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  • Impact, or The Business of the University
  • David F. Bell (bio)

The Research Excellence Framework (REF, available online at http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/2011-02/), which guides the annual evaluation and assessment of British universities and their teaching personnel, has a well-described history that need not be rehearsed in detail here.1 Suffice it to say that the Thatcher government undertook to professionalize the university in a way that had not been obvious prior to Thatcher's term as prime minister, purportedly to bring educational practices into line with the demand to train students in higher education institutions in a manner appropriate for a modern economy. In the sweep of this "reform," university teaching personnel were to be transformed into producers of results, both as pedagogues and as researchers, in ways that were to be measured by contemporary management practices and frameworks. Whatever other effects this transformation might have had, one thing is certain: it brought into the stark light of day the uncomfortable relationship between the university and the modern Western market society in which it exists. If the debate about impact and how to measure it quickly became a cause célèbre for academics worldwide, it was clearly because relations between the university and the society at large were anything but comfortable in the second half of the twentieth century and in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The impact measurement culture that exists within the university system in the United States—and I will argue that there is indeed such a culture—has not had a crystallizing moment of the sort provoked by the Thatcher initiative and its eventual codification in the form of the newest version of the REF. It has been developing in a more insidious and decentralized fashion, quite typical of the distributed federalism that is a characteristic governance mode of the United States. The recent fiasco that played out in June 2012 at the University of Virginia brought the market forces pressuring American universities into unusually clear focus, however. The board of visitors of the university (the equivalent of a board of trustees in many American universities) forced the university president, Dr. Teresa Sullivan, chosen by the same board a mere two years earlier, to resign, only to reverse the decision and to reinstate her two weeks later [End Page 28] (see Pérez-Peña for a more detailed presentation of the sequence of events in question). The commentary generated by this incident was extremely symptomatic of the state of affairs in the contemporary American university. Characteristically, it prompted statements expressing the nostalgic yearning for an ideal American university that has never actually existed:

In the 19th century, robber barons started their own private universities when they were not satisfied with those already available. But Leland Stanford never assumed his university should be run like his railroad empire. Andrew Carnegie did not design his institute in Pittsburgh to resemble his steel company. The University of Chicago, John D. Rockefeller's dream come true, assumed neither his stern Baptist values nor his monopolistic strategies. That's because for all their faults, Stanford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller knew what they didn't know.

(Vaidhyanathan)

It is extremely doubtful that this cursory overview would stand up to analysis, since at minimum, turning social and political attention away from monopolistic business practices by founding supposedly disinterested "higher culture" institutions (universities) could easily be viewed as just another obfuscating strategy on the part of the founders of American big capital. What is obvious in the remark is an ongoing desire to situate the American university in a space beyond the market.

As the Sullivan affair made abundantly clear, however, the present governance of American universities is intimately bound up with market forces. The University of Virginia board of visitors rector, Helen Dragas, and other board members (although not all) were appointed by the Virginia state governor as a result of their business world and political world experience and acumen, and collectively they had little connection to the day-to-day governance and educational mission of the university (their deep commitment to the success of the university as alumni and longtime university supporters...

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