Zones of alienation in global higher education: Corporate abuse and leadership failures

Abstract

Worldwide, academic ecosystems suffer from the industrialization of creative work and evaluative hegemony. Managerial obsession with growth has corroded collegiality, breeding mistrust, anxiety and burnout – negatively impacting the physical and mental health of faculty members. Concerned with benchmarking, audits and competitive self-assessment, academic managers generate accountability-heavy workloads, which are of doubtful value for critical inquiry, but a source of gratification for a metrics-minded bureaucracy and its coercive pace setters. Legitimized and propelled by the knowledge factories of global neoliberalism, this approach becomes particularly corrosive in the ‘zones of alienation’ created through the malignant interaction of two phenomena: ‘leaderism’ and ‘soldierism’. This paper explains how these phenomena emerge as a result of leadership failures and corporate abuse in global higher education.