Page 64 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

62 CHAPTER 3
(Airey, Lauridsen, Räsänen, Salö, & Schwach, 2017). This might not be surprising considering that English is the language of internationalisation (Fabricius et al., 2017). When focusing on the discourse of excellence, it is found that it has been adopted in policies at university level, reflected by words, such as “excellent”, “high- quality”, “world class”, “top” and “prestige”, yet, it did not result in a specific policy with excellence as the main topic. The document analysis shows that excellence and quality are related to research, education, staff and students, research facilities, and support services (e.g. Human Resources, ICT). Excellence, thus, is a multi-purpose adjective, or an empty signifier that can be applied to almost everything (Schinkel, 2017). However, this study finds that the discourse of excellence is only rarely presented in university policies with reference to recruitment and selection of academic staff. Recruiting “new talent” is the language used but ‘talent’ remains unspecified and is not translated into selection criteria. This makes excellence a ‘fuzzy’ concept that leaves room for committee members to select candidates based upon their interpretations
of the concept.
The findings show that the university incorporates the discourses available
in the global academic governmentality regime (Maesse, 2017). This study finds that the university-level criteria related to both internationalisation and excellence are characterised by ‘interpretative viability’: “a certain degree of conceptual ambiguity” (Benders & Van Veen, 2001, p. 37). This is often the case with management discourses, as this leaves room for multiple interpretations, and facilitates organisations to broadly disseminate them (Benders & Van Veen, 2001). Yet, this opens the way for inequality.
Departmental selection criteria
Internationalisation
Within the Natural Sciences department, the discourse of internationalisation shaped formal selection criteria for tenure-track assistant professor positions. A criterion related to foreign experience is formulated as “some years of postdoc experience, also abroad” (Recruitment protocol, n.d., p. 3). This is in accordance with the university’s goal to include “foreign experience” as a selection criterion, yet, at department level, the criterion is made more specific as it refers to the postdoc period, in which the experience should be acquired. Not all job postings adopt the explicit “international” part of this criterion, despite this being documented in the recruitment protocol. As the criterion leaves “abroad” unspecified, there still remains room for committee members to decide whether or not applicants’ experience gained abroad is sufficient.