I never thought I would say this, but I have learned something useful from the ASSESS list serve. I thought I was the only the anti-assessment lurker on the list, but it seems I was wrong. Another such person could not take it anymore and broke cover by posting a link to an interesting article that is almost ten years old, but it is one that I had never encountered.
It’s by Thomas Docherty of the University of Warwick and was published in the THE in 2011. It’s called “The Unseen University” and in it he describes what he sees as the two sides of the modern university: The Official University and the Clandestine University.
The Official Univeristy
describes itself by mission statements, mission groups, research reports, colourful prospectuses and websites, and YouTube videos. It prides itself on an essentially vacuous “excellence”, supposedly transparently demonstrated by various facts and figures (Information), finally settling into position in the multiplying, and often mutually contradictory, league tables that various agencies will use as a proxy for an understanding of the life of our institutions.
While the Clandestine University
is where most of us do our daily work. As academics, we do not “compete” against colleagues elsewhere for research funding; rather, we just want to do the research, and we welcome good work wherever it is done. When the research councils come up with their next Big Funding Idea, researchers will twist their activity to seem to fit the idea’s criteria, while actually carrying out their preferred research. Of course, although we know this to be the case, we cannot officially say it.
In the laboratory or library, when our experiments or readings lead away from a simple rehearsal of what the grant application said we would do, then we divert from the terms of the grant and we engage, properly, in research. We do not find what we said we would. But we cannot officially say this.
But the information generated by the Official University is powerful and it serves the interest of the powerful:
George Orwell, for one, knew that all totalitarian regimes have an interest in reducing knowledge to the level of mere information. This is the real import of Winston Smith’s job in Nineteen Eighty-Four where he “corrects” the historical record of events: “But actually, he thought as he re-adjusted the Ministry of Plenty’s figures, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie.”
For the replenishment of content in intellectual life, we go to those who operate in the shadows of the Official University: teachers, learners, researchers who are actually getting on with unquantifiable activities. Those activities require that we go into a seminar or a laboratory or a library not knowing what we will have found out when we leave. What we learn there will actually make the world darker, more mysterious, more demanding of further research and enquiry. But we cannot say this.
And, as in Orwell’s dystopia, the Official University is effectively a fantasy, dressed up in figures unconnected to reality, figures that are there to serve political ideologies and party power. And we had best not say this.
I’ve not seen a better argument for resisting assessment than this. So keep up the fight, keep knowledge and learning alive, even if it means doing so clandestinely.