Speaking of Universities

by Stefan Collini

Underlying so many aspects of the policies discussed in these two books is the fallacy of uniformly measurable performance. Human life involves many incommensurable forms of value. A parent’s love of a child is not the same kind of thing as a painter’s attempt to capture shape and colour or a scholar’s interpretation of complex sources or a soldier’s act of bravery and so on. The logic of punitive quantification is to reduce all these activities to a common managerial metric. Every other human agent has to justify their activities in the terms used by the businessman (or, to be more exact, an abstracted model of commercial calculation that managers are taught in business schools to use, whether or not actual successful businessmen may have operated according to other more diverse, and sometimes more intuitive, criteria). There are some activities for which these alien metrics only partially distort or fail to represent their true character; and there are others where ‘false metrics’ are ubiquitous. The activities of thinking and understanding are inherently resistant to being adequately characterized by quantitative metrics, which can only ever measure something measurable, and so in this case proxies have to be found for qualitative judgements.