Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics

The theme of academic life in the measured university has felt especially pressing to us. As co-editors, we have aimed to work together in ways that matter to us while still meeting numerous deadlines along the way. In curating this issue, we have shared and savoured many moments of intellectual pleasure together. One that stands out is the precious thrill invited by a slow encounter with a beautifully argued piece. Yet at other times, the editorial work has cast the paradoxes of our own academic lives and workplaces into sharp relief. Like so many others, we wrestle with our location in the measured university: endless cycles of organizational restructure promising liberation from past inefficiencies; our capacities being counted in ways that exclude our participation from the process and the final outcome; and the constant accounting for the worth of our thinking and the quality of our judgements. We are not special: these are the academic lives of many of our colleagues too. Working on this issue together has reinforced all the more that academic life is a peculiar kind of difficult work. It is tough for an outsider to see past the privilege, and even harder for them to empathize with our difficult work. Yet we see this issue as joining a conversation with the many others seeking to make meaning from, and develop alternatives to, what an academic life has become today.

In the time since the 2016 Academic Identities Conference – the genesis of this issue – the politics of higher education have radically altered. Brexit – England’s momentous decision to leave the European Union – happened only a few days before the conference started, plummeting a handful of visiting delegates into unknown futures all the while knowing full well that their academic colleagues back home would be anticipating plights of the very worst kind. Many of us were glued to our devices looking for explanation, analysis and consolation, hoping that the conservative decision would not extend to the US presidential election. We now know the outcome of the latter, and it is clear that universities will be grappling for some time with the consequences of a climate that has reified populism over expertise, and post-truth over evidence and scholarship. It is not that these aspects of sociality and civic discourse are particularly new; rather, it is that elevating their status to high office (and watching their flow through social media platforms) lends them an altogether different posture of credibility and speed that centuries of patient and meticulous inquiry will struggle to keep up with. Indeed, we may see the revitalization of the activist public intellectual and/or we may see the qualities of the post-fact world begin to wheedle their way into what gets measured in academic life, how and by whom, drastically transforming the nature and conduct of academic inquiry. Whatever future is on the horizon, the work of teaching, research and scholarship is going to get much more thorny.

Against this backdrop many people have told us that our emphasis on measurement is both welcome and timely. The demand to count, measure, rank, quantify, evaluate and judge the work of universities (along with those who labour and study in them) haunts virtually all aspects of our work: from the quality of research, to targets for income generation, counts of patents, citations of articles and public testimonies of policy impact made visible and likeable online; from the quality of curriculum, to teaching with technology, responding to student feedback, watching the employment destinations and salaries of graduates as a comment on the value of their education; to whether a university is healthy, sustainable, sufficiently globalized or doing enough to position itself as the world leader in this or that discipline. Every day, our conduct is being shaped to procure a commitment to institutional indicators, targets, standards and benchmarks that help us to diagnose ourselves (and others) as worthy and successful academics. At the same time, universities repurpose our labour to shore up their market distinctiveness in ways that are likely to surprise, shock and repulse us. Ocean and Skourdoumbis (2016) remind us that we are already well schooled in the language of measurement’s ‘discursive accompaniments: failure to measure up, failing to count, cutting and letting go, what the numbers say’ (p. 442). And far from being benign, ‘[m]etrics hold real power: they are constitutive of values, identities and livelihoods’ (Wilsdon et al., 2015, p. iii).

