Whose Accountability? Governmentality and the Auditing of Universities

Abstract

One of the most interesting aspects of the transformation that has been occurring in universities in the United Kingdom and elsewhere over the past decade and a half has been the extraordinary proliferation of new managerial discourses of ‘accountability’ and ‘excellence’. What we seem to be witnessing throughout the university sector, as in numerous other domains of life, are the curious effects of what anthropologists have termed ‘audit culture’, and in particular, a form of ‘coercive accountability’ that can be explicitly linked to the spread of a new form of managerialism based on neoliberal techniques of governance. The key features of this new regime of governance include, inter alia, a fixation with the measurement, quantification and ‘benchmarking’ of seemingly all aspects of university life; the invention of a plethora of new ‘performance indicators’ (not to mention the creation of a whole new vocabulary to enable the new auditor-experts to assess and rank ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’) and an explosion of new league tables to render commensurable hitherto unimaginable phenomena. Thus, we now have national league tables that rank everything from hospital deaths, police responses, academic output and benefit fraud, to court occupancy, beach cleaning, cervical cancers and primary school test results. All of these areas and more must now be scrutinized, quantified, statistically ranked and ‘rendered visible’ either to the consumer or, as in most cases, to the anonymous gaze of the State and its bureaucratic machinery.