Palazzo Giusso (Napoli). Wikicommons/Sistermone. Some rights reserved.Over
the last few months, a campaign inviting Italian academics to abstain from participating
in the latest nationwide research assessment exercise (VQR 2011-2014) has been
gaining momentum.
It
all started with a petition signed by around 14,000 academics calling for the
government to back off on its decision to write off the years 2011-2014 when
calculating seniority in service and corresponding pay levels for academics.
The
austerity-driven four-year salary freeze affected almost all public sector
workers in Italy (with the exception of judges and magistrates), but academics
not only were the last category to see their rise in pay restored, but the only
ones for whom 2011-2014 were basically written off altogether.
This
was perceived as an act of discrimination by academic staff who felt uniquely singled
out among public sector workers as deserving of financial punishment. Being
assessed for research activities carried out in years which have not been
counted financially also contributed to the sense of disrespect. It has been only recently, however, that the
campaign has shifted towards using an instrument which had already been
deployed by our French colleagues in 2009 and which led eventually to the
suppression of the French Evaluation Agency (ANEER) in 2013:
to abstain from participating in the second national research assessment
exercise (VQR), either by refusing to submit one’s publications for evaluation
or to participate as an expert in the committee work, thereby scuppering the
whole (expensive) exercise on grounds of statistical inaccuracy.
The
whole effort has been driven almost single-handedly by the formidable figure of
Carlo Ferraro – befittingly a professor of ‘Traction Thermal Motors’ – at the Polytechnic
of Turin –
wielding the basic communication tool of mass emails. But the campaign has also
taken off in social media and achieved the support of student unions such as
Link, and precarious researchers in the 29 April network, influential websites such
as ROARS (‘Return on Academic Research’) and the FLC-CGIL (the Federation of
Knowledge Workers within the largest, more left wing of the three major Italian
unions).
The background for the protest, in fact,
is the coincidence of the (belated) introduction of a complex national research
exercise with very deep and hurtful ‘austerity’ cuts which have produced a
massive contraction of the Italian university system.
The figures spell Armageddon for the
Italian Higher Education system: -20.5% of new students, -17% academic staff,
-18% administrative staff, -18% of
degrees, -22.5 % in ‘ordinary funding’, the lowest percentage of spending on
higher education in Europe, high fees and dwindling numbers of student grants. This contraction has
operated along geopolitical lines as universities located in southern Italy
(such as my own) have been disproportionatedly affected by the cuts.
‘Shameless
professors’
As an associate professor in a small (southern)
Italian university, I felt uncomfortable at first in joining a protest about
fair pay for professors – given the abysmal financial treatment Italian
universities (like many others) inflict on their casualized and precarious staff.
As expected, while the deadline for the VQR gets closer, the first tweet to
comment on the protest mentions ‘shameless professors’ asking for ‘pay rises’
when there are four million poor Italians.
And yet, the call to abstain from participating
in the VQR has also inevitably acted as a catalyst for a number of grievances
and criticisms which have been mounting in the Italian academic community. Such
grievances and criticisms have found an outlet and a forum in ROARS – an
informal interdisciplinary network formed in the aftermath of the latest
neoliberal reform of the Italian University system (the so-called ‘Gelmini law’
opposed in 2008 by the largest student movement in Italy for the past twenty
years) with the intention ‘to intervene with competence and credibility’ in a
discussion interpellating politicians and policy makers.
ROARS’ editorial committee includes
academics active in the fields of law, history, political economy, data
analysis, physics and the arts. Operating through a website, a Facebook group,
email and public seminars, the group has been relentless in its critique of
evaluation procedures, policy, and media coverage of issues pertaining to the
University. However, ROARS is only one (admittedly large) node in a social
media milieu of blogs, facebook groups, mailing lists and websites which is
covering the unfolding of the protest day-by-day (such as the number of
participants, livestreaming of meetings, documents issues by assemblies and
also reactions of the agency ANVUR which has already pushed back the deadline
twice, many believe also as a result of the protest).
‘No evaluation without valorisation’
As the battle is getting ready to be
played out in social and mainstream media in the next few weeks, it will probably
be spun against those folkloric devils – the ‘University Barons’ (decimated by
mass retirement themselves while those who still work have been ultimately
empowered by the new system) – who are greedily asking for pay arrears (the
difference between asking for arrears and having one’s pay level restored like
the other public sector workers being a subtlety which will not easily make
itself understood in the public and social media debate).
However, it will also be difficult to deny
that the extent of the cuts makes all kinds of evaluation a joke: as the slogans
put it, ‘no evaluation without valorisation’, ‘first respect, then assess’. How
can you ask to judge the quality of a system while you are also subjecting it
to the most massive disinvestment in the history of the Italian state?
If the whole purpose of the exercise is to
decide which universities should be entitled to remain such (thus exercising
both the function of teaching and research) and which ones will be degraded to
all-teaching institutions, why should academics cooperate in their own demise?
