Can I humbly suggest that academics with secure employment spend less time putting themselves in the shoes of university management and more in those of their junior colleagues? Also, the former are likely to try and sack you, the latter to stand up for you when you're at risk of being sacked.
If you follow me you would know that the people I care about most of all are the most precarious and vulnerable members of our academic communities. But we DO need system-wide analysis and to know in depth what the alternatives actually are to fight job cuts.
I don't doubt that you care about them (us). I just think that accepting the premise that universities can be run like businesses is not helping us. It lets the government off the hook and leaves the door open for a bloodbath of job losses.
I mean, the vast majority of people more or less admit that a market approach has been terrible for rail and water, why wouldn't we be able to make the case that the same goes for higher education?
A point I think it overlooks is how hard it is, even in good faith, to see how a university is working. IME, internal accounting systems and performance dashboards can create a clear and highly misleading narrative of performance/ underperformance, which is a dangerous basis for decisions.
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