No one challenges Big Brother

Academics are expected to accept a far-from-perfect system without question. Mary Evans rails against the culture of compliance.

Many academics will have been delighted by the recent Reith Lectures and the sceptical discussion by Onora O'Neill of the consequences of the culture of accountability in public life. But with this culture goes another shift in public life - the growth of a culture of compliance.

This culture has imposed on academics a sense that there are some issues and procedures that simply cannot be discussed, such as the 50 per cent age cohort participation rate in higher education and the growing construction of a New Model Academic.

This person is expected to take part in any number of bureaucratic rituals, from membership of the Institute for Learning and Teaching to the mandatory submission of research grant applications.

In many institutions, all academics "have to" submit grant applications and candidates at job interview are grilled about their grant application rate. Nobody would expect academics who wish to obtain (or who do obtain) grants to maintain a dignified silence about it. The point is rather that a perfectly legitimate, and important, process has been translated into a compulsory one.

To challenge this Identikit model of the academic is difficult for those applying for jobs, but it is increasingly becoming difficult for those actually in jobs.

Expectations of what academics are supposed to do in the light of "good practice" and "public accountability" are becoming more rigid. Across the sector, uniform practices and processes have been imposed, and questioning that imposition has been neither encouraged nor allowed by university administrations.

The external constraints created for universities (the research assessment exercise, the Quality Assurance Agency and the 50 per cent participation rate) have been passed on to university staff who thus live in a world of implicit moral and institutional blackmail. Individuals "have to" publish, they "have to" apply for research grants, they "have to" organise their teaching in certain ways and they "have to" accept that standards in higher education can be maintained in the light of more or less open admissions.

The shift in expectations about the role and performance of academics has inevitably led to increasing public scepticism about the value of universities in maintaining critical thought and debate.

The boundary between the state and the academy was never a sealed one and there is a long tradition of resistance to particular cases of the problematic engagement of universities in the state's research agenda. But what has emerged is less the growth of the state's use of the universities than the increasingly explicit assumption that every academic should accord to certain arbitrary bureaucratic measures of performance.

The worst effect - in terms of the consequences for universities as creative rather than collusive institutions - has been the increasing difficulty of dissent from these expectations. Not to be a new model academic is to invite the damning label of "uncooperative" or "unprofessional". But the construction of "professional" for academics has largely been set by unelected and unrepresentative individuals whose aim might well be the limitation and debasement of the academy rather than its enlargement and enhancement.

Challenging the new world order of universities has become rather like attempting to challenge the politics of Stalin's Russia or George Orwell's Oceania. The un-negotiable and inviolate assumptions are mass participation and public accountability. To question either of these is seen as elitist and/or undemocratic. But it is still worth saying that mass participation is transforming higher education in ways contrary to many of its most valued practices and that "public" accountability is nothing of the kind.

Mary Evans is professor of women's studies, University of Kent at Canterbury.