And yet there is another argument in circulation too: that the appeal to measure – which often draws on mountains of numerical data derived from the increasing surveillance of workloads, decision-making activity, performance reviews and enterprise systems analytics – is an altogether reasonable response to the complexity of the higher funding education environment and the bombardment of bureaucratic reporting associated with public accountability. On this logic, as Liam Grealy and Tim Laurie note in their contribution to this issue, ‘while numbers do not necessarily produce well-informed ideas about education, there are many ideas about education that can only be promoted through the institutional force of measurement practices’. Even those of us committed to equity, social justice and ethical practices need measures to mount persuasive arguments that advance the projects we are attached to. Nonetheless, compelling objections remain. Is it the fact that measurement has encroached so brutally into the domains of academic life by pushing forms of political reason that accomplish its inevitability, and that lead to the suspicion and erosion of expertise? Is it primarily that measurement is numerical and reductionist in that it offers uncomplicated accounts of lived worlds as facts? Is it the mismatch between the crude tool and its effects – outcomes that lodge themselves in systems and collective consciousness as real rather than representations of the real? One such example might be the ubiquity of student satisfaction as a proxy for learning. Is it that the communal discussions we participate in with good will and that are intended to nurture nuanced and complex measures are routinely dismissed or ignored by those in senior institutional positions or in government? Is it that others are defining our vocabularies of value and so violating our autonomy to craft narratives about our own work? Is it the way measurement works through, and on, our bodies, psyches and conduct, instantiating a panopticon-like surveillance and competition among individuals to be seen, to be performing, to be adding value? Or is it that the judgements resulting from measurement spill out from their original context and end up as categorical pronouncements about who we are and what we do in ways we do not recognize and have not consented to?

Whether in isolation, or taken together, these objections signal a need for caution. Moreover, many of the measures we are pressed to believe in as academics – those which antagonize and inspire us in equal parts – support a fallacious belief that past performance is the best predictor for future success even when the partiality of measures is writ large. In presenting those imperfect measures publicly – to society, to prospective students and to future colleagues – we (mistakenly) scale up their significance. We empower others to breathe life into those measures. We fashion stories of students’ futures around them. We evaluate the successes and failings of our academic lives in relation to them, and we appraise the moral compass and business acumen of the university against them. Not only do we need to keep a keen eye on the measures themselves and their material entanglements, effects and affects in the world, there is an intellectual duty to make a spectacle of the logics in play.

In his 2010 book Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics, democracy, Gert Biesta argues that a measurement culture takes root as if it is education because we are no longer sufficiently engaged with what a good education is and what it is for. In his view, the question of purpose has fallen from the public gaze. Departing slightly from Biesta, the trouble for us is not so much that there is an absence or dismissal of ‘purpose’ (purpose-talk in universities is everywhere and nowhere at once); it is that academic life is now confronted with a multiplicity of purposes that are in deep contradiction. The danger, as Ball (2012) has written, is that we become ‘malleable rather than committed, flexible rather than principled, essentially depthless’ (p. 31). In this scenario, our academic subjectivities are shaped by, and belong to, the institution. Paul Sutton, another of the contributors to this issue, has a striking way of putting it: ‘the creation of this new organizational actor takes place when academics come to want what is wanted from them’.

From the 80 or so submissions we received in response to the original call, we are delighted to bring 13 together in this special issue. As individual papers they address a fascinating range of higher education practices unsettled by the prospect of measurement: the ongoing struggle to take seriously the experiences of academic women, the potential for indigenous knowledges to transform the university, the contradictions of transparency in formulating academic workloads are just some of them. And they come to us from a range of national contexts too – Aotearoa New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Australia and England – each one wrestling with related challenges in local ways.

On the whole, we have noticed an interesting pattern among the contributions. Each of the three opening papers – Liam Grealy and Tim Laurie on the neo-liberal framing of measurement in research degrees, Briony Lipton on the consequences of mainstreaming of gender equity for academic women and Bruce Macfarlane on the need to be more perceptive about the moral nature of academic collaboration – bring to their object of interest a fresh insight on the ways measurement inhabits paradoxical positions in these spaces. On the one hand, there is the tantalizing satisfaction in ‘getting things done’ (Grealy and Laurie) while on the other, an alertness to the ‘cruelty of our attachments’ (Lipton).

The next two contributions sketch the contours and consequences of mismeasurement. From post-apartheid South Africa, Sabrina Liccardo and colleagues show just how enormous the task is in recruiting and retaining black academics especially when institutions attend mostly to measures entrenching the very situations those academics are intended to address. In a different vein, Angelika Papadopolous analyses data from nine Australian universities’ workload models, alongside the results of a survey regularly commissioned by the national academics’ union. Claiming that workload models operate as policy technologies, Papadopolous not only advances a case that these models seldom begin from real empirical grounds, but she also displays how these models obscure the very ‘thing’ they aim to be transparent about.

