Under the Shadow of Time: Where Indicators and Academic Values Meet

I am heartened by the thoughtfulness, passion, and analytical insight in this collection of essays about the "indicator game" (Fochler and de Rijcke 2017). Contributors (see Bal 2017;Irwin 2017;McHardy 2017) rightly recognize the threat to scholarly diversity and heterogeneity in higher education more broadly resulting from the widespread institutionalization of metrics. Several authors helpfully highlight how existing metrics don't allow us to measure qualities (e.g. patient thinking) we believe valuable (see In my brief essay, rather than focus on very specific details of the contributions to this thematic collection, I would like to build on it. What I write comes from my perspective as a scholar of higher education (see, e.g., Kleinman 2015; Kleinman and Osley Thomas 2016, 2014), an academic administrator and, dare I say, a senior member of the STS and higher education community more broadly. The scholarly and educational world in which I came of age (or at least my perception of it) has changed, and I have changed to. When I began my graduate work in 1985, I came with a perception of higher education as a relatively autonomous space for debating new-sometimes farfetched-ideas and as a site for developing the thinking skills of young people and preparing them for lives of engaged citizenship.Things were changing in US higher education when I started my PhD, but arguably the major public research university I attended in the US was still guided by a postwar ethos. Higher education was considered a public good that should be supported by citizen paid taxes. This included the education provided within its walls and the research undertaken. While US higher education was not immune from attack (witness McCarthyism), my reading of the historical record suggests little challenge to its virtues and apparently little felt need by members of the academic community to persistently and publicly argue for higher education's values.

mentioning

confidence: 89%

Simple Resistance is Not an Option: Playing and Transforming the Indicator Game

Kleinman

2017

“…Ulrike Felt's (2017) essay relates the growth of indicators to the shifting temporalities of academic work. Drawing on her own research but also on her professional experiences, she develops the notion of chronopolitics to analyze the politics of time governing academic knowledge production, work and evaluation.…”

Section: Reflecting the Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

<b>Implicated in the Indicator Game? An Experimental Debate</b>

Fochler

Rijcke

2017

The rise of new modes evaluating academic work has substantially changed institutions and cultures of knowledge production. This has been reflected and criticized in the literature in STS and beyond. For STS scholars, these debates (should) however have an even more specific dimension. Many of us are experts on aspects of these changes. But at the same time, we too are part of the processes we are analyzing, and often criticizing. To put it slightly provocatively, often we cannot avoid playing the very same game that we scrutinize. This creates tensions that many of us reflect on, and it certainly has created many implicit and explicit normative stances on how to deal with them. Yet it seems that so far there has been little room in our field to reflect on and exchange this particular kind of experience-based knowledge. There are many different ways to engage with the dynamics of evaluation, measurement and competition in contemporary academia, or to play what we refer to colloquially here as the "indicator game." With this debate, we would like to give room to the expression and discussion of some of these ways. This text is the introduction and prompt to an experimental debate. We discuss the state of the academic discussion on the impact of indicator-based evaluation on academic organization, epistemic work and identities. We use insights from these debates to raise questions for how STS and STSers themselves deal with the indicator game. In conclusion, we summarize our contributors' arguments and propose the concept of "evaluative inquiry" as a new way of representing the quality of STS work in evaluative contexts.

“…But the authors are also often quite open about their more positive emotions. Ulrike Felt (2017), for example, explores "the moments of empowerment and pleasure" enjoyed by her and others resulting from apparent successes in playing the appraisal game (see also Bal 2017;Irwin 2017;Wouters 2017). There are even references to some finding "joy in the indicator game" (Fochler and de Rijcke 2017, 23, 30).…”

Section: Being Implicated / Implicated Beingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, there are anecdotes within some of the essays (Felt 2017;Irwin 2017) and two articles in particular--by Roland Bal and Paul Wouters (Bal 2017;Wouters 2017) which constitute what might be called "survival narratives": participants' stories of institutional units which (at least to the point registered by the authors) have weathered the slings and arrows of sometimes outrageous appraisal. These two contributions comprise, as Roland notes, "auto-ethnographic" case studies and, in their rather small-scale versions, they could be linked to the lauded STS tradition of ethnographic laboratory studies.…”

Section: Survival Narratives: Sts Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implicated in the Indicator Game: A Response to the Debate

McNeil

2017

Let me begin by saying how much I welcome this collection. It is to be celebrated, as Alan Irwin (2017) encourages us to do, as exemplifying the strengths of STS as a field and the resourcefulness of its community. It is refreshing to find scholars reflecting on the structures and operations of the academic world and on their own practices, trying to develop strategies in the face of the growing pressures and consequences of the "indicator game." What makes this set of pieces distinctive in a growing literature on these developments (much of which is deployed and referenced in this issue) is that the authors try to think through what STS as a field and as a set of practices with a diverse theoretical repertoire might have to offer in the struggles to live with and against these developments. Their STS thinking is articulated with direct reference to specificities of the authors' own experiences. They offer situated reflections about doing STS and using it in dealing with "the culture of competition and quantification" (Müller 2017) which increasingly pervades academic life.My job as I understand it is to respond to these initiatives. I have chosen to do this, in the positive spirit advocated by many of the contributors (especially, but not only, Irwin 2017), highlighting what I consider to be key features of the collection. In so doing I will also make my own suggestions about further challenges for STSers (a borrowed neologism) and possibly others as we navigate this difficult terrain. Being Implicated / Implicated BeingsThe editors' epitaph (Fochler and de Rijcke 2017, 22) for the collection is striking: a quotation from Marilyn Strathern cautioning that, in dealing with the indicator game, "we are witnessing an effect that we (practitioners in higher education) have helped produce. Auditors are not aliens: they are a version of ourselves" (Strathern 1997, 319.) Strathern's "auditors-R-us" caution haunts the project and a number of the authors mull it over. The collection is up-front in acknowledging that STSers and other academics not only get caught up in the indicator mechanisms, but turn (even sometimes are) their cogs--enabling them to run.Some contributors flesh out how enrolments in these systems are solicited and ensured emotionally and psychically. There are allusions to the anxieties which prompt compliance, in