Inglês (pdf)
Artigo em XML
Referências do artigo
Tradução automática
Enviar este artigo por email
Citado por SciELO 
Similares em
SciELO 
Permalink
Introduction
At the turn of the 21st century, the Spanish public university system entered an era characterized by profound change and social tension. The establishment of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in 1999 and the subsequent implementation of the reforms set out in the Bologna Declaration, implemented nationally through the Organic Universities Law 2001 (LOU), gave rise to heated debate throughout Spanish society and academia.1
The reforms triggered a series of strikes and protests by students, teaching staff and administrative and service personnel that paralyzed university activity for nearly two months in 2001 and 2002. Two of the most common slogans - “We want public universities: no to Bologna, no to LOU” and “We’re not customers, we’re students” - encapsulate the protesters’ arguments that the Bologna reforms would pave the way for a weakening of the public university system and its subsequent commercialization. In the year running up to the deadline (October 1, 2010) for the implementation of the convergence plan with the European Higher Education Area, this concern was again denounced during demonstrations: “No to LOU and no to Bologna: No to the commercialization of universities, we need real public debate”.
The justifications for the reforms were diverse in nature. It was argued that higher-level education in Europe had to be homogenized and integrated and that teaching and research activities needed to adapt to the changing demands of society - in other words, the labor market. Furthermore, the new knowledge economy required improved performance and competitiveness or a rationalization of public expenditure. Whatever the reasoning, by adapting to a particular political-economic model (Ferreiro 2010) of education, the structural measures brought about by the reforms have fundamentally altered the meaning of university education in Spain (Narotzky 2016). Any attempt to understand this new model should not view these university reforms and the politics of knowledge in isolation from its sociohistorical context or “generalize the neoliberal process as if it developed in the same way everywhere”.2
This article explores the main transformations and foundations of the new political-economic model of public universities in Spain. Specifically, it focuses on two dimensions of the institutional framework that have had a special impact on teaching and research practice in Spanish universities: the strategic focus of research policy and labor regulations and employment conditions. To address both dimensions, the analysis centers on the implications each has for the reproduction of a specific discipline, social anthropology, in the context of a particular setting: University of Seville.
The intention of the article is to provide a critical reflection that can inform future ethnographies on the organization of work, forms of precarity and the politics of knowledge production in universities (Pérez and Montoya 2018). In this respect, the analysis is not based on empirical research, rather its arguments draw on information from various sources, including personal experience, a review of relevant publications and secondary data. In terms of my direct experience of the questions at hand, I have worked at the University of Seville since 2004, during which time I have been employed in seven different labor categories, including two scholarships and five labor contracts,3 until I became an associate professor (profesor titular) in 2022, the second of three levels of tenure in Spanish universities.4 Secondly, I draw on my experience participating in collective organization and struggle and on the representative bodies for Teaching and Research Staff (TRS) in the University of Seville.5 On the one hand, this involved participation in two assemblies (the Substitute Interim Professors Assembly and the Postdoctoral Students Assembly) that were formed in response to labor precarization and fragmentation brought about by LOU legislative reforms as well as mobilizations organized by other collectives (ADIUS,6 University and Social Commitment, the Interim Assistant and Junior Tenured Professors’ Assembly). On the other, I have been a union delegate and a member of the Workers’ Council for Teaching and Research Staff since 2014.7 Finally, I also conducted on a review of relevant literature and sources of secondary data.
While the article limits its focus to structural processes and conditions, future ethnographic research could explore these through representative samples and a systematic analysis of the embodied experiences of the social agents involved. As a researcher specialized in the anthropology of work, mostly in the agriculture sector, I can relate to critiques of anthropology for its lack of introspection and its tendency to ignore the various forms of exploitation, domination and dispossession suffered by university researchers and teaching staff.8
University of Seville is a leading public university at both regional and national level in Spain. My decision to focus on this university relates to my employment in the institution and my standing as a union delegate. Nevertheless, while considering the specific case of this university, it is important to take into account that there are significant differences between autonomous regions and even between individual universities despite the political and legislative framework being developed nationally. On this occasion, in an attempt to understand the particularities of different scientific fields, I examine the specific implications of this political-economic university model for the reproduction of social anthropology - my own discipline.
