The evolution of accountability

Abstract

Campus 2020: Thinking ahead is a policy in British Columbia (BC), Canada, that attempted to hold universities accountable to performance. Within, I demonstrate how this Canadian articulation of educational accountability intended to develop governmentality constellations to control the university and regulate its knowledge output. This research illustrates how power in education is evolving from a disciplinary form, as expressed in the term governmentality, and toward a form of networked power in the form of societies of control. I pursue my analysis by juxtaposing sections of the government report with sections from Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control. The synthesis from these two texts demonstrates how BC’s provincial government intended to develop a network of governmentality constellations which would have maintained and exercised power through macro- and micro-surveillance technologies. In conclusion, I argue that BC wanted to assemble its new accountability machine and finally participate in the neoliberal democratic network of educational surveillance in Canada, and eventually, the world.

Keywords:

• discourse/analysis
• philosophy

Notes

1. The Fraser Institute is a private (libertarian and neo-liberal) think tank with offices in Vancouver (headquartered), Calgary, and Toronto. The Institute is generally interested in developing ‘competitive market solutions for public policy problems.’ For education policy, the Institute specifically intends to develop educational markets in Canada by ranking schools based on test scores.