Academic workers today are far removed from their ivory tower image. Once eulogised as an other-worldly haven of disinterested intellectual pursuit, free-thought, imagination and scientific breakthroughs, academic labour is becoming increasingly defined by market relations and the managerial conditions under which it operates as paid wage labour. In one sense this is nothing new. Ninety years ago Thorstein Veblen (1918) lamented an earlier commercialisation of universities while in the late 1960s E.P. Thompson (1970), and the New Left more generally, protested against the rise of the ‘industrial university’. It also reflects a tendency in the development of capitalism to deprofessionalise and proletarianise high-status forms of work, or, as Marx and Engels (1998, p 38) put it, to tear the halo from once venerated occupations.

This chapter charts the changing landscape of higher education (HE) in Britain from the point of view of academic labour. It first establishes the deepening of neoliberal priorities and managerial prerogatives throughout the sector. It then considers how this has intensified and proletarianised the academic labour process. Crucially, we argue, the indeterminate nature of academic labour and the active resistance of academic workers themselves limit the extent of their subordination to managerial prerogatives. Finally, we consider the growing militancy of lecturers, illustrated by the industrial action in 2006 over pay.

Higher education under New Labour

With the introduction of tuition fees and the abolition of maintenance grants New Labour signalled their commitment to the socio-ideological preferences of the New Right. In HE New Labour has maintained the regulatory and management regimes introduced under Conservative rule (Deem and Brehony, 2005; Ryan, 2005). New Labour embraced the utilitarian agenda of the New Right that reduces educational value to economic ends and deployed the discourse of globalisation to help naturalise and legitimate neoliberal policies within HE (Cole, 2005). Policies that bear the stamp of New Labour propose a vision of society that has a greater resonance with the political preferences of the New Right than old Labour (Callinicos, 2006). As Brehony and Deem (2005, p 409) suggest, ‘The New Right have gone but the policies that its adherents promoted are alive and well in the guise of new Labour’. Tony Blair's modernisation discourse attempted to ideologically dismantle the social democratic welfare state, advocating instead a ‘new market state under the dominance of private monopoly capital’ (Ainley, 2004, p 508; Cole, 2005, p 4).