Employability (again). It’s not about jobs: it’s about “embedding entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum.” That's a quote.

Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about how I was required to spend an hour-long seminar in a history course at my university to teach CVs.  This was my department’s way of conforming to the government’s “Employability Agenda”, which pushes a version of “employability” into academic curricula.  The post is here.  http://sonofsar.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2012-01-01T00:00:00Z&updated-max=2013-01-01T00:00:00Z&max-results=19

A shorter version of the post appeared in the Times Higher Education in March 2013.  Here it is: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/employability-agenda-isnt-working/2002639.article

The THE article in particular evoked some agreement and some critical comment, most of the latter taking one of two lines.  The first and most hostile one claimed that I did not care about students’ job prospects.  I had in fact made clear that I actively support students’ with their employment prospects by clearly explaining  the “transferable skills” I teach on their courses, by spending as much time as students ask for discussing their futures, and by writing the best letters of reference I can.  But such things are often lost on the ideologically enraged.  The second and friendlier line of comment focused on ways in which the embedding of employability that I described could be made a bit softer.

Ironically, it was the first line of commentary that got closest to my point (hence, I suppose, its hostility).  That is, that “employability” is not so much about getting students jobs as about ideologically indoctrinating them to accept modern corporate-capitalist practices as normal.  Now, to be clear, I have no doubt about the perfect good faith of most of my colleagues who are involved in implementing employability in the curriculum, including the one, someone I like and admire very much, who devised the CV seminar.  I just think they’re wrong in thinking that employability is a benign or at least apolitical mission to help students get jobs. 

In the above post and article I made the following points in support of the case that “employability” is actually highly political.  Not party-political (indeed it was introduced by New Labour and has simply been continued by the Conservatives and the other party they’re in government with, the ones who made a cast-iron promise to abolish fees and thereby remove one of the foundation stones of the privatisation and corporatisation of higher education).  But political in the sense that it serves a broader pro-corporate-capitalist ideological agenda by using academic courses to normalise modern corporate business practices and to encourage students to adopt such key facets of ideal modern corporate employee behaviour as interpersonal competition as the means of individual advancement, as opposed, say, to unionism as a means to collective advancement and the general social good.  Or some other set of values that might emerge from universities, were they to continue with their traditional emphasis on free-thinking rather than adopting the employability agenda’s focus on free-market thinking.

I pointed out, for example, that responsibility for universities no longer lies with the Department of Education, but with the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills, and that’s where the “employability agenda” originates.  That if “employability” was about jobs, rather than about using education as a form of indoctrination, universities would be encouraged to invest more in Careers Offices, which employ experts in … employability, rather than being encouraged to “embed” in academic curricula what are actually very particular interpretations of what “employability” is, and that are quite different from the un-ideologically-driven “transferrable skills” that academics have always taught, such as grammar, how to structure an argument, and … critical thinking.  And that indeed the whole clunky vocabulary of modern corporatism (including words like “embed”) is the very language of the “employability” agenda.  (For more on that, see this other post: http://sonofsar.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/cascading-emails-or-bizguistics-and.html.)

You can see these points developed via the links above.  The point of this post is, after admitting that many were unconvinced by my argument that “employability” is deeply political in its inspiration and implications, is to add another piece of evidence that I hope some will find more convincing. 

The other day all staff in my university received an email entitled “Understanding and embedding entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum.” The email identified its audience as follows: “Target Group – All Staff, particularly those involved in curriculum or module design or employability.”  The email offered “a three day course for any member of staff who wants to be able to embed entrepreneurial thinking … into their existing curriculum, and in doing so prepare their students for the highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces of the future.” The course would be “delivered by Professor [Xxxxx Xxxxx], an expert in driving the move towards the Entrepreneurial University.” 

The agenda--“to embed entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum”—could hardly be more clear or explicit.  True, it is voluntary at the moment, at least for academics if not for the students subsequently taught by the ones who volunteer to learn “to embed entrepreneurial thinking.”   But given what this email indicates about how the “employability agenda” is moving forward, so to speak, I wonder how long before such courses are compulsory.  I’ve been told, for example, that I must repeat the CV seminar I first blogged about.  I will because I must, involuntarily.

  

Anyway, contrast the idea of embedding “entrepreneurial thinking in your curriculum” with how most of us in the past were presented with the idea and the point of our higher education.  When I went to university I hoped and was assured that its purpose was to open my mind, to learn critical thinking skills, to think about how the world might be different.  Yes, I would hopefully get a good job afterwards, and I did, but I was never told and never wanted to be told that that was the main point of my education.  And certainly not that I was going to be embedded with entrepreneurialism.  Those who want to be “entrepreneurial” have plenty of chances to be so.  There’s ample opportunity and incentive to become so outside universities, and universities do not stop people being so.  My university education did not try to make me oppose “entrepreneurial thinking”, but nor did it indoctrinate me to accept it.  It was about opening minds, not about closing minds by embedding particular systems of thought.

As for preparing students for the “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces of the future….”: is it now literally the business of higher education to encourage students to accept as givens such modern flexibilities as unpaid internships, zero-hours contracts, short-term contracts, and all the other Dickensian violations of working people’s rights, interests, and well-being that modern corporations have been entrepreneurially bringing back?  Are our students expected to accept these things for themselves, or are we to teach them that it’s fine to impose these conditions on others while pocketing colossal bonuses for doing so?  Are they to be taught, perhaps in Development Studies modules, that when workplaces become too “changeable, flexible and challenging” for first-world legal systems, these conditions can still be imposed on workers in poorer countries whose governments have more entrepreneurial attitudes to pay, conditions, and death  in the workplace?  Are new Geography modules going to focus on identifying off-shore tax havens?  How far will all this go?  The above may seem fanciful to some, but all of these examples of entrepreneurialism are practiced by the same people who are driving the employability/entrepreneurship agenda in our universities.     

If things keep going as they are, then what will soon become fanciful is the idea of teaching students to question the very idea of “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces”.  Of teaching students to think about what “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces” do to individuals, families, communities, societies, and countries.  And of teaching students to think about alternatives to “highly changeable, flexible and challenging workplaces.”  Some of us still engage in this kind of open-minded teaching and learning, but will it still be possible to do so when “the move towards the Entrepreneurial University” is completed?