It is my impression that a genuine sense of ambivalence surrounds the whole question of the audit culture; I sense this among a majority of 'English' academics with whom I have discussed the matter, in lieu of any more scientific manner of surveying opinion. That is, it is only at moments of extreme frustration that we feel inclined to rail against all the processes of audit as such that have been introduced into higher education over the last ten years or so. In more rational moments it is recognised that there are pedagogically positive as well as questionable aspects to the whole apparatus of documentation which now buttresses our teaching and research. It is just this sense that there are some difficult matters of principle in the midst of all this that has led to the present article. To anticipate slightly, it seems to me that there are especially complex issues concerning explicitness of aims, outcome-related learning, and theoretically-derived models of the subject, that need to be teased out. But in the first instance, it's that ambivalence that I wish to emphasise.
The purpose of the conference on 'English and the Audit Culture', of course, was to address the particular implications of the 'audit culture' for English. All the papers were addressed to that topic, and there are some acute questions for us as a subject community posed by the audit culture. Yet it is obviously also the case that many of the questions posed by the audit culture (that is, by the widespread adoption of auditing and review procedures at all levels of the institutions in which we work) press with equal urgency upon, not only our colleagues in other departments, but also upon other sectors in education and in the public services more generally. So I propose to survey briefly some of the wider pressures that have created the audit culture in the first place.
Obviously, this topic becomes attenuated without some sense of the wider context in which the audit culture has come to form such a prominent part of University life. I suggest (or have encountered) three possible explanations for the widespread adoption of audit and review procedures in the University, the first two hostile, the third more friendly.
The first of these explanations is that the 'audit culture' represents a Thatcherite assault upon the possible resistance to the Thatcherite project posed by an autonomous unregulated 'professional' sphere. This is the view very powerfully put by, for example, Michael Rustin, who sees the various grading and point-awarding systems of audit as a form of marketisation, similar to other systems of internal competition introduced into public service provision. His pessimistic conclusion, if, as seems likely, New Labour continues with Thatcherite policies, is this: 'What will be constructed is a system which ostensibly offers more consumer choice, higher standards ('guaranteed' by audit), and greater flexibility. It will however be more competitive, provide less support, have higher rates of failure, and become more steeply stratified. It will become more of a mirror of the market society'. In this reading of the situation, audit procedures are a kind of smokescreen for the inevitable decline in standards created by driving down funding; Dearing estimated in 1997 that funding by student had declined by more than 40% since 1976.
A variant of the above argument is that proposed by Bill Readings in The University in Ruins: the view that the University has become uncoupled from its moorings in the development of a national culture, and in the pursuit of a vacuous 'excellence' is now bolstering its own procedures in an essentially contentless way. The various auditing procedures that dominate the university are thus a kind of consumerist substitute for the vocational sense of education-bildung-that formerly characterised the Humboldtian national university. Readings wants to go on a make a distinction between accountability and accounting; he accepts the former, but claims that many of the procedures of the current audit culture are essentially conceived in the spirit of the latter. But what would genuine accountability look like? That is, an accountability that respected the very nature of what happens in the university. This is a question that takes us to the heart of many of the issues surrounding the audit culture. Readings hardly supplies an answer to it; his is also an argument which certainly works better for the elite international institutions which see themselves as competing, not with Oxford Brookes down the road, but with Harvard or Stanford.
The third answer, a much less hostile account of what has happened, is to see it as a particular form of modernisation, and in that sense as something like a part of the zeitgeist. The reduced ambitions of modern social democracy, after all, precisely intervene in society by means of highly rationalised procedures-setting targets, and monitoring their achievement; and in the name of a perfectly respectable notion of accountability we are obliged to be explicit about what we do, and to check to see that we achieve what we aim for. The demystificatory implications of 'outcome-related learning' (upon which many of the audit procedures are implicitly based) are part of exactly this mentality. And indeed, I know that when it comes to health care, for example (or the insurance industry) I am very keen on just those audit procedures about which I have initially expressed ambivalence.
