Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at Our Universities

In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic freedom and trade union organisation. The authors of Shaping for Mediocrity not only had front-row seats in the campaign against these mass redundancies, they were in the ring - both as targeted employees and as trade union officers and negotiators. Shaping for Mediocrity tells the inside story of these attacks and the campaign against them. It situates this story within a longer history of struggle to make the university a place where critical thinking is possible, showing how events in Leicester are both reflective of higher education in the UK following four decades of neoliberal ’reform’ and a particularly egregious instance of the increasingly authoritarian management of public institutions such as universities.

David Harvie is a deprofessionalised intellectual. Until 2021 he sold his labour-power to the University of Leicester, where he was associate professor of finance and political economy. He is co-founder of the Institute for Commoning and of The Breakdown Institute. He lives in Leeds, UK.

Gibson Burrell is Honorary Professor of Organisation Theory at the Universities of Manchester, Lancaster and York. He was recipient of the 2014 American Academy of Management OMT Division’s biennial Joanne Martin ’Trailblazer’ award for lifelong contribution to the area and recipient of the Richard Whipp ’Lifetime Achievement Award’ from the British Academy of Management in September 2021. Whilst at the University of Leicester, between 2003 and 2007 he was Head of the School of Management, and from 2003 until 2021 was Professor of Organisation Theory.

Ronald Hartz is Research Assistant at Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. He is interested in organisation and management studies, alternative forms of work and organisation, and the discursive constitution of organisations. Recently, he became interested in the critical exploration of the transformation of higher education.

Geoff Lightfoot was so dismayed by the behaviour of the management at the University of Leicester that he left academia. He now works for Citizens Advice.

Simon Lilley is Professor of Organisational Studies and Management at Lincoln International Business School at the University of Lincoln. He likes it there. Lincoln’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Strategy emphasises ’Respecting academic freedom and valuing excellent research of all forms’. It makes a very pleasant change.