Saturday, November 20, 2010

The accountability regime

Tuchman's "Wannabe U, inside the corporate university" is an attempt to describe how the American public university has been taken over by administrators and external pressure via the installment of an accountability regime. The sociological viewpoint that Tuchman takes allows for telling observations on who talks to whom after the board meetings, and other astute comments on detailed social interactions and hierarchy. Overall though, the book lacks structure, global vision, global data and a clear opinion on what is cause and what is effect. It also fails to make a clear argument on what is wrong with a pure accountability regime, and the takeover of education by administration.

She does mention the example of a first year's course invented by a central administrative facility (posing as an institute with a pedagogical purpose) in which entering students learn how to write a check. What's wrong with this, is that is an attempt to give students credit for wasting their time, or being lazy. Writing a check can be learned in five minutes, from any acquaintance. Inventing a course for this, paying people to lecture on it, renting a classroom, filling pieces of paper with grades for writing checks is a total waste of education and research money.

Let me just make one argument against the accountability regime which fits within its own logic, and nevertheless always escapes from its proponents vision. Let's literally look at accounting practices at universities. They have become extremely strict of late, and require lots of man hours to put into place, and simply to keep them up. One has to justify in detail for instance the buying of pen and paper, via competing offers, etcetera. It is generally argued that by making departments accountable for money spent on office supplies, the money spent on office supplies will diminish.

Unfortunately, this argument doesn't take into account that academic practice has always been to be careful about spending money on goods that don't matter. Beside the point, the accountant will argue. Fine. So, the secretary spends some more time getting competing offers from several companies (instead of just leafing through the brochures she has on her desk as she always did). The offers agree with what's in the catalogue, and she buys what she always bought, except now she's a little more tired, since she has the feeling she wasted time. Her boss is irritated since she has no time to do important work. Next, she fills in what she did in a centralized accounting program, programmed for that purpose by programmers, and analyzed and read by a central accounting office.

In the end the accounting office announces proudly, say, that (very optimistically) twenty percent has been saved on the department's spending on office supplies.

Meanwhile, they had to hire a programmer, extra secretaries, as well as accounting agents in order to come to this spectacular result. And, of course, in the final count, these extra wage costs, let alone extra irritations, demotivations, and general effects of the terror of an accountability regime are not factored in.

I am absolutely sure that many of the savings associated to a strong accountability regime are more than compensated by the cost of installing it, and keeping it alive. And this is an argument purely within the logic of accountability.

Needless to say, there are other and stronger scientific and psychological arguments against the logic of accountability as applied to for instance merit raises, and the closure of departments or universities. It is well-known that a market or efficiency logic simply does not apply to certain commodities. It is not sufficient to count when judging. It is not correct to imagine that individual actors always choose their own best interest. It is not correct that all group dynamics can be understood in terms of the motivations of individuals. It is wrong to think one can invent practical metrics for measuring merit. Etcetera, etcetera. I will not get into a systematic analysis of all that's wrong with accountability logic here.

Tuchman does a reasonable job in sketching a worrisome evolution in the corporate public university. It would be good to systematically enumerate counter arguments for the political evolution she describes, both at all national as at the international level. In any case, it seems that for now we academics are powerless, and that politicians fail to see their own failure. This does not exempt us from attempting to educate. It may well be though that academia always has to await devastating societal repercussions before its organization is readjusted to a workable model.

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