ABSTRACT
Contemplating early retirement from the hurly-burly of education? Or perhaps already sniffing the push, as a result of managerial ‘rationalization’ of resources, and looking for a career change? Then perhaps we could take Iain Sinclair's (1997, p. 11) advice from the highly educational Lights Out for the Territory, a post-modern guide to some of London's more unsettling subcultures: ‘Dog training, surveillance, security: those are the growth areas, that's where to sink your redundancy packet.’ Disconcertingly, Sinclair's tongue-in-cheek ‘growth areas’ may already describe the territory of Higher Education – as it becomes infected by a behaviourist revival; follows a top-heavy assessment and evaluation programme underpinned by a paranoid, surveillance-led ‘quality assurance’ mentality; and exhibits an institutional obsession with security, in which health and safety concerns seem to create more interest than intellectual risk.