The neoliberal restructuring of public universities in Spain and repercussions for social anthropology
Based on the higher education system of English-speaking countries, such as the United States and England, the Bologna Process embodies the neoliberalization of third-level education that is setting in across the world. As studies from Mexico (González Casanova 2000), England (Shore and Wright 2016) and Spain (Galcerán 2010) reveal, this transformation is framed within a wider strategy of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that has been adopted by many governments. In Spain, the publication of University Report 2000 - also known as the Bricall Report - and the meeting of the European Council in Lisbon in 2000 represent key turning points in the positioning of the Spanish public university system towards economic competitiveness, advances in ICTs and an increased focus on education to fulfill labor market needs. Under the slogan “Towards an Europe of innovation and knowledge”, the Lisbon strategy proposed “a radical overhaul of the education system in Europe” to adapt to a changing society:
“If Europe is to become the world’s most competitive economic area, it is also important to improve research conditions and create a more favorable climate for entrepreneurship […] the Commission also wishes to see a real spirit of entrepreneurship developing in Europe. The completion of the internal market is another priority arising from the Lisbon summit of 2000 and remains a priority in 2005. In its conclusions, the European Council called, inter alia, for the Member States, the Council and the Commission to do their utmost to achieve liberalization in specific sectors (gas, electricity, postal services, transport, etc.).” 9
This strategy makes sense in a political-economic model of a society based on market globalization; a belief that technological innovation equates to progress; profitability and competitiveness as key objectives; the principles of efficiency, excellence and quality; the subordination of public policies to the interests of the market; the privatization of public services or their functioning within the logics of business management; and the segmentation and precarization of the labor market.
In order to understand the specific forms that this political-economic model has taken in the academic arena, the next section looks at some of the main transformations that have resulted from Spain’s convergence with the European Higher Education Area. Of particular importance are the passing of the national Organic University Law (LOU) in 2001 and its respective adaptation by Spain’s autonomous regional governments. Specifically, the article examines forms of neocolonialism and the business logic that is driving new research policy as well as the processes of fragmentation and precarization of work that underpin university employment policy. By attending to these aspects of the model, I will also consider the repercussions in the field of social anthropology for what Pablo González Casanova (2000) has termed “the new university”.
Research policies: business logic and academic neo-colonialism
The race to be among the elites of the world’s universities
“The University of Seville is awarded more research grant money than any other in Andalusia. For every three euros that comes into the region from the Horizon 2020 research program, we win one euro. We are also ranked third in Spain for winning national grant applications. The impact index for our publications is significantly higher than the Spanish and European average and we are the leaders in Spain for international patents and second in Spain for national patents.” (Miguel Ángel Castro, rector of the University of Seville)
In this interview, published on the October 27, 2019, in the newspaper Diario de Sevilla, Miguel Ángel Castro, rector of the University of Seville, defines - and defends - the objectives of the “new university”. Two points in particular stand out: the acquisition of finance through competitive grant processes and quantitative outcomes based on the number of patents and high-impact scientific publications. These objectives, or measures, are in turn part of a strategy to internationalize research. His words also reflect the fact that the underlying logic of universities efforts to achieve these goals is the competitiveness of the (neo)liberal economy.
As well as universities individual development plans, a number of laws - the Organic Universities Law (6/2001), the Science, Technology and Innovation Law (14/2011) and the Andalusian Universities Law (15/2003) - set out the regulatory frameworks and the basis for recapitalizing public universities through national and international calls for funding applications and public-private partnerships. This policy has been established in an institutional context where public services must be efficient, profitable and productive and, to a large extent, self-financed.
In parallel to these changes, public spending on research and development (R&D) has also decreased in Spain, provoking the Science Marches in Madrid in October 2019. The protestors denounced the gap between the percentage of GDP allocated to research in Spain (1.2%) compared to that of many other European countries, where it stands at around 2%. This data suggests that the drastic cuts to R&D, justified as necessary economic measures under the austerity program that followed the 2008 economic crisis, were in fact structural adjustments rather than cyclical. In this respect, the Organic Law 2/2012 on Fiscal Stability and Financial Sustainability and Royal Decree-Law 14/2012 on urgent measures for rationalization of public expenditure in the education sector are particularly important. According to a report by the Education Federation of the Workers’ Commission trade union, budget cuts in Spanish public universities were just over 1.5 billion euros between 2010 and 2014, with the total budget falling from 10.1 to 8.6 billion euros over this period, equivalent to 15%. In the University of Seville, the budget was cut from 83.8 million euros, falling from 473 to 389.1 million euros between 2010 and 2014 (Comisiones Obreras 2015: 11-12).10 As Raúl Lorente warns, these cuts were accompanied by another measure that brought about a major structural change to the financial model of the education sector:11 a significant increase to university fees, making Spanish public universities one of the most expensive in the Europe Union. This signaled a gradual shift towards funding by service users (students) (Castillo and Moré 2017). These changes were met with a long cycle of mobilizations and general strikes in education.
