University audits: A panoptical theatre of the absurd?

With virtually all my colleagues shaking in their boots, so to speak, in the face of an impending double audit at our university this year — one internal, in preparation for the other, external one, later in the year — and my own instinctive as well as not-so-instinctive (philosophically informed) response being one of immediate suspicion, it is time to reflect on this bogeyman of South African universities.

In his book Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher Michel Foucault gave us a genealogy of modes of punishment, contrasting the punitive practices of the pre-modern era with those of the modern. While the pre-modern was characterised by blood, gore and spectacle (through drawing and quartering, for instance — recall William Wallace’s execution in Braveheart), to scare off would-be offenders by example, the modern form of discipline has turned out to be far more effective, by insidiously inculcating in people a kind of internalised discipline, by means of which they ultimately learn to discipline themselves.

One of the most effective means of doing so has been various “panoptical” practices, a name that derives from the “ideal” prison — the Panopticon — imagined by Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century, where prisoners’ cells would be arranged in circular form, with a central tower from which wardens would have optical access to each cell, and every prisoner would know it. Understandably, the awareness of such constant surveillance on the part of prisoners would have the effect, on pain of severe penalties, to behave in a “disciplined” fashion.

It is easy to recall fictional counterparts to this panoptical procedure — the Sharon Stone thriller Sliver comes to mind, where a New York high-rise apartment block turns out to be the electronic surveillance counterpart of Bentham’s Panopticon, with similar “disciplinary” purposes in mind. Or think of The Net, with Sandra Bullock, as a reminder of the postmodern panoptical surveillance techniques that virtually control our official identities.

But panopticism, as Foucault calls it, is not restricted to fiction; it is very real, and all around us. Every time you slow down instinctively when the lights of an oncoming car flash, to avoid being speed-trapped, you are succumbing to panopticism. For academics like myself, one of its most invidious manifestations is the much-dreaded university audit. And I stress “like myself” because I love teaching and doing research (that is, reading, thinking and writing, with a view to publishing in academic journals, which I do regularly) — something which cannot be said of all academics.

For many of them, it is just a job, a way of earning a living, and for such “academics” the dreaded audit is just another administrative schlep among others.

The vast majority of academics don’t read philosophy or an equivalent critical discipline (such as literary or psychoanalytic theory), of course, so they lack the critical means to reflect on and judge panoptical practices such as audits in an informed manner.

But are audits really panoptical practices intent on disciplining the people who have to submit to them? Yes. Think of it this way: academics have two fundamental functions, namely teaching and research, and if they are worth anything as academics, they will teach on the basis of their research (while teaching often has a reciprocal cross-fertilising effect on research as well), otherwise their teaching becomes arbitrary.

Of course, a minimal amount of administration always accompanies one’s teaching at undergraduate as well as postgraduate level, such as writing course outlines, marking, calculating percentages, getting student feedback and so on; that’s par for the course, and one readily accepts it as the mostly boring stuff you have to do to be able to indulge yourself with the really exciting stuff, like sharing the wonderful thoughts of Gilles Deleuze or Julia Kristeva with your students.

But the advent of “audits” has created this third “thing”, the QA (quality assurance) file, or box, which would still be OK if it only contained the (to my mind minimalist) course outlines and so forth that one routinely writes and distributes among students (the real energy being reserved for the important, difficult, but exciting work). But this is not sufficient: the QA department — the university counterpart of SAQA — has to justify its existence somehow, and therefore a suffocating avalanche of forms to be completed descends on academics.

I need not go into the detail — it probably differs in the minutiae from university to university — but what these measures all have in common is that they consist of some form of panoptical commentary (by lecturers) on the two fundamental functions that we have, namely teaching and research — it is neither of these, nor does it relate directly to one’s teaching as a necessary way of keeping records, and so on. It is a form of window-dressing, of self-aggrandisement (or at least the opportunity to engage in it), of irrelevant, time- and energy-consuming description of what it is one is supposed to do as academics, but can no longer do because of the colonisation, if not invasion, of one’s precious time by these truly panoptical practices.

Why panoptical? Because they do not enhance teaching and research one iota. All they achieve is to “discipline” academics by ordering them to fall in the same line by conflating standards and standardisation. In fact, they systematically undermine the work that academics are supposed to be doing by turning them into glorified clerks. I know what supporters of university audits would retort, however, in the unmistakable discourse of bureaucracy: “Audits are a way of assuring quality teaching and research at universities.” Yawn … wrong. For quality to be maintained — or better, improved — lecturers should be encouraged not to fill in forms endlessly and mindlessly, thus wasting precious energy, but to do everything possible to get to know their disciplines and students better.

In fact, the only proper quality “audit” (although a new word would be necessary to describe this) would be for representatives of SAQA to come and sit in our lectures, unannounced, at unpredictable times, and see the way we teach and read our research. I, for one, would welcome that — perhaps they would learn something valuable in the process.

But I’ll bet they would be in for a shock — students often share with me their frustration with lecturers who simply read from prescribed textbooks in class, or insist on verbatim reproduction of passages from such books in tests, instead of opening things up for debate in class, encouraging student participation and so on. The same so-called lecturers, however, may come across as very impressive if they complete the required audit forms with the same pedantic but irrelevant fastidiousness — they would be very good at window-dressing.

Although some may argue that the practice of university audits is well-intentioned (I have my doubts — it smacks too much of an attempt at exercising optimal control over universities on the part of government), its overall effect is therefore detrimental to university practice, which should be aimed (as I have argued before) at the cultivation of critical thinking abilities on the part of students by lecturing staff whose primary functions are acknowledged as being teaching and research, instead of submitting to stultifying bureaucratic measures.

And incidentally, while (as stated earlier) no lecturer could function properly without a minimum amount of administration of his or her lecturing and research practice, there is a fundamental difference between administration and bureaucracy.

At universities, administrative networks are supposed to serve the core functions of the university, namely teaching and research, instead of the reverse.

Bureaucracy is what happens if administration occupies the position of raison d’être, the be-all and end-all, of the university, where lecturing staff are coerced, panoptically, into serving the monstrous bureaucratic machine, in Kafkaesque fashion, ultimately relinquishing their own intellectual and scientific function. It happens when the tail starts wagging the dog. This is a perversion of what universities should be.

The large number of resignations at South African universities in recent years attests to the unbearable pressure that increased bureaucratic rule has brought — and I don’t say this speculatively; many colleagues who have resigned or retired early have explicitly referred to bureaucracy as a cardinal reason for leaving.

Hence, it should be abundantly clear to so-called “authorities” -– so-called, because, with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, I agree that the only ground for accepting authority is superior knowledge, and I see scant signs of superior knowledge on the part of the “authorities”.

Besides, in the process of bureaucratising our lives, they reveal their lamentable lack of historical knowledge — does one have to remind anyone who claims to be “educated” that it was Stalin’s rigid bureaucratic regime that nearly destroyed Russia?

Bureaucracy kills creativity, healthy dissent and debate, inventiveness and the true spirit of democracy. And if dumped on universities like a cloud of sleep-inducing gas, no one should be surprised if truly creative teaching and research eventually fade or even disappear. I hope the “authorities” come to their senses; unless they do, we can forget about ever becoming one of the leading nations in the world.