ABSTRACT
In this chapter we address how university faculty members and students learn to become what they should want to be, their formation as academic subjects that must strategize for and within entrepreneurial universities in their quests for becoming excellent in these turbulent new ecologies. We also address how their decisions and choices are situated in universities that are corporatizing and bureaucratizing in strategic ways that rely upon new kinds of entrepreneurial subjectivities among their members. We also ask how those increasingly entrepreneurial subjects might be altering universities. In the previous chapters, we have repeatedly criticized the idea of a globally uniform neoliberal university and juxtaposed our observations from NTNU and UCLA to demonstrate some of the existing diversity. We continue this effort when we study the formation of academic subjects, recognizing that we are based in distinctly different academic systems. We explored features of the local political economies in Chapter 2 and cultural diversities in Chapter 3. Here, we juxtapose our observations of different regimes of subject formations. In addition to clear differences in the organization of research training and the working conditions of young academics, US universities follow a tenure-track system with continuing individual assessments, while Norwegian universities offer permanent employment without formal assessment once hired into a faculty position. We explore some consequences of this variation. In doing so, we return to the topics of meritocracy and academic citizenship. Meritocracy may be seen to provide an ideological foundation of academic subject formation; its double-bind quality can both motivate and inflict pain (Bateson, 1972/2000). Academic citizenship is acquired; it is a set of practices, civilities, ethics, comportment, and virtues that shapes the way we may influence the becoming processes of others. Good academic citizens are helpful, but academics may also learn to inflict harm upon others as might have been inflicted on us. Thus, we show how radical changes in governance has been facilitated and resisted through the performance of different kinds of strategic mutations of academic subjectivity, co-morphing into outliers, cooperative citizens, and authorities, some of whom coalesce into factions, collaborating with the occupying bureaucrats and corporatists. The co-morphing process is central to understanding how governance and its subjects are co-constructed.