We cannot forget, however, the long history of academic precarity in Spain, which has taken different forms according to the particular historical period and university system in place. As Susana Narotzky has observed, while “hierarchies of patronage dominated the scarce avenues towards stable tenure” during the mid-1970s, “precarity, now, is part of an austerity regime that has reduced public education resources”.12 As we will see shortly, the neoliberal regime has combined with local power networks, which persist under the new regime.
In practice, the race to be among the elite of the world’s universities is a mechanism for differentiating between well-funded and well-resourced centers of excellence and those that are undervalued (Galcerán 2010). It is important to bear in mind that, unlike the model in the United States and England, the Spanish system is not characterized by acute imbalances between public universities, although this is slowly changing. Public universities are also held in greater esteem than their private counterparts and have traditionally received more institutional and economic support. As well as the recent proliferation of private universities, it is noteworthy that the university ranking systems (such as Shanghai and Times Higher Education) are becoming increasingly influential and contributing to imbalances in the system. To illustrate how this differentiation mechanism works, we can examine the content of the banner displayed on the University of Seville’s website in 2019, which highlighted the following six key achievements:
“(1)Campus of International Excellence: Andalusia Tech is the only southern European Campus of Excellence in the top international category; (2)cultural leadership: the Centre of Cultural Initiatives of the University of Seville (CICUS) has energized the cultural panorama of the Andalusian capital; (3)research excellence: in terms of funds acquired for research, the University of Seville is among the top seven Spanish Universities; (4)internationalization: the University of Seville is wholly dedicated to the internationalization of research and education; (5)knowledge transfer: the University of Seville ranks third among Spanish Universities in terms of patents acquired over the course of the last decade and has contributed to the creation of 50 technology-based companies; (6)third ranked university in Spain for patents: as data from the Spanish Office for Patents and Brands shows, the University of Seville ranks third in Spain for patents registered by its researchers.” 13
These six achievements show that, in addition to fundraising, the race to be positioned at the vanguard of academia is now based on measurable outcomes, or indicators, of knowledge transfer. This change is also evidenced in the incorporation to state research policies of a productivity subsidy called the Six-Year Knowledge Transfer and Innovation Scheme. A review of the evaluation criteria for this scheme reveals how the first and second indicators in particular are shaped by business logic:
“1. Knowledge transfer through the training of researchers (number of people hired for Research, Development and Innovation projects; industrial and/or business theses directed; people trained in entrepreneurial culture: number of people in “Startups and Spin-offs”); 2. transfer of knowledge through activities with other institutions (temporary contracts in external entities and membership of highly relevant committees); 3. transference that generates economic value (royalties and license fees; participation in contracts and projects with companies, other organizations and public administrations; partnering in “spin-offs”; number of patents); 4. transference generating social value (agreements and/or contracts with non-profit entities or public administrations for activities with special social value; dissemination of publications: reports for social agents, protocols, clinical guides, codes of practice, creative or cultural products, translations, participation in the development of laws and regulations).” 14
Another indicator that occupies a central place in this conception of excellence and internationalization relates to publications in high-impact journals and publishers. Like other governments, Spain’s public policies have adopted the dominant quality indicators of English-speaking countries, in particular the use of bibliometrics and impact factors for scientific journals (such as Journal Citation Reports [JCR] and Scimago Journal Ranking [SJR]) and books (Scholarly Publishers Indicators [SPI]). Although they began in the fields of natural and experimental sciences, these indexes are now widespread in social and human sciences in Spain. However, this system has been questioned on a number of fronts, not least the basis of drawing a direct relationship between the importance, quality and real influence of a publication and the number of citations it has received or the quality of a researcher’s curriculum and the number of articles they have published in high-impact journals.15
As a result of concerns about the widespread misuse of indicators in the evaluation of scientific performance and the obsession of universities with their position in global rankings, a group of researchers specializing in bibliometrics published the Leiden Manifesto in 2015 (Hicks et al. 2015). Among the ten principles the manifesto sets out, the following five are of special interest (277-279):
“1. Quantitative evaluation should support qualitative, expert assessment. 2. Measure performance against the research missions of the institution, group or researcher. […] No single evaluation model applies to all contexts. 3. Protect excellence in locally relevant research. […] This pluralism and societal relevance tends to be suppressed to create papers of interest to the gatekeepers of high impact: English-language journals. 6. Account for variation by field in publication and citation practices. 7. Base assessment of individual researchers on a qualitative judgment of their portfolio.”