As evaluation and austerity cuts have gone
together, universities feel they are literally competing for survival and
participation in an action that is never without pain. If the action does not
succeed, lack of participation will directly affect funding, triggering an
inevitable sense of guilt, fear and responsibility. The punishment will most
likely materialize not only when negotiating promotions, but also as a loss of
funding for teaching contracts and research funding including post-doc
fellowships and new posts.
Not participating in the action, however, also
bears its responsibilities and risks in as much as it will signal that academic
staff continue to accept everything that is thrown at them. Television
statements issued by the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to the effect that
Italy does not need too many universities and that we will be much better off
with just a few ‘centres of excellence’ while concentrating on national
economic priorities such as tourism and food, also does not bode well. After
all, as critics have pointed out, the 1.5 billion cuts to the public university
system have already materialzed elsewhere – the same sum having been allocated
to the Expo 2015 fair held in Milan last year.
‘Algorithmic regulation’ and a large number of losers
The internationalization of research
careers has also made many of us well aware, that the purpose of evaluation is
to control and direct academic work towards business-oriented forms of
productivity – thus producing a new subjective figure of academic-administrator
who earns her own salary and the university’s upkeep by chasing public grants
and private sponsorships.
As Italian political theorist Valeria
Pinto well put it in her Foucauldian account of assessment procedures – to
evaluate is to punish. More specifically, research assessment exercises mobilise
a whole technical and technological assemblage that is set to produce a kind of
organizational automaticity. It seems to me to be a case of that process of
‘algorithmic regulation’ which, according to Evgeny Morozov, is coming to
define the evolution of ‘data-based governance’ which for him spells the end of
politics. The guidelines for the
exercise issued by the controversial agency ANVUR explicitly refer to the
necessity to produce a ‘standardizable and comparable database’ which can be
used to make visible the state of research in Italy in any given year (there is
also a yearly data gathering exercise known as SUA), but also, effectively, to
calculate the portions of funding that should be allocated.
As funding for universities reaches
dramatic lows, the research assessment exercise functions as a clumsy
computational dispositif through which to implement an ‘economy’ of ‘allocation
of (very) scarce resources to different ends’ with very few winners and a large
number of losers. It is as part of this process of automatic governance that data
is gathered and then measured, weighted, compared according to a number of
parameters, indicators and weighings.
Lines of criticism
While some academics insist that these
evaluation exercises are ultimately technologies of power which undermine the
freedom of research, others are challenging such procedures on their own
terrain, by contesting their scientific claims.
ROARS’ criticism of this model has aimed
at debunking ‘the ideological use of mathematics’ as a means of intimidation (treating
scholars in the humanities more harshly) suggesting that the evaluators
themselves are out of touch with scholarship about evaluation. This is an
effective line of criticism, but it also seems important to discuss not just
the technical points, but the overall political drive and model of automated, data-based modalities of
assessment.
In the first place, we might consider that
the current Italian model (as it appears from below, to those like me who are
subjected to it) is characterized by strong centralization. The whole process
is data driven but according to a model where end-users become data-entry
operators unable to affect the determination of the criteria used to collect
the data and constrained in their writing to the most codified of statements.
End-users, as many accounts of academics’
experiences of interfacing with the platforms confirm, are prisoners of rigid grids
and of strict determinations which allow or forbid passage to the next level
(coded as green and red). There is an enormous amount of ‘cut and copy’ work
from old versions and wasted effort in duplication of data as the capacity to
crosslink informational data sets is not implemented in many cases.
Arcane formulas appear in the documents
issued by the national agency for research evaluation (the controversial ANVUR)
which need mathematical competences to be decoded. A whole industry of
consultants ready to help universities to match their submissions to the
shifting requirements issued by ANVUR is also proving to be a further drain on
already scarce resources.
Evaluations of these informatic reductions
are performed by human agents acting in committees who are selected according
to the procedures of a centralized administrative state. Subjective and
objective elements (if this distinction can still hold) are mixed but the overall
thrust goes beyond the inherent corruptibility of all human evaluations and
methodological flaws in search of statistical methods of data collection.
This orientation is inevitably geared
towards an increased productivity demanded of researchers and academics. What
the whole system wants from us overall is simple: it wants more while paying
less and to be able to determine what ‘the more that counts’ is; it wants to
give a numerical value which determines the importance of different strands of
research, in a kind of centralized, hierarchical, optimized control of
knowledge production geared towards the proliferation of ranking tables and measurable
growth – an increasing, paradoxical, expansive homeostasis running on decreasing
resources and supposedly infinite energies and time.
Online tools
Much has been written, especially by
contemporary Marxists, about the process of real subsumption of capital, how
value today is not limited to the homogeneous quantitative measurement of the
industrial working day, but is increasingly abstracted as the social production
of value is turned into capital.
