The banality of 'restructuring'

After recommending to a friend that she read Erich Fromm's "The Fear of Freedom", I came across a nice collection of "Fromm quotes".. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/erich_fromm.html. The first one struck me as apt for what is happening in education at the moment: "As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.". Managerialism is in full-sway in Universities as they restructure in the light of uncertainty over student fees, and there are numerous reports of a "thick-masked vicousness" being unleashed on academic staff up and down the country. Most often this manifests itself as a game of musical chairs: make everyone re-apply for their jobs, but ensure there are fewer jobs than there are people.

But the 'thicker mask' that managerialism wears in such instances is made from ordinary people doing what appear to be ordinary jobs following procedures determined by senior managers. This makes me think more about Hannah Arendt than Erich Fromm. In 'The banality of Evil' Arendt made a telling analysis of the behaviour of Adolf Eichmann who famously pleaded that he was "only obeying orders". She says:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

She concludes that

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”   

Nobody in Higher Education is evil. But individuals nevertheless become ambitious. Ego clouds their judgement, and as it does so can numb their sensibility to what is right. This is more dangerous at a time when sensibility to what is right is already clouded by the sheer complexity of events. At such moments, and particularly for people in power, becoming part of the mask of viciousness increases its appeal simply as a survival strategy.

Under such circumstances, there is a pathological mechanism that can set in. And with it, I fear, there is a distant but distinct possibility of evil amongst those who "never make up their minds to be good or evil". I think this is where we are now in the world. I am frightened.

Fromm would identify in the pathology the failure of individuation - the "Fear of freedom" and the choice of the herd rather than a radical realisation of self through creativity. Ironically, the real mess we are in is only revealed when we consider that the route to a radical realisation of self is education. I don't think it is an over-statement to say that for this to be happening in education is a human tragedy, and one which will have deep repercussions for our children.

Arendt knew the critical significance of education, and I could not possibly do better than quote her on it...

"Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”