Plastic Fish: the logic of 'management, not science' [republished with a new note from the fishpond]
A swaggering hubris has infected universities, with no end goal in sight.
I am at the Australian National University this week, doing some research. Before the archive opened, I decided to go and visit the plastic fish that occupy the pond outside the Chancellery. The fish, rather like some of the academic staff I have spoken to, appear to have lost the will to live, sharing ANU staff’s overwhelming vote of no confidence in the university’s leadership - a lack of confidence surely shared by everyone in Australia, right now. In the picture I took (below), two fish have retreated to the shallows. One fish is facing the corner, just trying to block out the scandal after damning scandal that, they tell me in their fishy way, is getting frankly boring.
For some fish - and people - it is also really traumatic.
Everywhere, expensive consultants tell them they have to cut jobs. But at the same time, bosses take business class junkets to cope with the stress of being a bad guy.
Here is the thing to remember:
It is no one’s fault but the fuckers running the place. THEY are the ones that have to go.
If you missed it some months back, these fish are a metaphor for the logic of managerial decision making. You can read the original post below.
Original Post Below:
Outside the Chancellery at the Australian National University, there is a pond. The fish that once swam there have now been replaced with plastic goldfish.
Plastic goldfish, so the web tells me, are currently selling at $11.99 for a pack of twelve.
Real goldfish, by contrast, go for anything from $6.41 to $181.17 each, depending on the breed. A dozen of those would cost between $76.92 and $2174.04. If the previous fish were Koi, they cost $50-$250 per fish, so $600-3,000 for twelve.
Then you have to feed them of course - a packet of fish food at Pet Barn would set you back $14.99. I guess it probably lasts a while.
If you are a VIP management type at the Australian National University in Canberra, you probably want to pay someone else to feed the goldfish. Let’s imagine the human fish feeder is on the lowest pay scale. Even if it only took them five minutes a day, this would cost the university $3.59 a day, or around $933 a year. Potentially less than the fish, depending on your breed selection, but still enough for a fairly good coffee maker (or whatever it is VIP management types care about these days).
The maths is incontrovertible:
Plastic goldfish: $11.99
Real goldfish/Koi, including food and labour: $1024.91 - $3947.99
Plastic Goldfish Saving: $1012.91 - $3,936
The correct managerial decision, obviously, is to replace the fish with plastic goldfish. Well done, management.
The only problem being. Well, they aren’t actually fish.
Seems like a metaphor for the university, I quipped in response to the social media post that mentioned it.
Actually, can I use this in a piece of writing? I hope you will, sed Paul Gillen.
Management, Not Science
In the earlier days of the summer break, when I was too tired for anything much, I watched the 2018 Netflix series, Dirty Money. One episode, Drug Short, made me think of universities - though it was in fact about Big Pharma. In particular, the Valeant Pharmaceuticals scandal, circa 2017.
One might suppose that the purpose of a pharmaceuticals company was to provide drugs. Sometimes these drugs are the only thing keeping a person alive. The drugs are kind of important.
The *other* purpose of companies like Valeant, as manager after manager reminds us, is to make a profit. Some are likely to suggest that this is their 'real’ purpose.
A pharmaceuticals company makes a profit by developing new drugs that address health needs in a new way. These can be life changing and life saving.
New drugs are developed by investing in research and development.
But that is boring. And a bit too ‘real’, like you believe in science and hard work and life saving drugs. Out-dated nonsense, obviously. Instead of doing their own actual work, Valeant aggressively purchased other peoples’ research and development. Then they priced these new, life saving drugs at levels that only insurance companies could pay, which they would if they were not paying any attention.
Management, not science, was the mantra.
Specifically, in 2011 Valeant CEO J Michael Pearson said: “We do not bet on science, but on management.” The fact that he was that management is. Well. Telling.
The purpose of all this was not about drugs (or even managerial hubris, probably) but about share prices.
They replaced the Koi with plastic goldfish.
Management, not authentic learning or discovery
‘I hope I get to meet the robot that takes my job’, a wonderful colleague said to me before I left academia. Together we were grappling with that disastrous first semester of AI-produced essays. Ugh. Worst semester ever.
I was still in the middle of all that when I ran into the Vice-Chancellor at a graduation. I mentioned how much of my time this AI stuff was taking. He shook his head. It is the same as contract cheating, he said. It doesn’t affect academic workload. I knew when I was dismissed.
I do *not* want to discuss AI and assessment OMG, not today and not ever. There are enough people doing that. Besides, it really was the same as other kinds of plagiarism and I’d seen enough of that before. I found it despairing. These students were taking history, which surely you only do for love. Why, why, why would you get a robot to do it for you?
But one can hardly blame students for replacing the Koi with plastic goldfish. The plastic goldfish cost-benefit is modelled to them every day. It reduces their becoming to bureaucratised learning outcomes and performance metrics that are likely as deadening to their souls as they are to their morally-deskilled teachers.
Managerial swagger like the one that underpinned the rise of Valeant located value in strategy rather than stuff. Management was the cause of value, not innovative drugs. And value was measured in share price, not lives saved or made better with medicine.
Although few would have the same eye on a share price, Universities have followed this logic too. Strip teaching back to its bare bones, and then hollow it further. Invest in research only to the extent that it enables you to game metrics. Reward staff on the basis of alignment to managerial strategy, which could well include not teaching, or doing research well, or at all. The central ‘product’ of the university is not what running a university is really about, according to this logic. Fulfilling empty, meaningless metrics (turns out it is possible to locate metrics more meaningless than share prices) possibly does require management rather than science.
For anyone there to learn or do research, this is more than a little bit dispiriting. Because making and meeting those metrics are good managerial decisions in exactly the same way as purchasing plastic goldfish.
It is only that. Well. They aren’t actually fish.
Let us imagine that the purpose of the pond was to house fish, but that keeping and sustaining the pond required the support of politicians, taxpayers and the fish themselves. Preparedness to support the pond might start to decline if everyone could see the fish are made of plastic. Any real live fish that found themselves swimming with plastic might also be less and less keen on the pond.
It is kind of existential, actually.
How does it end?
Things did not end well for Valeant. By 2015 Valeant was under serious public pressure, and Pearson said they would move to doing more research and that price increases would be ‘more modest’.
It was not modest (or real) enough. Valeant came under investigation, the share price plummeted and in 2016 Pearson lost his job. In 2017 Valeant sold a bunch of stuff and soon settled a case for less than they expected. In 2019 they also settled a class action with their own shareholders, denying they did anything wrong. In 2020 the SEC charged Valeant, Pearson and other execs, who had to pay some hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
Valeant rebranded as Bausch Health. The web tells me that at least report they had US$2.51 Billion revenue, up 12.15% Y/Y and a nearly 80% increase in net profit.
F*cking capitalism.
I’m not, however, convinced that on their current trajectory, universities will recover quite as well. Perhaps if they chose science (understood in its widest sense), over management (and not in the half arsed way Valeant did in 2015), there might be half a chance. I hope they can work it out before it is too late.
Because, just like those drugs were more real and important than the managerial hubris that denied them to too many people, so is scholarship. There are a lot of things we are facing in the world right now. And plastic fish will not help.