In spite of these recommendations, the evaluation of research quality continues to be reduced to the number of articles published in high-impact journals and publishers. This is evident in a wide variety of agencies and contexts at national and regional level in Spain, including in (a) the scales applied in public competitions for access to university teaching posts and postdoctoral contracts by the National Agency for Quality Evaluation and Accreditation (ANECA) and its respective agencies in regional governments;16 (b) in the criteria of the National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI), integrated within the ANECA; (c) the criteria for evaluating research activity that qualifies professors for salary supplements; and (d) in many competitive calls for access to funding.
To illustrate the growing influence of this approach, we can examine how research activity in Spanish universities is evaluated and subsequently used to stratify teaching staff. Firstly, to have a six-year period of research activity validated in anthropology, the evaluation criteria are limited to five publications in high-impact journals and publishers.17 Similarly, research activity that is considered valid for access to salary supplements must also be in high-impact journals. Furthermore, the University of Seville’s scale for hiring assistant, adjunct and interim professors - the lowest step of the teaching hierarchy - rates an article in a JCR or SJR journal eight to 24 times higher (depending on the ranking of the journal) than an article not published in one of these journals or twice as much as teaching a core degree course (six points for subjects lasting 60 hours).
Along with the limitations of quantitative metrics and the use of rankings as a basis for evaluation, Manzano-Arrondo (2017) argues that a model based on journal citation ranking is self-reproducing (at individual and university level) as it operates on two levels or circuits: firstly, one that includes those who manage to get into the system (a number of articles in high-impact publications results in more positive evaluations and a greater capacity to obtain funding, reduce teaching hours and increase research activity), and a second circuit made up of those who are excluded and therefore cannot gain access to the resources that would permit them to compete with those in the first circuit. As such, the system reproduces inequalities and mechanisms of differentiation.
Faced with this scenario, it seems pertinent to question the repercussions of new research policies in the field of social anthropology, the conditions under which anthropological practice is integrated into this institutional framework, and the consequences it is having on ethnographic method, one of the pillars of the discipline.
Anthropological practice in the new institutional framework
The dichotomization of universities discussed above has also extended to areas of knowledge and research methodologies. The disparate value given to basic and applied research is paralleled by a growing hierarchy between the experimental sciences, life sciences, medical sciences, health sciences and engineering, perceived as the engine room of the new university, and social sciences and humanities, believed to be less productive and relevant (Heatherington and Zerilli 2016; Narotzky 2016).
The focus of the aforementioned criteria of the National Commission for the Evaluation of Research Activity (CNEAI) or the six achievements highlighted by the University of Seville on its homepage substantiate the differential position that some areas of knowledge occupy in the evaluation systems. For example, the structuring of the CNEAI criteria, the area of knowledge transfer, excludes researchers in anthropology from obtaining higher research positions through positive evaluations in the six-year research evaluation periods. To receive a positive evaluation, research contributions must be relevant to two of the four evaluation areas, however only one area (transfer generating social value) is accessible for social anthropology. The indicators that measure non-academic impact and the quality and success of social anthropological research also highlight the problems that can occur when simplified distinctions are made between supposedly good or bad impact (Mitchell 2014).
For a discipline such as ours, whose teaching and research practice is very distinct from the world of patents, spin offs, research contracts with private companies or technology parks, the possibilities of accessing finance, gaining recognition and being involved in decision-making are marginal - in Spain, at least. From this point of view, the under-representation of social anthropology among the bodies that decide academic policy - university governance committees, research commissions and social councils - is coherent.18
In addition to the stated effects, we must also consider the repercussions for social anthropology of the tendency to reduce the notion of research activity to scientific articles published in high-impact journals. Most significant is the displacement of monographs and, with it, the weakening, if not the disappearance, of ethnography in publications. The profound consequences of this policy for social anthropology is illustrated by a number of other shifts: the new regulations that promote doctoral theses through compendium of publications in high-impact journals; the evaluation systems for R&D projects, which have gone from requesting an ethnographic report on research to demanding only results measured in impact publications, international congresses or knowledge transfer activities; the undervaluation of monographs in the evaluation criteria for public tenders and their exclusion from the productivity criteria that count for salary supplements (with the exception of monographs in the first third of the SPI rankings). The effects of reduced word counts and article formats in the high-impact journals must also be considered, in particular the limitations they place on the proper development of ethnographic methodologies. Finally, given that there are relatively few social anthropology journals ranked in the first two quartiles and a large number of works produced, many authors are forced to submit their articles to journals that are less receptive to ethnographic analysis.
