Fixing the facts: The rise of new public management, the metrification of “quality” and the fall of the academic professions

Abstract

In this article I argue that neo-liberal reforms of universities since the 1980’s have installed a new type of governance – usually known as New Public Management (NPM) – that is undermining the very idea of professionalism. NPM does so basically by replacing professional ideas and practices concerning the judgment of quality by the continuous “metrification of output” in both the domain of teaching and of research. As the idea of the university is based on the idea of professional specialisation, NPM is rendering the discussion about “the idea of the university” irrelevant. NPM does so especially by “impact factor measurement” and by university ranking, but in the Dutch case also by using “performance agreements” between the government and the universities that force faculties to produce fixed “outputs”. Simultaneously, in terms of labour relations, the faculty’s autonomy is effectively undermined by replacing tenured faculty positions by casualised academic labour. Therefore NPM also requires the permanent “re-education” of the faculty – usually advertised in NPM New Speak as the faculty’s “professionalisation” – although in fact it boils down to the faculty’s de professionalisation. The article primarily uses the example of the Dutch universities in order to analyse “impact factor measurement” and “performance agreements” and their role in the general neoliberal economisation of academic teaching and research.