Introduction

In his review of the 2015 government consultation document Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice (BIS, 2015), Collini (2016) describes how the idea of both the student and the academic has been re-shaped. In the recent past, governments often talked about students as problematic radicals, who ‘ “sponged off” society when they weren't “disrupting” it’. In today's policy script, he argues, ‘students have come to be regarded as a disruptive force in a different sense, the shock-troops of market forces, storming those bastions of pre-commercial values, the universities’. The focus of suspicion and restraint, meanwhile, has become academics: ‘who, unless kept to the mark by constant assessments and targets, will revert to type as feather-bedded, professional-class spongers’. Collini writes:

In this context, it is unsurprising that academics experience the needs and desires of the ‘student consumer’ as having a major impact on their practice, and their professional identity. To remain viable in an increasingly competitive market, Universities have adopted methods of self-regulation to comply with external benchmarks of quality (Fanghanel, 2011). An academic's value is increasingly judged by their capacity to produce appropriate outputs within limited frameworks and timelines (Archer, 2008): as evidenced by the architecture of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF).

Ostensibly, academics enjoy considerable autonomy in the workplace: they master their own discipline, design their own curricula, choose their own topics for intellectual and empirical enquiry (subject to securing funding), and have significant control over their working practices. Yet, in 1975, Marie Haug predicted the ‘deprofessionalisation of everyone’ and the widespread diminution of professional power and authority over clients. A large body of literature has examined the deprofessionalisation of teaching, medicine, and law (Freidson, 1984, 1985, 1988; Reed and Evans, 1987; Ritzer and Walczak 1988; Anleu, 1992; Brooks, 2011).