There is a growing higher education literature that explores the impact of neoliberalism in shaping the behavior and subjectivities of academics. Neoliberalism and its associated new managerialist practices such as accountability, audit, and development have been critiqued as being neither innocent nor neutral. Rather, researchers such as Strathern, McWilliam and Davies have argued that these practices promote an academic subjectivity through which academics become self-managing individuals, in so doing rendering themselves auditable and governable. Academics are hence being re-made through new managerial practices.
These critiques explore the ways academic work has become increasingly regulated, standardised and fragmented into functions around teaching and research with academics increasingly stressed under regimes of control and surveillance. The characterization presented under neoliberalism serves to simplify the complexity of academic work and life with its focus on functions: having an academic role and 'doing' academic work; what is lost here are the processes of 'becoming' and 'being' an academic.
As discourses of neoliberalism come to dominate contemporary higher education policy and practice they become hegemonic, creating new norms and values around the importance of transparency, measurement, independence and individual performance. While critiques serve to challenge the assumptions underpinning these norms, they paint a very bleak picture of academic life and rarely offer an alternative, more optimistic, view.
This paper and the research on which it is based, uses the concept of kindness to denaturalize the discourses of neoliberalism and challenge many of the assumptions underpinning new managerialist practices. It offers an alternate generative view of being and becoming an academic in the modern university through exploring understandings of kindness as a relational practice. I draw on recent analyses by Clegg and Rowland, Phillips and Taylor, and Hamrick and their account of kindness in modern society that involves 'fellow feeling' as well as related concepts such as the gift, the concept of care and Buber's notion of "I it” and “I thou”. In making a case for kindness, together with its focus on the social, relational and emotional, what emerges is an illumination of the mysterious, less visible and less easily measurable dimensions of academic work. From this, I propose that kindness, with its concern for human values, offers a more hopeful view that moves away from dire contemporary critiques of neoliberalism and academic work, towards a more generative way of 'working the spaces of neoliberalism' (Laurie and Bondi, 2005).