This situation corresponds to the analysis of other authors, who have concluded that the neoliberal university model is based on an emerging business culture (Heatherington and Zerilli 2016; Galcerán 2010; Mitchell 2016; Shore and Wright 2016)19 that transforms the objectives, logics, roles and working conditions of academia as well as subjectivities; modify ideas, values, beliefs, desires, aspirations, motivations, pleasures, how we relate to each other and our very identity.20 In other words, it fosters a business culture of values and practices linked to excellence, individualism, entrepreneurship and competition and a system focused on the creation of innovative and quality products that favors competitiveness and positioning in the rankings. In its effort to quantify the output of a deeply qualitative discipline, the result is a profound shift away from the foundations and roots of social anthropology by modifying the types of research being conducted and the conditions under which such research is carried out (Knowles and Burrows 2014).
In a context where English has become the hegemonic language of high-impact journals and publishers, another concern is the reproduction of central/peripheral power relations and the loss of diversity in the production, dissemination and access to scientific knowledge. Manuscripts published in high-impact journals must conform to the structure, format, epistemological frameworks and research agendas of English-speaking countries. An analysis of the bibliographies of published articles confirms a clear predominance of publications from the United States and England, which along with France - though to a lesser degree - also occupy the highest positions in the university rankings. It is evident that the new institutional framework reproduces, under new forms, old power relations between hegemonic and subordinate centers of anthropological production.
This strengthening of academic neocolonialism corresponds to Mexican anthropologist Esteban Krotz’s conclusion that academic evaluations constitute, in practice, “coercive models of planning, research and communication of knowledge from northern institutions and assumed as universal” (Krotz 2018: 74). As Eduardo P.Archetti (2009) reminds us, the establishment of an international anthropology has usually been a matter for the center. Based on Takami Kuwayama’s analyses, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar (2009) point to “a world-system of anthropology” which, among other things, relates to the way that the peer evaluation system reinforces the hierarchical center/periphery relations articulating the policies of production, dissemination and knowledge consumption.21
Reversing this trend, creating new conditions and promoting diversity and communication between the empirical and theoretical production of anthropologists from all over the world is precisely the goal pursued by the World Anthropologies Network (García Acosta 2009; Ribeiro and Escobar 2009; Narotzky 2009). While condemning the relations of domination in the current context of globalization, this network is also aware of the opportunities that it offers to promote balanced exchanges that accommodate heterogeneity - a value that is highly important to the discipline. Confronting these imbalances and creating new conditions for the production and dissemination of knowledge means addressing another key dimension of the new university: labor and employment policy and the imbalances it generates.
Labor policies: fragmentation and precarization of work
An academic career or an obstacle race?
An examination of labor policy in the new universities first requires an analysis of how the introduction in 2001 of the Organic University Law (LOU, 6/2001), which replaced the University Reform Law (LRU, 11/1983), resulted in the fragmentation of Teaching and Research Staff (TRS). In Andalusia the national law was implemented through the Andalusian Universities Law (15/2003). This reform resulted in a highly complex TRS structure that created two basic categories: TRS-civil servant and TRS-contract, and further segmenting TRS-contract.22 In order to understand this new panorama, it is necessary to take into account that labor precariousness goes beyond the type of employment contract and is affected by diverse factors.
The former LRU system differentiated TRS according to salary, stability of position, position in the staff hierarchy (based on years of service and type of contract),23 rights to claim salary supplements, access to management positions and promotion pathways.24 The new system adds to this complexity by introducing a vertical structure based on multiple types of employment contracts. The following data, from the University of Seville, illustrates how fragmented and imbalanced compensation for TRS in public universities is: almost 40 percent of all TRS-contract staff are on temporary contracts; the TRS-contract category is sub-divided into ten distinct types of contract; the majority of temporary employment contracts exclude any right to claim salary supplements for teaching or research activity; if lack of access to salary supplements is taken into account, a full-time Interim Substitute Professor may earn less than half the salary of the permanently employed professor they are covering.
This vertical and segmented structure is sustained by a number of mechanisms: the majority of employees occupy precarious positions on temporary employment contracts; promotion pathways are limited, heterogeneous and imbalanced; and the pressures associated with productivity, the toughening of evaluation criteria and their constant modification. This spiral of precarity tends to be naturalized (Téllez 2018) and obliges us to shed light on the enormous quantity of hidden work that is conducted outside of academic working hours and spaces (Castillo and Moré 2017).
