This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speaker: Christopher Newfield (Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London)

Indicators have been thoroughly critiqued for years, and the negative features of the “audit society” have been well understood since the 1990s. And yet indicators are widely regarded as indispensable to running any organization, particularly universities and research units. Will anything wean governments and managers from their attachment to metrical management at a distance?

In this talk, I will try three arguments. The first is that we have no real evidence that the use of indicators increases efficiency. The second is that the use of indicators in higher education undermines its social justice goals. The third is that metrics have discredited professionals and stimulated the rise of right-wing populism. Are all three of these true? Will any of them work to disquantify higher education policy? I’ll answer these questions and then discuss an alternative way to improve higher education and strengthen its social effects.

Christopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London.

A multidisciplinary scholar, his areas of research are Critical University Studies, literary criticism, quantification studies, innovation studies, the intellectual and social effects of the humanities, and U.S. cultural history before the Civil War and after World War II. His current research project involves the nature and effects of literary knowledge. He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press,2016). His research on universities emerged from practical experience with university planning and budgeting through the University of California’s academic senate. He is co-author of What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) and is co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He has served as co-principal investigator on a multi-year grants from the National Science Foundation (“Nanotechnology in Society”) and as PI on a multi-year collaborative research grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (“Limits of the Numerical: Metrics and the Humanities in Higher Education”). He has co-authored a film, What Happened to Solar Innovation? He also writes about American intellectual and cultural history (The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America, University of Chicago Press), and has co-edited Mapping Multiculturalism(University of Minnesota Press) with Avery F. Gordon. He is currently president-elect of the Modern Languages Association. He blogs on higher education policy at Remaking the University, and has written for the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, WonkHE (UK), The Guardian’s Higher Education Network, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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