‘Judgement’ versus ‘metrics’ in higher education management

This article argues that universities currently privilege an instrumental ethos of measurement in the management of academic work. Such an ethic has deleterious consequences, both for knowledge production and knowledge transfer to students. Specifically, evidence points towards the production of increasingly well-crafted and ever more numerous research outputs that are useful in permitting universities to posture as world class institutions but that ultimately are of questionable social value. Additionally, the ever more granular management of teaching and pedagogy in universities is implicated in the sacrifice of broad and deep intellectual enquiry in favour of ostensibly more economically relevant skills that prepare graduates for the travails of the labour market. In both cases, metric fetishization serves to undermine more noble, socially-minded visions of what a university should be. For such visions to flourish, it is imperative that universities take steps that explicitly privilege a collegial ethos of judgement over a managerialist ethos of measurement