Furthermore, the complexity of the system resides in various peculiarities of the new Spanish university, such as: the neoliberal organization of labor (segmentation, flexibility, precariousness, temporality and productivity); technocratic logic (excellence, efficiency and meritocracy); and characteristics inherited from the previous academic model (position in the teaching hierarchy, clientelism, nepotism, and hierarchies based on the power of the tenured professor). In this respect, “local patronage networks are still very much in place” 25 and the academic precariat relies on invitations, benevolence and charismatic power for scientific visibility and access to employment (Ferreira and Stoica 2022: 8). I agree with the criticism levelled by the Indocentia collective 26 in relation to the political and media use of the discourse of endogamy to justify the reforms that promote neoliberal labor deregulation:
“[they never intended to] provide security to more precarious positions, which would remove their dependence on local powers and undermine a relational logic built on clientelist networks that have not only survived but have adjusted perfectly to new productivist and ‘meritocratic’ demands.” 27
This rhetoric has also led to a loss of prestige for university professorship, as evidenced in the labor and life trajectories of university professors recounted in Castillo and Moré (2017: 105, 133). Precisely because education reforms have failed to follow the path identified by the Indocentia Collective, the everyday clientelist and endogamic circuits in many university departments worsen uncertainty and vulnerability. This is particularly the case for those seeking employment who are not part of these local networks or who have not been earmarked for posts or had posts created for them. Even after achieving the merits required by neoliberal rationality, individuals may still be excluded from accessing posts and/or promotion based on the principles of equality, merit and ability. Relational capital, chains of favors, loyalty and corporatism are key elements in this field of power.28
An examination of the new University of Seville regulations and merits scale, approved in 2019, for the hiring of assistant, adjunct and interim professors helps to understand this issue.29 The discussion and negotiations around the regulations and the merit system, in which the Workers’ Council participated revealed the tensions between the old and the new university, differences between disciplines and the multiple forms of labor precarity that exist. To explore these tensions, I will briefly focus on three of the changes introduced.
Firstly, we can consider the role of affinity coefficient in the merit scale, which allows the evaluation committee to rank a merit (for example, an article) as having low or high affinity with the teaching post. The new regulations establish that the affinity coefficient must be applied to each merit individually, not by section (for example, publications, professional qualifications, etc.), and that it should not be applied to some merits. The aim was to regulate the use of the coefficient and avoid abuses by some hiring committees to the benefit of specific candidates and detriment of others.30 However, the implementation of the new merits scale has not eradicated this practice, which remains decisive in hiring committees’ evaluations. Secondly, with the objective of favoring the principles of equality, merit and ability, the new regulations established that starting positions in the university (assistant professors) should be offered as generic positions in the area of knowledge (for example, Social Anthropology) and only under exceptional and justifiable circumstances would a position be offered for an assistant professor with a specific profile of research or teaching background. Indeed, the vast majority of positions advertised by the university over the last few years do not detail any specific characteristics for the post. A third change to the merits scale relates to a detailed description of individual merits that aims to promote meritocracy and objectivity. This change was preceded by another, aimed at promoting transparency: the publication of the merits awarded to all candidates. While recognizing that some advances have been achieved with this measure, the detailed breakdown of the merits scale has created a cumbersome procedure and excessive work for both candidates and hiring committees. In addition, subjectivity continues to affect the evaluation, either because certain merits are not objectively measurable or because certain committees are unwilling to adapt to the new concepts.
Increasing fragmentation, precarity and job instability can also be related to a significant growth in the volume of work (in teaching, research and administration) and the increasing variation of academic responsibilities.31 This dispersion and overload of work is even worse for those professors in the highly precarious position of juggling part-time contracts in different universities. Furthermore, in contrast to other public university models that offer the possibility of choosing between a teaching or research focused career pathway, Spanish universities offer full-time positions with both teaching and research responsibilities. A brief look at the daily reality of university departments reveals the contradictions in this system and the inherent difficulties this supposes in adopting the education reforms. Of particular note is the self-defeating nature of a pursuit for quality and an increased workload. If this tension is articulated within the vertical staff structure it becomes clear how employment precarity in the university takes shape.
