While she was US Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013, Hilary Clinton the 2016 Democrat candidate for presidential office habitually used her private email server to send and receive messages, both personal and concerning affairs of state. She did not activate a state.gov email account for the official stuff, saying that it was ‘for convenience’ as her Blackberry smartphone could only access on account. More than 30 thousand undeleted e-mails were hacked by ‘persons unknown’ and appeared on Wikileaks in early 2016, with more in late October 2016, to become one of several issues central to the 2016 US presidential campaign. This practice was twice exonerated by the FBI, despite her account proving to be insecure and the risk to state secrets.
Hans Thybo, President of the European Geophysical Union and a widely esteemed professor of seismology at the University of Copenhagen, was not so lucky. He was fired by the University authorities, allegedly for using his private email account for work-related issues and advising a postdoctoral fellow that criticising the University’s management was ‘legitimate’. More than 1000 academic colleagues have petitioned the University of Copenhagen to reverse its decision and reinstate Thybo, and his case was central to the lead editorial A creeping corporate culture in Nature of 15 December 2016.
Anyone connected for more than a few years with academic life in probably every university on the planet will be conscious of the spread of a culture of bureaucratic control, corporatism and commodification in what formerly were largely self-governing institutions of higher education and research. The trend is in line with increasing, omnidirectional economic pressures stemming from the aftermath of the 2007-8 global financial crisis. But it is not entirely new. My own experience suggests it is partly a logical outcome of leading academics becoming increasingly prone to saying ‘Yes’; at best simply disengaging from dispute with a growing managerial caste within education and research, at worst by opportunistically joining it. A serious disjuncture has developed between teachers and researchers and the managers and business administrators in institutions of higher education. Symptomatic of this kind of schism was the recent passing of a motion of no confidence in the Vice Chancellors Executive of Britain’s Open University by its unionised academic and academic-related staff, following disastrous bungling of a new means of tuition of its entirely non-residential undergraduates in the current academic year. Those who were to implement the measures were inadequately consulted by the leading managers, most of whom had little experience of how the OU had functioned successfully since it received its Charter in 1969.
In Britain, checks and balances on the requirements of management and faculty historically centred on their Senate, once the primary academic authority of universities, in which all members of both academic and non-academic sectors freely debated and passed judgement on new directions and the abandonment of practices that had been found wanting. In most institutions, the Senate has been reduced since the mid 1980s to a mere fraction of staff, who, after nomination, are elected by the various components of the institution, together with unelected, ex officio, members of senior management. In practice, Senates now generally act as a ‘rubber stamp’ for decisions of the top echelons, much in the manner of business corporations.
Part of the new culture attempts to regulate electronic communications. An example of such an IT regulation states that the institution ‘… may monitor all data, systems and network traffic at any time …’, i.e. it claims ownership of work-related communication. No wonder Hans Thybo fell foul of his university. Should outside pressure persuade the authorities of the University of Copenhagen to reinstate him, that would be a significant blow against what has become an unwholesome aspect of learning and scholarship.
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