If those of you still reading this thread who have had some experience in the annals of university humanities departments in the last couple of decades will forgive my rehearsal of an old theoretical entrenchment, I would like to suggest that this more or less Foucauldian discussion of power might be well served by adding (note that I said adding ) a little bit of Marx.

Which is to say that what has been happening, of late, to the university is not simply its bureaucratic reorganization on a corporate model, and that the incredibly geeky and arcane struggles for power that happen at departmental meetings are not simply performative for the sake of asserting bruised and outsized academic egos. Presumably, anyway — and as I am constantly reminding both my students and my colleagues, this is written into Foucault's understanding of power relationships — such egos would find ways to perform and reinforce departmental hierarchies regardless of the specific form their interactions must take under this or that model.

The reason why this model, in particular, however, is being imposed on the university more and more right now has to do with one thing — the almost complete incorporation of the enterprise of higher education into the processes of global capital. That means the need for clear metrics of productivity, the transformation of departments and programs into 'profit centers', the reimagination of students as 'consumers', and curriculum that is specifically (and openly) oriented towards training students towards vocational competencies that fit into the current needs of capitalist production. It also means that faculty — whose intellectual and affective labor is far less easy to quantify or monetize — must be assigned tasks that can be counted and evaluated on outcomes that can be measured. Meetings, as Amanda suggests, create a record of 'service', which has become more and more central (psychically anyway) to the tenure chase at least partially because it is counted in hours and tasks which are more easily accumulated than articles and books, the units in which scholarship are counted.

Of course, anyone who has ever labored in a cubicle doing project management and has been told to fill out a task-based time sheet knows that this kind of relationship to corporatist, technocratic logic is hardly limited to the University. And yet it somehow seems more of an affront when we encounter it there. I think that's because we accept, in most cases, that the underlying logic of whatever corporation for which we are laboring at any given time is that of capitalist accumulation, and although we might take personal umbrage at having the complexity of our work reduced to blunt outcomes, we also see that in order for the corporation to continue to be successful and pay our salaries, its management must be able to extract data with which to conduct analysis. The enterprise of higher education, however, is still imagined by many to stand somehow apart.

However we might want to imagine an alternative (and there are lots of different models and they've all got some pretty big conceptual problems), there are some pretty harsh realities about why it has come to be the way it is now, and they start (particularly in the US context) with the massive defunding of universities starting, unsurprisingly, with the Reagan era. Like so many other supposedly social goods, higher education was cut loose to make its own way on the sea of capitalist markets.

There is so much more to say about this — addressing student debt, the relationship between university research and military development, and the exploitation of graduate student labor, to start with — and there are a lot of people talking about it. The best one-man show is Mark Bousquet's website How the University Works, and his book of the same name. Also check out Edu-Factory for an international perspective and information about the growing anti-corporatization student movement. I have already, however, wandered far afield of the original discussion. Nonetheless, I think it's important to realize that the specific corporate bureaucratic model came from somewhere, and it came from there for a reason.

Some academic administrators seem to make a career of such meetings and sucking the rest of us into their vision of the corporate university. Not all administrators, mind you.

As I get older, I've started to judge old textbooks in retrospect by how valuable I've found their insights to be in the years since I first read them, and an excerpt from a text that has repeatedly scored high on that scale is one taken from Stephen Greenblatt's “RENAISSANCE SELF-FASHIONING: FROM MORE TO SHAKESPEARE . Greenblatt extrapolates a memorable telltale sign of power from Thomas More's writings: “the ability to impose one's fictions upon the world.” This holding of ridiculous, free-floating, time-eating meetings that the power figures behind rarely attend is a perfect example of raw, stupid power in action.

If you enjoyed this excellent essay, I especially recommend this brilliant post from Amanda's blog (her blog being linked to from her name in her profile above): “On Leaving the Academy.”

Usually, I do not react well. But today, I was in the meeting with three people with whom I had exchanged and discussed this article and the comments. So, the whistles, and the committee reports, and the discussions of the content of the upcoming meetings (where we will undoubtedly discuss the agenda of the meetings to follow) struck a slightly more comic note. At least, I seethed just slightly less than usual.

If someone whistled at me to indicate time for a meeting, I have a feeling I would not respond very well.

I suppose I probably sound bitter, but I did feel that no one is academia understood the concept of Getting Things Done.

So I admire your determination to change course, and wish you well on the journey.

This is almost always the wrong thing to do. And yet, the mandate is so sincere, open-ended, and philosophically difficult to argue with, that the meeting happens anyway. Since the salesperson who mandated it doesn't understand the problem (and therefore doesn't understand why the meeting is useless), he doesn't attend. The operations people then spend the first half of the meeting trying to determine whether they can trust each other to call the situation what it is. If they do reach this point, then they spend the rest of the meeting collaborating on a report to the salesperson that will a) make the meeting sound productive, and b) ensure that a follow-up will not be deemed necessary.

When I was working at Microsoft, my group had two weekly meetings. One was a departmental meeting with Diane, the executive to whom my manager reported. Outside of these meetings, I never saw Diane. That meeting happened on Wednesdays.

The other meeting happened on Tuesdays. It included everyone that the Wednesday meeting did, except for Diane. The point of the Tuesday meeting was to prepare for the Wednesday meeting. Note that we were not formulating executive summaries, or making sure that all our ducks were in order. Rather, we were rehearsing how to present things to Diane in a way that would make her want to leave us alone.

Also, there are many problems that can be solved much more easily over email, where everyone involved is more or less forced to actually say something of substance. But it's remarkable how often I've heard colleagues – always managers or who are not going to have to do any of the actual work – whine that it would have been much faster to have a meeting. By which they mean, it would have been easier on them, because instead of solving the problem, they could then focus their energies on coming up with creative ways to tell other people to solve the problem.

Perhaps you are free from this at the university level, but some of the most agonizing moments for me are when the commencement of a meeting is signaled by a piercing, obnoxious, only-appropriate-for-herding-cattle whistle.

Worse still, there's hardly any objection to the assertion of that particular kind of authority.

Moan.