The emphasis placed on quality, improvement and innovation clashes with evaluation systems and regulations that encourage a view among staff that being assigned more teaching hours for not researching or for not doing so according to the established criteria is, in effect, a punishment or an extra burden (Indocentia 2017).32 The new regulations, or criteria, governing entitlements for reductions in teaching hours establish the following areas of activity as valid: the number of validated six-year research periods (sexenios), direction of R&D projects, direction of doctoral theses and holding certain management positions (department director, secretary, master’s coordination). These criteria, which only evaluate a part of academic work, are oriented to TRS in stable employment positions, while the greatest workload falls on TRS in temporary or unstable employment contracts. Non-permanent staff do not have the right to apply for six-year research periods, can rarely be principal investigators of R&D projects for European calls, cannot direct training grants for teaching staff or doctoral theses and cannot take on management posts (such as department director or secretary).
Additionally, it is necessary to take a closer look at the implications of combining the logics and regulations of the current model with those inherited from the previous system. Of particular importance is the teaching hierarchy used by the majority of departments to organize the teaching assignment plan. In practice, when combined with the new regulations that permit a reduction in teaching hours to compensate for research activity, this means that teaching staff in more precarious and unstable categories have to take on a greater number of teaching credits and have less - or no - possibility of choosing subjects and timetables. Furthermore, TRS in more precarious positions have to deal with a greater diversity of subjects, types of degree courses and moving between more campuses. The difficulty of balancing timetables, lack of continuity and the preparation of new subjects clash with academic policies that demand an accelerated pace of research in order to achieving employment stability through public competitions and accreditation processes. For teaching staff in these categories, an academic career has become an obstacle course that generates low job satisfaction as well as negative impacts on health (Santos, Muñoz-Rodríguez and Poveda 2015), leading to growing disengagement. As Henry Noll (2019) observes, the new methods for evaluating research and teaching share similarities with Taylorist methods for the scientific organization of labor; their effects are not only associated with the impoverishment and the standardization of research work and teaching, but they are a management mechanism that impedes the articulation of collective action in response to the intensification and precarization of work.
Anthropological work in the context of the drive for excellence, speed and quantity
As in other labor markets, employment regulations determine how work is conducted. In the productivist context of the new university, significant increases in management, teaching and research workload, along with shorter deadlines, come into conflict with the slow pace and extended timeframes required for ethnographic fieldwork in anthropology. These conditions make it increasingly difficult to immerse oneself in the field, to build relationships of trust with informants, to develop an in-depth knowledge of social reality, to take a holistic approach to socio-cultural phenomena, to analyze empirical data thoroughly and to remain up-to-date on scientific knowledge (Méndez 2019). Accentuating this problem is the requirement by many universities for teaching responsibilities to be carried out during both four-month academic terms.33 For disciplines such as social anthropology, the possibility of concentrating teaching in one term facilitates extended periods of fieldwork, especially when this requires the researcher to travel.
In the case of TRS, conditions are even worse for those who occupy the lowest positions on the teaching scale. They encounter greater obstacles to long-term fieldwork due to increased teaching hours, a wider diversity of subjects to cover, a lack of continuity in the subjects they teach and pressure to obtain measurable results for the new evaluation system. If, as Esteban Krotz (2018) suggests, it is necessary to ask why the huge increase in publications,34 seminars and congresses also corresponds with a reduced impact on society, then we have to consider if the quality of research has been affected by the limitations of the new system.
Addressing this issue, the Charter of de-excellence was published by a collective of French and Belgian researchers in 2014 (L’Atelier des Chercheurs 2014). The document analyses the impact on the quality of academic activity since excellence, a neoliberal and business management ideology developed in the 1980’s, was introduced to academia through the Bologna Process and became a cornerstone of administration processes in European public universities. Concerned with the deterioration of teaching and research activity in universities, the charter addresses issues central to the reproduction of social anthropology in that it calls for both a slowdown - “slow science” - and refocusing on values that foster quality. As part of a broader series of principles against productivist and utilitarian knowledge production, the paper calls for university researchers to “not submit to the obsession of productivism in terms of publication”. In practice, this means, among other things, encouraging “publication deadlines that are long enough to allow for quality writing,” drawing “the attention of young researchers to the dangers of an ideology of excellence that gives priority to quantity and speed over content” and creating the conditions that protect long research projects from discrimination (L’Atelier des Chercheurs 2014: 6-7).35
The pace of work, labor conditions, pressure for measurable outcomes for evaluation systems and diminished public impact are all related, in turn, to another characteristic of the new university model: growing specialization and fragmentation. In 1980, a few days before the 79th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropologist Association, Eric Wolf published an article in the New York Times in which he expressed serious concerns. In particular, he focused on the fragmentation of anthropology into ever more diverse fields (and subfields) of specialization that had little communication between them and an increasing detachment from the roots of the discipline.36 It has been more than four decades since Wolf’s reflection and the current academic model would seem to confirm his concerns as specialization and competition between fields has become firmly rooted (Narotzky 2016),37 taking anthropology in the opposite direction to the integral and humanist characteristics of preceding university models.
