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Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

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First published online January 22, 2010

Carelessness: A hidden doxa of higher education

Kathleen LynchView all authors and affiliations

Volume 9, Issue 1

https://doi.org/10.1177/1474022209350104

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Abstract

This article explores the implications of new public sector ‘reforms’ for the culture of higher education. It argues that a culture of carelessness, grounded in Cartesian rationalism, has been exacerbated by new managerialism. The article challenges a prevailing sociological assumption that the character of higher education culture is primarily determined by new managerial values and norms. Carelessness in education has a longer historical trajectory. First, it has its origins in the classical Cartesian view of education, namely that scholarly work is separate from emotional thought and feeling, and that the focus of education is on educating an autonomous, rational person, homo sapiens, whose relationality is not regarded as central to her or his being. Second, it is grounded in the separation between fact and value that is endemic to contemporary positivist norms that govern not only scientific and social scientific thought (Sayer, 2006) but the organization of higher education (Grummell et al., 2009a; Lynch, 2006). What is new about new managerialism in higher education is the moral status it accords to carelessness. Given the moral imperative on women to do care work (O’Brien, 2007) and on men to be care-less, the carelessness of higher education has highly gendered outcomes.¹

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1. The author has been a lead investigator in two major studies on the subject of paid work and care and the relationship between the two. Findings from a study of senior appointments in higher education in Ireland suggest that there is a ‘care’ ceiling operating in the workplace which is as powerful and embedded an exclusionary device as the various discriminations that operate to exclude women from positions of authority (Grummell et al., 2009b; Lynch et al., 2006).

2. Care commanders are those who can afford to pay others, or command them via their social and moral power, to do their primary care work for them. Those who are care’s foot-soldiers are those who are morally impelled by society to do their own and others’ care work (women of all classes), and people who must do care work for others to survive (poor people, especially women, including those who are economically vulnerable through migration). Some people would claim that they have no primary care responsibilities, no one dependent on them in any way. While a very small number of people are in this position, many others have no care responsibilities because they have offloaded them onto others (care for elderly parents for example, or siblings in need of care) or because they ignore, or engage minimally with, the care needs of those to whom they are related or connected.

3. The studies involved investigations of seven top-level appointments (at the level of Vice Chancellor, President, Vice-President, Provost, Director) in the higher education sector in Ireland. Three of the cases involved recently appointed male senior managers and an assessor from their selection board, while the others involved recently appointed female senior managers and an assessor from their selection board (except in one case study where the senior appointee was the only person interviewed): 14 interviews in all. The institutions involved include three universities, two institutes of technology, one further education college and one other education body (although these details are generalized to preserve the anonymity of respondents from this small educational field). Similar studies of senior managerial appointments at primary and second level education have also been conducted, and these are analysed elsewhere (Grummell et al., 2009b; Lynch et al., 2006).

4. Care status is referred to as ‘family status’ in Irish equality law (Equal Status Acts, 2000, 2004). It refers not to marital status but to whether the person has primary care responsibility for a dependent person. While care overlaps with gender, it is by no means synonymous with it; care status exercises its own distinct forms of inequality (Lynch et al., 2009). There is a need to disaggregate gendered identities from care identities as the two are not synonymous although they are deeply overlapping.

5. It is an entirely separate question as to whether or not one can be assessed in an educational institution in terms of one’s capabilities for caring and loving — psychologists such as Sternberg claim that it is only through the doing or functioning of things that one can be truly assessed across all spheres.

References

Acker, J. ( 1990) ‘Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations’, Gender and Society 4(2): 139-58.

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