Quality and Power in Higher Education

Citation

James, R. (2006), "Quality and Power in Higher Education", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 187-189. https://doi.org/10.1108/09684880610662060

Is the nature of quality in higher education really understood? Has the so‐called “quality movement” in universities delivered any improvement in research, teaching and learning given the effort and costs involved? Louise Morley and most of the university staff in the United Kingdom (UK) she interviewed for this book seem to answer “no”. For Morley, quality assurance and the like in universities is mostly about surveillance and control. This book is a strong, and at times, strident and polemical critique of the efforts to assure university quality, mainly those of the UK, but also beyond.

Quality assurance and quality assessment have become such pervasive activities in higher education during the past 20 years that they warrant careful scrutiny. By and large the concepts of quality control, quality assurance and total quality management owe their origins to manufacturing industry. The underpinning ideas have been extensively developed for other organisations, of course, but the jury is still out on whether they really work in complex knowledge and service organisations such as universities, especially for the co‐production involved in the creation of the teaching and learning “product”.

Morley's analysis is wide‐ranging, addressing many quality‐related issues: the policy context – in particular globalisation – the problems with assessing and managing quality, the effects on scholars, the politics, the construction of students as consumers and issues of equality. Morley has read widely, and interviewed UK university staff extensively, having funded the research herself after failing to convince funding bodies of the value of this study.

Her overall thesis is that quality parades as a universal truth. In Morley's words, quality is a socially constructed domain of power, it has become a universalising metanarrative, a discursive orthodoxy. Morley concludes that the contentious activities surrounding quality assurance in the UK have created a compliance culture and, paradoxically, are generating mediocrity rather than improvement. Quality and quality assurance are depicted as convenient tools for government. Universities, for their part, have failed to resist the fads and buzzwords of the quality industry.

For Morley, quality assurance is a:

… command economy in higher education [that] threatens to produce self‐policing, ventriloquising apparatchiks, as opportunities for self‐agency are reduced (p. 162).

The book features a number of similarly emphatic pronouncements. The prose is often “staccato” in style, with many short sentences that move breathtakingly quickly from topic to topic. Often the ideas do not seem to flow logically and it is difficult to grasp the direction of the argument. This is not to say the book does not provide insights and some finely argued points. However, the overall impression is of an intellectual “curiosity shop” – there are ideas of real interest and substance but often these are presented piecemeal and are lacking in sustained coherence.

One of the reasons for the impression of fragmentation is the excessive use of lengthy quotations from the staff interviewed. Many of the comments seem little more than the expected angst over change, the role of university management and the reduction in resources that are a part of mass higher education systems. In presenting these data, however, Morley signals her own position by introducing pejoratives – people who claim positive benefits from Quality Assurance (QA), for example, are labelled “product champions” while those with concerns are more approvingly dubbed as “critics”.

Despite these irritating stylistic tendencies there is a profound critique lurking in this book. A very bleak picture of quality assurance in higher education emerges. University staff see little benefit in the time, resources and energy being devoted to the measurement and management of quality. Further, Morley argues that:

… quality assurance demands self and organisational beratement that demoralises and disempowers … quality assurance discursively carries the threat and trace of the other within it (p. 165).

Putting aside questions about the vague meaning of these statements, it is clear that Morley and the staff she interviewed see little good in quality assurance and quality assessment, in both concept and implementation.

I have written critically about quality assurance, evaluation and benchmarking in Australian higher education (Krause et al., 2005, James 2000, 1998). Despite this, I found this book unsatisfying and ultimately unconvincing. This book seems to leave no room at all for the concepts of quality and quality assurance in universities yet offers no alternatives or suggestions. Morley seems dismissive of anything that smacks of measurement, management and performance in higher education. Can we really argue that the research and teaching conducted by universities is in some way beyond reckoning, that communities must simply trust us an academics? True, some silly activities are being conducted under the rubric of quality assurance. But surely this does not mean we should shy away from the goal of quality, however, we might describe it.

If universities are to be concerned about the quality of their research, teaching and learning, then more needs to be learned about how to pursue this objective in policies and programs. Understanding quality assurance is still a “work‐in‐progress” in higher education, it seems likely that universities need a highly distinctive paradigm for quality assurance. No such paradigm has emerged, and it seems we are a long way from establishing one. This book is a useful criticism of the effects of current QA efforts, but it offers no ways forward.