Marketing Academic Authenticities at an international branch campus in Vietnam

Abstract

As neoliberal logics converge with the internationalisation imperative on university campuses worldwide, the nature of what it means to be an academic is changing. In an era when tenured stability in one's home country has become, for many, an unlikely dream, academics are experiencing an increasing need to be globally mobile, while many university workplaces are consequently becoming more multicultural, and more transient, than ever before. This combination of globally transient academics with neoliberal market forces has necessitated new forms of academic labour that are not often accounted for or discussed, either by universities or in the higher education management literature.

This thesis reports on ethnographic research conducted over nine months at an international branch campus of a Western university, located in Vietnam. This campus, I argue, is an extreme case of the aforementioned intersection between the forces of neoliberalisation and globalisation in higher education. By undertaking participant observation; shadowing individual academics for varying periods; conducting interviews with academics, and non-academics; and conducting qualitative content analyses on internal and external university documents, I have attempted to shed some light on the nature and potential extent of these changes to academic labour.

The results of this study demonstrate that academics in a neoliberalised, globalized university are required to produce what I am calling "marketable academic authenticity". That is to say, they are employed not only to teach, research and provide service to their community, but are also expected to make themselves available as marketing materials that can be displayed to demanding potential customers: prospective students and their parents. I argue through the six body chapters of this thesis that the production of marketable academic authenticity via proxy indicators of academic quality and authenticity have come to replace the need for "actual" academic quality, or what most academics would consider to be "authentic" academic work. This production of marketable academic authenticity has one primary goal: to build prestige and have prestige conferred upon the university by a range of stakeholders. However, the university under scrutiny in this thesis has allowed prestige-seeking activities to become their highest priority, over and above the traditional pursuits of developing young minds, creating new knowledge and reproducing disciplines.

Prestige-seeking is primarily carried out by exploiting those assets possessed by the university that are considered to be of most value to their target market. Foremost among these assets is the whiteness of their academics, and the Westernised appearance of the facilities, as proxy indicators of "world-class" quality and "authentic" international education. Of the white academics, the best placed to be indicators of quality are the white male academics, and best of all are white male academics who are most able to produce the kinds of academic professionalism that a Vietnamese market expects - well-dressed, well-spoken (ie. native English speakers), bearing a sense of gravitas (either via age or physical stature), who is also an entertainer in the classroom. While the production of marketable academic authenticity in pursuit of prestige may have been necessary for the university's survival, there have been unintended consequences of these actions, to both the academics of the campus and to the university more broadly - racism, misogyny and other structural inequalities; social and psychological strain and increased cognitive load management; and the creation of toxic work environments, to name but a few.

This study provides a fresh view of the future that highly internationalised, neoliberalised universities may expect if they allow the need to produce marketable academic authenticity to overpower all else.