I take it that elements of all three of these explanations are in fact true, and that these differing pressures have contributed aspects of the audit culture as we currently experience it. Indeed, it is possible to resolve the audit culture into distinct phases or modes, which have become inextricably linked in the present circumstances but which are perhaps not inevitably connected. The first phase consists of all those practices which seek to describe what we do and review or audit our success in achieving our aims. The second phase is that which takes the information thus obtained, sorts it into league tables, and then assumes that the pressures of the market (student and employer choice) and government funding (in the form of grants etc.) will equitably follow this information. The confusion of these two phases accounts for the particular political ambivalence of the whole process. If it were simply the case that we could categorise these matters as the outworks of a Thatcherite drive to the marketisation of the university system, then we would be presented with a different set of choices than the ones which actually confront us: which is that in among all the grading and mark-awarding there are a series of procedures which are perhaps genuinely worthwhile.
These issues are all clouded at the time of writing (September 2001) by the more local politics of the QAA, HEFCE, and the Russell Group. For those of us who do not work in Russell Group institutions it is very unclear how these disputes should be resolved; but it would certainly seem like the worst of all possible worlds if, because of the political clout of the large elite institutions, they were to be effectively exempted from auditing procedures which the rest of us had to undergo. That would certainly go a long way to reintroducing the binary divide, and to setting in concrete that more steeply stratified system predicted by Rustin-a system not at all unlike the divide between private and public secondary education, or perhaps more like the distinction between private and state universities in the US. Moreover, there is something perhaps shameful about the loud noises of protest that have been made about the auditing of our teaching compared to the tameness with which we have knuckled down to and collaborated with the auditing of our research-though the financial rewards that follow success in the RAE doubtless go a long way to explaining the discrepancy.
Up to now, I have been writing as though audit procedures were simply something introduced to the universities from the outside. Yet it is a familiar fact that in higher education, unlike the wholly more hostile system in place in secondary education, audit works by peer-review, and characteristically sees itself as in some senses 'value-neutral'-that is, auditors are asked to assess the success with which departments and programmes carry out the objectives which they themselves set. I'd like to come at this aspect of the topic via the unlikely route of some comments by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the 'unrationalized' nature of academic work; she is discussing the American academy at the beginning of the 1990s:
Beyond being condensed, and thus tending toward the unreal or the hyperreal, in its synecdochic relation to the universe it claims to represent, the university is also in an anachronistic relation to it. People may choose an academic vocation, not in the first place because of their cognitive talents or because they have particular values or identifications, but because academic labor, at least at its most privileged and visible levels, is still in many ways so amazingly unrationalized. Compared with industrial or other service labor - even compared with the other professions - our fealty to the stop clock and to time discipline, to the bottom line of profitable or even of quantifiable results, to the public or private stresses of office or factory interaction, to the suppression or denial of affective charge, and in particular to the forcible alienation of our labor in the service of projects conceived by and for someone else is still, for some, almost miraculously attenuated. Projects conceived in relation to identity politics, such as feminist or gay-lesbian inquiry, are continually testing and redefining the limits of such a professional exemption. Delusive as some of these freedoms may be, the space of work for at least some in this industry can seem strikingly close to an idealised preindustrial workspace of task orientation, work continuity, and the relatively meaningful choice of tasks based on perceptible need and aptitude.
It is obviously important to recognise the large national differences that obtain between different university systems. Certainly in my experience American academics are staggered when I describe to them the nature of the audit procedures that dominate our teaching-after all, theirs is a system which barely acknowledges external examiners. Nevertheless, I think that we can all recognise the picture of academic life that she paints as a kind of ideal-type, and I presume that much of the opposition to the audit culture comes from a feeling that it radically trespasses upon that 'idealised preindustrial workplace'. I shall return to the 'rationalism' of the audit culture later. But for now I want to consider the apparently 'value-neutral' nature of the audit procedures, indicated by such phrases as 'fitness for purpose' and so on. That is, the extraordinary proliferation of documentation which now surrounds and buttresses our teaching is by and large neutral with respect to its wider purposes, for all that sometimes these push at the limits of our autonomy as Sedgwick describes. It would be possible, for example, to devise some 'Aims and Objectives' for English programmes as they might have been devised by Arnold, or I. A. Richards, or Leavis, or Raymond Williams, or shall we say Terry Eagleton circa 1980. The point would be that all these are in principle conceivable, however difficult to articulate.
