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.

On Philosophy at the Universities

Schopenhauer's On Philosophy at the Universities is an enjoyable attack on the instutionalized university. Although his arguments are meant to apply almost exclusively to professors in philosophy, it is useful to consider his thesis that true philosophers are not paid professors while professors in philosophy cannot be true philosophers in a broader context. A contemporary and broader interpretation of his attack could translate into the dictum that too much time spent on thoughtful grant applications interferes with top research. Or that adminstrative piloting of research through the generation of numerical data renders academics slaves to these seemingly objective criteria, interfering with their creative freedom. The degree to which Schopenhauer's old critique applies to contemporary academia, and the way it is ignored in the rapid evolution towards hollow accountability, is worrisome.

The Last Professors

The Last Professors by Frank Donoghue is a must-read for all humanities professors in the US. And, the story of their demise is so telling that it should be recommended literature for all academics. It is interesting to learn about all those books published and never read, about the debate on tenure (while it slowly disappears under the eyes of the debaters), about the companies that will soon own every bit of what universities produce, including their temporary staff, about the difficulty to defend certain intellectual values, and about how the better education will slowly but surely only become affordable to the rich. It is scary how the evolutions predicted in this book are rapidly coming true. (Example : Cameron in Britain, autonomous universities in France, rationalization in Flanders, ..)

The University in Ruins

The University in Ruins by Bill Readings is an interesting analysis of how the university might still function after it has lost its role in the nation state as the instrument that defines and spreads national culture. He argues that the present day university is rather dominated by an idea of excellence that is empty enough to allow for a purely administrative interpretation.

Though Readings makes several big mistakes, especially in attempting to heed the credo of postmodernism, in which relativism dominates, and which renders most interesting arguments impossible because one or another minority, or one or another context is not properly taken into account, he does succeed in succinctly depicting a few important historical sources for the ideal of the university that still dominates many discourses.

Readings underestimates that academics could globally unite, and teach and research in a planetary framework, and that they should be the most important players in administrative decisions. Arguments that academia becomes self-referential then, and that many academics are not suited for administration, for instance, are entirely correct, but should not be seen as decisive in this debate, just as administration should not be judged as inherently evil.

Clearly, there is an open road that stretches far beyond academic nationalism, and the application of empty administrative criteria. Academics have to take their fate into their own hands, instead of sheepishly implementing national and international administrative criteria, while simultaneously attempting to satisfy them in order to gain research grants. Academics should concentrate on what they know to be higher quality research, and they should honour those that attempt to do so persistently.

French Higher Education

French higher education is good, especially the Grandes Ecoles. That is normal since they get 30 percent of the budget for 5 percent of the students. The elite that makes it into the Grandes Ecoles, after passing entrance exams, is very well trained.

There are various problems with the present system. Since the entrance exams are very competitive and extremely important for the future careers and lives of the students, children need to be prepared to have very high problem solving capabilities at eighteen. That requires that children enter very good schools at an early age. That jeopardizes the otherwise democratic nature of the entrance exams. The influence of the direct environment on the children's far future is big.

The Grandes Ecoles are separated. They are not universal (as universities are) in that they usually have a single department with a single vocation (e.g. electrical engineering). That compartmentalizes the elite and makes for little cross-discipline and cross-professional fertilization. That takes its toll on the flexibility and creativity of French administration, technology, research and industry, etcetera.

The university students (which remain an important resource of talent) suffer badly from the fact that the head of the student body is chopped of by the Grandes Ecoles. The university degree is devalued in the presence of the close knit Grande Ecole elite.

Long term the only solution that one can envisage is the joining of Grandes Ecoles to form elite universities within France. Or the joining of Grandes Ecoles to universities in such a way that they retain their exceptional quality.

Grandes Ecoles cannot disappear since they are of the highest level. They must however allow their elite students to communicate more freely with students from other domains, and they may take the task of leading the whole of the French higher education body closer at heart. Universities should aspire to cooperate and compete with the Grandes Ecoles, with the conviction that they are expected to find talent in numbers, or in latebloomers or disadvantaged youngsters.

These are changes that can only be implemented gradually and in the long term, through careful and informed planning, by both the higher education community and central administration. There is no easy changing of more than 200 years of impressive history.