Accounting for Scholarship in the University 2.0: Knowledge Production and Dissemination under the Conditions of Global Knowledge Economies

When I started putting together this essay, my home institution, York University, a university founded some fifty years ago with a mission to provide humanities and social sciences–focused education to the diverse immigrant population of the Greater Toronto area, considered purchasing a software package ominously called “SciVal.” SciVal is an online tool that has – like all good “brands” – a tag line: it supposedly “unlock[s] the promise of your research” (http://info.scival.com) by aggregating data on citations, publications, and so on from the citation database Scopus, also owned by Elsevier, and displays those compilations in simple yet colourful charts, graphs, and tables in order to assist university management in “keep[ing] an eye on their peers” for hiring and budget decisions (Reisenleitner).

Elsevier also owns a large share of the journal market in health sciences, and its parent company, Reed Elsevier, made headlines in 2007/08 because of its (now severed) links to the international arms trade (Allen). Together with the Thomson-Reuters Corporation (an “information company” that owns the Web of Science citation index, on which the bibliometric performance indicators of the Time Higher Education Survey university rankings [THES] are based), Elsevier arguably now not only dominates the global public perception of the quality and standing of individual universities (which would be problematic enough), but it is also part of a complex of for-profit organisations that have contributed significantly to the successful establishment of an imaginary of parameters that are considered decisive in the constitution of academic knowledge and its production.

I find the term imaginary useful in this context because it underlines that we are not simply dealing with a metaphor or representation of what it means to produce knowledge in a tertiary educational setting under the conditions of global, disorganized capitalism in the twenty-first century. An imaginary constitutes (or, in the case of institutions with long histories such as universities and the disciplines practiced in this setting, reconstitutes) lived experience, material practices, social relations, and public discourse, and generates the taken-for-granted, and thus operates beyond the level of individuals’ intentionalities, whether they are well-meaning or not. Such a setting is well-described by the term managerial university, describing an institutional context in which knowledge is managed, rather than just commodified in the by now almost ubiquitous notion of an education market (rather than a public good).

This is, of course, not the first time academics have had to confront outside pressures. The modern Humboldtian academy, which institutionalised research and education, had to negotiate its mandates with wider frameworks of the nation state, market forces, and other sources of external pressure, resisting or accommodating impositions from the outside while pursuing the kind of independence of knowledge creation only insufficiently captured by the sound bite “academic freedom.” An important part of this negotiation consisted in the concomitant formation of universities as specialized, disciplinary research institutions, on one hand, and liberal arts–focused instruments of general education, on the other – a process that carved out a remarkable degree of institutional independence while existing in a contested space of intersecting value systems in which the gatekeeping of educational elitism (Bildung) and the reproduction of class, national, gender, and ethnic hierarchies was constantly confronted with pluralising, democratising, and meritocratic principles. Today, these institutional histories (and internal contradictions) have to be articulated in, and aligned with, a global economic environment in which the academy’s arguably most significant contribution, the production of knowledge, has become a crucial commodity in national and global markets. Knowledge in the twenty-first century is no longer the more or less exclusive product of the pre-competitive, politically and economically more or less protected environment of nation- or state-funded institutions. Imaginaries of knowledge production as the engine of national and global economies have irrevocably breached the bulwarks of the ivory tower, and the new imaginaries that accompany these breaches clearly have some unintended consequences that leave little space for self-regulation and independence from market ideology.

The accountability tyranny of university rankings, performance indicators, and...