Which brings us to one of the central issues that I think confronts us specifically in English-which is the degree of explicitness which audit procedures force us to adopt in relation to our teaching. This is at the heart of a series of issues central to our topic, to do with such matters as tacit knowledge, 'theory' and its place in the curriculum, and indeed the very possibility of defining in explicit terms exactly what it is we do. Let me introduce this aspect of the topic via a moment of autobiography. When, as a postgraduate in the late 70s, I was cutting my teeth on theory, I remember looking back with particular disdain (or should that be complacency?) at that moment in the 40s when Leavis refused the challenge issued by René Wellek to be explicit about the criteria by which he was judging literature. This seemed to me at the time to be a deeply symptomatic moment, when the ideological project of the Leavisite academy refused to speak its name. Now I'm not so sure. The reason for this uncertainty is not merely that I have gone soft in my old age; it's more that there is an element of rationalist fantasy about the demand for explicitness, since the very nature of our subject-I say this despite the danger of agreeing with Leavis-at least poses a challenge to the extreme explicitness now demanded of us. This rationalist fantasy is at its most visible when one is contemplating the extraordinary panoply of documents that now surround what we do. Programme specifications, module descriptors, level descriptors-all seem premised on the notion that it is possible to describe the world fully, to tie it down in a discourse which will anticipate every eventuality and exactly prescribe the complex modalities of learning. And yet, having said all that, it certainly remains the case that the inexplicitness which my younger self rejected remains the ground for confusion, pedagogical uncertainty, and indeed ideological subjectification. So the issue before us is how far English as a subject can or should embrace the demand for explicitness which the prevalence of audit procedures requires. In short, is there something specific to the study of English which, for all the dangers of irrationalism and covert ideology that the question skirts, is essentially resistant to the level of explicit formulation that audit procedures demand?
One such demand, springing from the diverse sources out of which the audit culture has grown, is that we should describe our courses in terms of the skills that they teach. In one aspect this appears as a demystifying, even democratic, procedure-put to one side, it seems to say, all those high-falutin' justifications, and simply say what students can do at the end of the course which they could not do before. Moreover, perhaps this is a discourse that we can exploit to our own advantage, to demonstrate that English as a subject does indeed include the teaching of a range of 'skills' that are important in other contexts. I certainly know that all the modules on which I teach include 'analytical skills', though to be sure I'm not very skilful at teaching them. Yet the problems with a skills-described curriculum for a non-vocational subject such as English are only too obvious-that we teach the skill and not the topic, or rather that the topic becomes the opportunity to teach the skill, rather than vice-versa. This is a classic means-ends dilemma-that is, in concentrating on the means, we are in danger of losing sight of the ends. More crudely, we end up teaching Don Juan or Beloved not because they are texts whose complexities lead us into specific historical experiences distinct from our own, and the intricacies of their textual realisations, but because they are an opportunity to learn particular transferable analytical skills.
The question for us can perhaps be framed in this way: if we feel that audit procedures propose a series of inappropriate criteria for English as a subject, do we wish instead to propose criteria for audit which are in effect more appropriate. One perfectly sensible answer would be 'no'; it is the answer of a certain pragmatism or, if you prefer, cynicism. According to this response, which I am sure that most of us have practised to a greater or lesser degree, we accept the descriptions and documentation that are proposed to us, and just do them in a spirit of more or less bad faith. This response has its own dangers. One is the obvious danger that those descriptions, produced, shall we say, as rhetorical exercises, always come back to haunt us at audit time. University mission statements are a case in point, those vacuous assertions which characteristically offer two opposing ambitions joined together by a 'while' ('national while remaining local'; 'aspiring to excellence while remaining committed to a supportive learning environment' etc.). They turn out not to be so vacuous when we are asked by auditors-quite properly-how our teaching programmes carry them out. And quite apart from these pragmatic considerations, there is the bigger question of how happy any of us would be to find ourselves working in an environment which required such practical bad faith from us on a daily basis. The alternative, however-which is to say that we should, as a subject community, propose our own criteria for audit (which is to some extent what is already happening via such initiatives as the benchmarking proposals)-has its own dangers. Let me suggest one such criterion to you. It seems to me that one of the real tests of an English course is how far it manages to get its students to engage with the books they are asked to read. However, would it be possible seriously to suggest, as a criterion for audit, the success of an English Department in leading its students to engage with their reading? It would certainly scare me to be faced with such a criterion, and anyway our success in leading our students to a serious engagement with their reading seems in large part a matter of much wider social and cultural forces than we can command. So while in general it certainly seems preferable to suggest that, as a subject community, we should have control of the criteria by which the success of our teaching is measured, such a solution has its intimidating aspect also.
