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Audit culture and the politics of accountability are transforming not just universities and their role in society, but the very notions of society, academics and students. The modern ‘university of excellence’ applies a totalising and coercive commensurability to virtually every aspect of university life, from research output and teaching quality to parking space. But more than this, the politics of accountability enmesh universities in conflicts over neoliberal transformations which are taking a wide variety of forms in different parts of Europe, North and South America, and Australasia. ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ —Albert Einstein, 1879–1955 Anthropology in Action, Volume 12, Issue 1 (2005): 1-10 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action tion’—shaping the ways universities relate to society and the ways, as academics, we relate to our profession, to our colleagues and students, and to ourselves? This debate is both important and timely for three reasons. First, because one of the defining qualities of anthropology as a discipline is its epistemological reflexivity and its capacity to think critically about the conditions of its own existence and, beyond this, about the way knowledge is produced. As the university is the primary institution for the cultural reproduction of anthropology as a discipline, it is important to understand what is happening to the conditions of work and thought in which we operate—and the way these influence knowledge production and what ‘counts’ as valid or ‘robust knowledge’ (Strathern 2003). Second, this debate is important because those conditions of existence have undergone radical reforms since the late 1980s, changes so profound that some scholars argue that it is no longer clear what is the role of the modern university today. The traditional liberal/ Enlightenment idea of the university as a community of teachers and students dedicated to the rational and disinterested pursuit of ‘higher learning’ as an end in itself is fast being replaced by the idea of the university as a transnational corporate enterprise whose function is to provide a skilled workforce and relevant and usable research for the new Global Knowledge Economy. The British Government’s recent White Paper on The Future of Higher Education sums this up succinctly: We see a higher education sector which meets the needs of the economy in terms of trained people, research and technology transfer. At the same time it needs to enable all suitably qualified individuals to develop their potential both intellectually and personally, and to provide the necessary storehouse of expertise in science and technology, and the arts and humanities which defines our civilization and culture. (Cited in Collini 2003 : 3) As Collini notes, that long and convoluted sentence contains all the different aims that government now expects universities to fulfil (which perhaps explains why universities in Britain are so demoralised). The very idea of the university has changed. Third, the metamorphosis of universities into transnational corporate enterprises has entailed the creation of a raft of new bureaucratic mechanisms and procedures designed to render universities more accountable, manageable, efficient and ‘visible’ to those agencies and inspectors concerned with the measurement of performance. As universities have increasingly defined their constituencies, students and funding sources internationally, the apparent need for comparability of courses and degrees, as well as of expectations and standards, has helped drive this push towards accountability. Since the 1990s, we have witnessed a spectacular growth of new managerial models and methods aimed at ‘enhancing performance’ and assuring the quality of teaching and learning. This is reflected most clearly in the wholesale import into higher education of the language and concepts of commerce and private-sector management, including terms such as ‘mission statements’, ‘output performance indicators’, and annual staff reviews—and the reclassification of students and their parents as ‘customers’, ‘stakeholders’ or ‘consumers’ of educational products and services. This shift in the discourse of higher education towards an emphasis on the preeminent role of markets and New Public Management systems also provides fertile ground for a critical and reflexive anthropology. On closer analysis it appears that the processes of neoliberalism, structural adjustment and globalisation that anthropologists have so often studied in Third World and developing countries are also evident in the Western universities in which many of us work. AiA | Don Brenneis, Cris Shore and Susan Wright

Getting the Measure of Academia: Universities and the Politics of Accountability