Confessions of an Academic Hit-man

Education, like other social services such as health, is far from being a simple ‘product’. The forces of supply and demand can’t be the only factor taken into account, because education is a right recognized in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But the education market is no longer simply a matter of choice and competition between educational institutions. The education market is a diffuse, expanding, and sophisticated system of goods, services, experiences and routes – publicly and privately provided.

The rendering of educational processes into a form which is more readily privatized – into a contractible form, into a form for cost and profit calculation, into a version of education which can be reduced to a commercial exchange based on output indicators, which can be monitored.

Within institutions – colleges, schools, universities – the means/end logic, education for economic competitiveness, can transform what were once the social process of teaching, learning and research into a set of standardized and measurable products.

As part of seeking after new ‘markets’ and the re-orientation to the customer, new forms of ‘delivery’ and consumption of higher education are being created which can result in learning becoming increasingly fragmented. Colleges have been turned into value/commodity producing enterprises. They become institutionally rearranged on a model of capitalist accumulation.

College students are rendered as active consumers but passive learners, a development that further reinforces the idea that a diploma is a commodity that (hopefully) can be exchanged for a job rather than as a liberal education that prepares students for life.

The economy of student worth - seeking success in the performative culture – is very much a product. If only there was some way of curbing the derogation of ethics, brought about by privatization and the ‘disciplines’ of the market. In the business of survival in the marketplace, the niceties of care and equal value become easily dispensable. The social relations between providers and ‘clients’ and among the providers themselves are changed significantly. This is a process of 'ethical-retooling’.

The currency of judgment in education provides an infrastructure of comparisons which value practitioners and institutions solely in terms of their productivity, their performances! Productive individuals are the central economic resource in the reformed, entrepreneurial public sector. The performances of individual subjects or organizations serve as displays of 'quality', or 'moments' of promotion or inspection.

Metrics are constructed which are used to make different sorts of activities commensurable. The use of metrics, targets, linked to incentives and sanctions, and the constant collection and publication of performance data, embeds instrumentality into everything that is done. What they stand for, or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgment.

In the process, what we do is emptied of all substantive content. Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions in terms of affectivity and appearance. Beliefs and values are no longer important - it is output that counts. We have come to value others solely for their performance, their contribution to the performance of the group or the organization, rather than their intrinsic worth as persons.

The commoditization of academic labour has shifted the carriers of culturally valued knowledge bearers into a struggle for authenticity. Authenticity and performance are as easily replaced by compliance and silence. Academic entrepreneurs are determined to improve academic productivity creating a bureaucracy of academic auditors. The pervasive presence of business ethos in the education industry is a sign of the changing balance of power between the state and the market.

The specificities of human interactions involved in teaching and learning are being erased. The practice of teaching is being re-made and reduced to externally generated rule-following and target achievement.

The prerequisite of the commerce of education, is that Knowledge is no longer legitimated through ‘argument and reasoning', rather, through the pragmatics of ‘optimization’ – the creation of profit rather than ideals.

So, what makes up today’s college student? Today's college student is defined by shallowness, flexibility, transparency and represented within performances. Their ‘professionalism’ is in turn their willingness and ability to adapt to the necessities and vicissitudes of policy.