As it happens, I taught in an English department which allowed itself to be used as the basis for an evaluation of teaching methods by an educational researcher who wished to propose more humane methods to his colleagues in science. His work did indeed suggest that the Department was successful in transforming many of the body of disengaged students who arrived into more engaged students when they left. But his work took several weeks and involved very extensive questionnaires and evaluations from the students. I mention it now as suggesting what genuine accountability, on grounds that we might choose and which are not chosen for us, might look like.
Finally, I propose this way of looking at the matter, which begins to explain for me some of the ambivalence I feel with respect to this whole topic. While there has certainly been a disciplinary aspect to the whole process over the last twenty years-some sections of Government and university management have certainly wanted to tie the buggers down, to ensure, that is, that the Doctor Piercemullers of this world are at their post and doing some measurable bloody work-this has only been a part of the impetus behind the spread of the audit culture in the sector. It has equally been driven by what are in many respects benign and admirably social-democratic purposes: accountability to ensure that students are getting a fair deal; transparency of institutions; equity for students in the way that they are treated; explicitness in 'learning outcomes', so that the new generation of students, recruited via mass ascription to what were previously elite institutions, can have the same opportunities as those earlier students for whom underlying assumptions did not need to be spelt out. Yet this has produced what can perhaps be described as a Foucauldian paradox, in that procedures and routines defended in the name of rationality and fairness appear in practice to be a kind of rationalist box.
Something of this paradox has been well described in a short article in the journal Key Words by Rod Jones on anonymous marking. He starts by recalling his own education in the 50s, when it was simply not assumed that women would go in large numbers into higher education, and certainly not to study scientific subjects. As a result, many potentially talented women scientists were excluded from careers in science. Any systematic attempt to eradicate the kinds of distortions-injustices-created by such attitudes are of course unequivocally to be welcomed. And yet anonymous marking introduces into our examination procedures a further level of abstraction, so that the symbolic violence that such systems represent is still further entrenched. In short, the drive to produce equity or indeed elementary justice seems to entail a still more profound disengagement from students as individuals and a reduction of them to ciphers. Something of this dilemma seems to me to haunt the rational and equitable systems of audit as a whole (always assuming that they are rational and equitable, of course); this is not a dilemma that can be resolved either by wholesale repudiation of audit (however tempting at times) or by the assumption that it straightforwardly embodies the equitable principles upon which it claims to be based.
Notes & References
Michael Rustin, 'The perverse modernisation of British universities', in Soundings, 8 (Spring 1998), 83-99, p. 98.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1996).
Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, 'Gender Criticism', in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (The Modern Languages Association of America: New York, 1992), pp. 271-302, p. 295.
Readers are invited to assign the following programme aims to their presumed progenitors as they feel appropriate:
- 'to introduce students to the best that has been thought and written in the world, and thereby to wean them from their narrow and partisan allegiances'
- 'to restore students to a proper psychological balance, by exposing them to models of organic form as achieved by certain poems'
- 'to provide a militant group of cultured individuals with an intimate acquaintance with that small number of texts which affirm life rather than the empty values of mass civilisation'.
As will be seen later, the readiness with which so many of us can produce these parodies is symptomatic of a situation which is itself politically ambivalent.