Developing a specialized curriculum requires more and more funding and the most precarious teaching categories are occupied by those that find it most difficult to obtain finance. In the last decade, it has become relatively normalized for TRS to bear the economic costs of creating a curriculum that meets the new evaluation criteria. The high level of employment precarity that young researchers in particular have to cope with are apparent if we consider the burden of taking on the cost of specialist translation into English (an average of 1.500 euros per article if revisions are included), participating in international congresses (an average of 300 euros for registration, plus accommodation and travel) or international stays (quite frequently self-financed). In his critique of a model that fails to consider the economic resources of the researcher or their institution, Vicente Manzano-Arrondo (2017) analyzed the economics of the business of scientific publishing at a global level. Payments by authors or their institutions to publish articles in scientific journals (open access article processing charges) generated 182 million dollars in 2012, with an annual growth rate of 34%. Furthermore, it is estimated that this form of publishing will represent 20% of income from scientific publications by 2020 (Björk and Solomon 2014, cited in Manzano-Arrondo 2017: 6). In 2021, the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) reached an agreement with the publishers Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and ACS to unify processes for accessing and publishing academic articles for Spanish universities. Together, these four publishers receive an average of 45 million euros per year (170 million euros covering a four-year period from 2021 to 2024), which includes the cost of publishing around 12,000 articles each year.38 In practice, however, the agreement only covers around 10% of the papers published annually in Spain.
In this respect, it should be remembered that the largest companies in the publishing world, Thomson Reuters and Elsevier, also create and publish the journal ranking systems, which are then used by public bodies for evaluation and grant purposes.
While the adaptation of universities to the neoliberal economic and political model does not have to result in their complete privatization, it is sufficient that the measures they have adopted over an extended period of time leads to them functioning as a business (Galcerán 2010). In addition to putting knowledge, resources and public infrastructure at the service of the private sector (Ferreiro 2010), universities are transformed into spaces subject to the mechanisms of finance, the logics of performance and productivity and fully capitalist labor practices (Rodríguez 2003). In other words, a productive space whose objective is the exploitation of research and education or “putting the University to work” (Rodríguez 2003: 59).39 As Esteban Krotz (2018) suggests, the scale of this transformation forces us to look beyond the technical aspects of academic evaluation:
“The increasing imposition on the social and human sciences of forms of planning and conducting research and teaching taken from models developed in the natural sciences and industrial organizations is a type of denaturalization of our sciences that goes beyond the technical problems of academic evaluation.” (2018: 77)
According to Pablo González Casanova (2000), the concept of academic capitalism, proposed by Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, best expresses the restructuring of traditional academic models. That is, the objectives, foundations and relations that configure the “new university”.
Conclusions
The analysis of the political-economic model underpinning the new university in Spain reveals two important lines of inquiry that can help us understand the complexity of the processes of restructuring academia: the particularity of local institutional frameworks and the specific repercussions they have on social anthropology.
As the article argues, these processes do not involve the complete privatization of Spanish public universities, rather the introduction of private sector management logics and systems of organizing work that are based on competitiveness, profitability, efficiency, flexibility, quantitative evaluation mechanisms, rationalization of costs, employment segmentation and precarity. These changes are transforming work culture, types of research and associated objectives, and the conditions under which anthropological practice is carried out. The penalization of long-term fieldwork, unhurried analysis, ethnography and the publication of monographs are some of the most profound implications for anthropology that can be directly linked to the Bologna reforms.
The analysis also reveals how academic restructuring does not result in a total displacement of old models. The institutional framework supporting the new university in Spain combines elements of neoliberal economic organization (hiring systems, performance logics, productivity), a technocratic logic (excellence, meritocracy) and the old university (hierarchies, clientelism). This combination of systems translates into different levels and types of inequality: between territories by maintaining old power relations between hegemonic and subaltern centers of anthropological production; between areas of knowledge by accentuating the already peripheral position of anthropology in the sciences as a whole (from the point of view of financing, recognition, influence and the degree of professionalization); between elite universities, positioned at the top of global rankings, and peripheral universities; between categories of employee, which fragments teaching and research staff by salary, working conditions, hierarchies or entitlement to salary supplements; and, finally, between teachers who manage to gain entry to the upper level of this system and those who do not. These imbalances greatly complicate the academic landscape and condition the reproduction of social anthropology.
