The Constraints of Neo-Liberal New Managerialism in Social Work Education

Universities have been overtaken by corporatization and managerialism. This means they are run like a business with a focus on economic sustainability, viability and business relations, rather than education. Managerialism is a form of restructuring the workforce under neoliberalism (Baines, 2007). Neoliberalism refers to “[a]n approach to social, political, and economic life, that discourages collective or government services, instead encouraging reliance on the private market and individual skill to meet social needs” (Baines, 2011, p. 30). Everyday practices of managerialism involve an intensified control and disciplining of the workforce evident through strategies and surveillance tools such as performance reports and outcome measurements. Like universities, social services are increasingly shaped by these same tactics. According to Chomsky, disciplining workers requires reducing people’s expectations for democracy, social justice, and control over the workplace (2014). The emphasis is on productivity and keeping costs low while taking power away from those who do the work and increasing the power of those in administration. This is true not only of social work academics, but of professionals in the social services and front line social work practice. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has argued that universities are at risk and that we need to resist the corporate control over Canadian higher education (Tudiver, 1999; Turk 2000, 2008). New managerialism has a deeply problematic grip on higher education in Canada. There is a growing pressure for teaching, research, and scholarship to serve the market rather than a broader notion of the public good and the core mission of teaching and research. The CAUT Policy Statement on Academic Freedom maintains that, As such, social work educators need to be vigilant toward administrative demands geared toward the market such as employability, competency-based training and an emphasis on brief cost saving interventions within schools of social work in order to resist rather than contribute to the snowballing impact of managerialism. Under neo-liberal new managerialism we see a disproportionate swelling of university administration. For instance, between 2005 and 2015 at Dalhousie University the number of senior administrators such as vice-presidents and vice-provosts (not including deans and executive directors) was up from eight to 20. Between 2002 and 2015 Dalhousie’s spending on “Administration and General” went up by 150%, and “Facilities Management” by 239%, while spending on “Academic” went up by only 77% (Dalhousie Faculty Association, 2016a). The expansion of management continues to grow while tenure-track faculty numbers decline and universities become dependent on a casualized labour force of contract employees. These limited term and sessional faculty have limited job security. Under new managerialism, governance is top-down, and board decisions are increasingly rubber-stamped by disempowered senates (Findlay, 2014). Gone are the days when collegial governance meant professional administrators such as deans would be part of administration for a period of time and return to the faculty ranks. Today administrators are often not academics or scholars, but pure and simply management. Benjamin Ginsberg (2011) describes this as the growth of the “all administrative university” and the fall of faculty. Chomsky equates current trends with the “Walmart model” centered on part time or contingent workers with few to no benefits. University contract employees are a precarious, vulnerable, and exploited labour force. They are routinely given high teaching workloads and low wages with few benefits. The School of Social Work at Dalhousie is part of the Faculty of Health Professions, which has approximately 40% of all limited term-teaching staff at the university, and this does not include sessionals. During this time of program prioritization it appears our Faculty, like the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is not well valued. Many, if not …