Governance and conflict in the university: the mobilization of Italian researchers against neoliberal reform

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on neoliberal governmentality in higher education by focusing its analysis on the constitution of conflictual subjectivities. Starting from the hypothesis that resistance is constitutive to any power relation and coextensive with it, the paper problematizes the production of conflictual subjectivities in the structure of governance in universities, through a reflexive analysis of the experience of Italian researchers who mobilized for 10 months in 2010 against a university reform. In Italy, researchers are an important component of academic staff, created in 1980 to carry out research but also to provide essential teaching. The 2010 reform proposed the elimination of this figure. The response of researchers was to refuse to carry out teaching activity, which threatened to paralyze the university system. This reflexive analysis emerges from the need to understand why the researchers’ mobilizations did not succeed in uniting forces within the academy to block the controversial reform. The process analysis of the mobilizations considers the emergence of conflictual subjectivities rooted in governmental technologies that are interconnected together in what I define as a ‘meritocratic-financial’ mechanism. The principal sources for the research are the 4890 conversations held between April and December 2010 in the blogs and mailing lists that accompanied the various struggles and campaigns.