Counting Out the Scholars: The Case against Performance Indicators in Higher Education (review)

If I had a nickel for every student who asked me the purpose of studying history and theory, or the practical merits of Canadian Studies, I'd be a rich man. My introductory lectures now involve extensive discussions of the obvious (to me) power of understanding historical methodology and argument; on how, in interdisciplinary fashion, deconstructing Canada as a socio-historical idea can articulate one's identity in a post-postmodern world; and how both can sharpen the perceiver's judgment and perhaps effect a more humane world.

With this perspective, I read Counting Out the Scholars with interest. The book was rewarding, as it details and explains with considerable authority a well-travelled and discussed crisis in postsecondary institutions today. This book analyses a patently integral issue in the well-being of the modern university. Those who teach in universities already know bits and pieces of the story, sadly, and hence one of the book's strengths is that it plainly puts a crucial dilemma between two covers. It describes the oft-times distressing and frustrating myopia of anti-intellectualism in society and especially the government in trying to extend inordinate control over something that eschews by nature outside intervention: the creation of knowledge. Universities in history had knowledge at their heart; scholars, professors, and astute administrators and students knew this. Somehow, from one generation to another, politicians and bureaucrats forget, and William Bruneau and Donald C. Savage finally lay it out. This book is long overdue, and essential reading for all stakeholders in higher education.

Engaging the reader in the 'modern educational horror story,' the book is logically and instructively organized. It wisely offers a historical background to the sometimes good-natured attempts to measure all and sundry in higher education, but also delves into the heart of darkness, which is both the intentional and the 'oops' factor (e.g., Margaret Thatcher later lamenting her naïve efforts to increase the quality of British universities through performance indicators) that have marked the long development of benchmarks. Statistics are discussed as the sine qua non for bureaucrats and doctrinaire politicians who seem tireless in applying models of accountability and management to the multifaceted university. Three large case studies are analysed - the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States - before the questionable current situation of measuring and 'outputs' in Canadian universities is explored. Educational philosophers and well-wishers in the nineteenth century led the way to Chicago-Taylorism in the early twentieth century. These ideologies were eventually added to by the specious fallacies of neo-Conservativism in its approach to higher education up to the early years of the twenty-first century. The historical university was, and is, predicated on knowledge for knowledge's sake: through teaching and research, it pushes the intellectual envelope of its professors and charges, but it has now seen the 'enemy,' and it is spreadsheets.

The attack on the intellectual culture of the university comes in the form of indicators which are designed to measure separately easily quantifiable data such as student numbers, drop-outs, and employability; research grants awarded per instructor, department, and faculty; teacher-student ratios; effectiveness and funding of library and supportive services; number of faculty publications; number and kinds of community partnerships; and in a particularly interesting chapter, the adherence to performance contracts in Quebec universities. In Counting Out the Scholars, the legion of 'PI's in socio-historical contexts, and the PIs' interrelationships to each other and to their centralized political brainchildren are laid out adroitly and clearly, and the authors demonstrate a deeper understanding of the sheer complexity of the meaning and motivation underlying the indicators than those who promote them in the first place. While taken individually and in consideration of what it can do for the university and, by association, for society, quantified information is indeed valuable, as the authors suggest, but only in the right hands. Abused...