Unsurprisingly, the personal costs in being relentlessly measured feature in the special issue. While Catherine Manathunga and colleagues outline how an art-based postcards project afforded a space for resistance, rejuvenation and fellowship, their description of writing about it is heartbreaking: ‘our stomachs clench, our foreheads knot, our shoulders tighten. We feel sick as we struggle to sketch in what has come to count in the entrepreneurial university’. By comparison, Sandra Acker and Michelle Webber’s portrayal of seven early career Canadian academics caught up in preparations for tenure seems far more muted. To be clear, there are costs evident – work–life balance, time away from children, deciphering inconsistent institutional messages about success – but it may well be that, in Canada, metrics are still skating across the top of academic life as an upshot of the absence of a national approach to research assessment or teaching evaluation. To close this theme, we turn to the contribution by Jennifer Chubb and colleagues who, in interrogating the variety of emotional responses to the research impact agenda in the UK and Australia, assert that we ought to be more circumspect about the accuracy, prevalence and hyperbole of only crisis accounts. Interestingly, they advocate for a distinction between being a ‘public intellectual, the notion of public accountability, and performance-related auditability’.

From there we move to four contributions grounded in the desire for institutional transformation. The first two turn our minds swiftly to the experiences of doing indigenous knowledge work and being indigenous workers in an academy whose measures are entirely western. From Aotearoa New Zealand, we glimpse into Nell Buissink and colleagues’ institution-based efforts where they have partnered with the UK-based Higher Education Academy (HEA) to place the Māori value manaaki at the heart of professional learning for all university teachers. The piece describes why and how their university extended the professional standards of the HEA Fellowship Scheme as a radical act of care, hospitality and kindness. In the second article, Helen Flavell and Jonathan Bullen draw on Rauna Kuokkanen’s logic of the gift and Martin Nakata’s commitment to the cultural interface to expose how the measures and machinations of quality often work against universities’ espoused obligations to Indigenous studies, and to projects intended to indigenize the curriculum. The context in question: a large first-year inter-professional unit on Indigenous cultures and health. For them, the quality measures associated with this unit constitute an act of epistemic violence.

The next two contributions – from Jan Smith and Jennie Billot and Virginia King – are no less significant in their appeal for universities to conduct themselves more ethically. Smith takes aim at the UK process of academic probation, specifically, the task of setting targets and moulding oneself to meet them despite deep institutionalized uncertainty. In Smith’s research, the intellectual horizons of early career academics on probation are being driven into safe terrain precisely because they have been individualized and over-surveilled. And in a related way, Billot and King’s focus on a process of academic induction that joins together formation, socialization and agency reminds us there is the potential to design professional learning activities and spaces inside the academy where human flourishing can be imagined and made practical.

We leave our closing contribution to sociologist Paul Sutton who resurrects the humanism of Karl Marx to encourage an academic life with adequate moral energy for the language of love and the desire to cultivate care for our souls. While Sutton has long surrendered to the measurement of academic labour, he finds hope and prosperity in well-being measures that are ‘hedonic, eudaimonic, and evaluative’. For him, these examples chart a course for a new moral economy of academic labour. And, we add, of academic life.

As is customary in all issues of HERD, we include a Book Review and Points for Debate piece, both intended to further elaborate our theme. Tai Peseta takes us on a tour of two books: Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy (2016) and Les Back’s Academic diary: Or why higher education still matters (2016). And, in Being an academic is the key to who I am – a memoir (our Points for Debate), Canadian sociologist of education Sandra Acker examines the addictive rhythms of academic work and reveals what keeps her engrossed in retirement.

As this is the last special issue commissioned by the former HERD journal editorial team led by Executive Editor Barbara Grant, we want to make special mention of three Associate Editors – Stephanie Doyle, Tamsin Hinton-Smith and Lisa Thomas – who assisted in the preparation of this issue. They bore the brunt of many interactions with patience, grace and humour. Our thanks, too, to the reviewers (both College members and others) whose anonymous and free labour is rarely ever rewarded enough. We also want to acknowledge the labour and creativity of the many researchers, scholars and teachers who subjected their thinking and writing to peer review but whose scholarly efforts do not appear here. And finally, we extend a special note of love and appreciation to Managing Editor Diana Nicholson who has shepherded us to the end in the most efficient and humane way possible.