This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerade as education as a social good while the ‘university’ itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms.

中文翻译：

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企业动物园

本文提供了永久紧缩时代大学管理角色的类型学。将大学行政部门内的每个职能重新包装为成本中心——当然也意味着潜在的利润中心——长期以来一直被视为一种不可持续的市场模式。然而，它仍然存在，而且我们最好在一个缺乏幽默的凭证主义盛行的地方命名这种受管理的制度重建的双曲线官员。该论文重振了 20 世纪早期社会学家托尔斯坦·邦德·凡勃伦 (Thorstein Bunde Veblen) 的工作和气质，作为一种启发式辅助手段。就凡勃伦而言，国家教育部门的商业规则将教育伪装成一种社会福利，而“大学”本身则被形式的悲剧现实主义所扭曲。