Research and education can be considered
as part of this social production of value, resistant towards past knowledge
and the existence of networks of relations and cooperative processes which
enable new knowledge to be produced. Looking at the tables and equations
littering the pages of the assessment documents I am institutionally obliged to
pour over, I cannot help thinking that they display recognizable features: they
seem ready for a sociological description (such as the popular Actor Network
Theory framework) of the ways in which step by step, data entry by data entry,
grid by grid the intangible and heterogeneous values of research can become
countable and measurable.
As Italian academics have pointed out, in
the end, we do not even need expensive national research exercises as we are
already thoroughly implicated in the data politics of knowledge production
through online tools and platforms such as Google Scholar, Academia.edu,
databases such as Scopus, but also viewings on YouTube and such likes.
In a recent special section of the journal
Theory Culture and Society I
co-edited, dedicated to the predicament of the European Union in the aftermath
of the latest financial crisis, Italian-French economists such as Carlo
Vercellone, Andrea Fumagalli and Stefano Lucarelli have argued that an economy
based on knowledge requires a new form of welfare which is adequate to the new
conditions – what they call ‘commonfare’ or ‘welfare of the common’.
Vercellone in particular argues that the
old institutions of the welfare state cannot be simply considered as sites of
reproduction – luxuries which economies can afford once they have produced a
sizeable surplus and which can be cut when such a surplus is not available.
Health, research, education, insurance and such likes for Vercellone are the
new bases of production of ‘non-mercantile’ values and wealth (an ‘anthropogenetic
model of the economy’).
Hence they do not claim a surplus produced
elsewhere, but they constitute the basis out of which that surplus is
generated. Scholars at the Manchester Business School are also arguing for the
existence of something called ‘the foundational economy’ which includes
education, health, food and even telecommunications, which they argue are
foundational to human life and flourishing and mismanaged by the logic of
competition[1].
Paul Mason’s popular notion of
‘post-capitalism’ also seems to signal a new mood and orientation. The
evolution of higher education (but also national health systems, insurance etc)
towards commonfare or a ‘foundational economy model’ should also be marked by a
shift away from the rigid public/private dichotomy (in practice converging in
neoliberal approaches to public management) towards processes of
democratization which could also deploy some form of automation.
It is not by chance that the Italian
Marxists mentioned above (who draw on the concepts and categories of Italian
Autonomist Marxism) have also been involved in a recent EU-funded project
called DCENT (‘Decentralised Citizens
ENgagement Technologies’) which is crucially
concerned with the democratic potential afforded by new technologies.
If current data gathering exercises about
academic research are inspired by a utilitarian philosophy which sees the value
of knowledge as subordinated to the generation of economic value, is it
possible to think about a different model? Would it be possible to make the
data sets generated by evaluation exercises a Data Commons Project? Would it be
possible to devise more flexible and adaptable software platforms which would allow
for the introduction of parameters inconceivable for a centralized agency –
parameters which could be invented?
Could the contributions of precarious
workers (obliterated by the current system) be made visible in such a way as to
support requests for fair pay and welfare support? Can evaluation become a p2p
exercise in learning and change which is autonomously and cooperatively pursued
rather than imposed centrally? Or is it doomed to be an alien stultifying
intrusion on the social life of knowledge?
Just the beginning
The protest of Italian academics against
the VQR is pitted against some big obstacles: the general mood of austerity,
the rise of unemployment and poverty can be easily used to attack what seems to
be the demands of a highly privileged category of public sector workers.
The whole process might just return to
acquiescence once the demands for pay are resolved – even as rebellious
academics claim that this is just the beginning. On the other hand, the
questions posed by one of the first national initiatives against research
assessment exercises will keep resonating.
In spite of more radical positions which
denounce the complete complicity of such procedures with a larger system of
control, it seems that many academics actually want to be evaluated. We should
not be too quick to reject this demand as the reflex of a subjectivity which
has been formed mostly by its capacity to perform at evaluations, the petty
desire to be told that one is good.
I believe that in the demands of academics
to be evaluated there is also a desire to unsettle the silos-like structure of
Italian universities, where rigid internal hierarchies resting on a mass of
precarious labor are matched by national hierarchies within strictly defined
disciplinary enclosures.
If most Italian academics, as they seem to
do, want to be evaluated, then maybe it is then a question of asking how and
under what conditions? Will imagination and democracy (rather than centrally
imposed algorithmic regulation) be allowed to play a part in the game? What
role should algorithms, data, software platforms, social media and such like
play in a new model of higher education and research as a ‘foundational
economy’ or ‘welfare of the common’?
[1] See,
e.g., Bowman, Andrew, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, John Law, Adam Leaver,
Michael Moran, and Karel Williams, eds. 2014. The End of the Experiment? From Competition to the Foundational
Economy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.