policy makers and university managers – a warning signal on how the academic community could be easily destroyed by harmful organizational changes, and how to regain what has been already lost by recovering ‘all the virtues connecting us with something greater than ourselves’ (p. 188). The main message I personally take from ‘The University of Hope’ is that even if it sometimes seems to us that there is no hope for a better time in the academy, it is always worth looking for the remnants of collegiate structures that can help us reclaim that hope (‘look for foundations of sea-worn granite’, as Robinson Jeffers (2024) writes in one of his beautiful poems). It is worth to mention, however, that there is no nostalgia for some better time in academia in this book–the author brilliantly diagnoses the pathologies of feudalism in the academy, and the harassing actions performed by feudal ladies and feudal lords, now reinforced by neoliberal reforms (see Jensen and Zawadzki, 2024). To challenge this capitalist and feudalist reinforcement, and to restore academic values, we need to become a revolution – and not just to make a revolution.
