By Daisy Sanchez Villavicencio

In the early weeks of ANT473, Professor Li assigned students  “Coercive Accountability: the rise of audit culture in higher education” by Cris Shore and Susan Wright (2003), which brought our attention to the effects of technological practices as they interact with social life and cultural change. Audit technologies, which I understand as “verification rituals”, are not neutral or objectively rational but are distinctive moral conducts and behavioural norms within the current climate of academia. The concept of audit shaped and guided my early conversations with a lead Strategic Plan writer at Student Life. The same staff member also worked to draft an Assessment Framework plan for each unit of Student Life. According to an early draft, the Assessment Framework was necessary to hone in on important goals, create a structure of support, maximize planning and collaboration, and create a powerful and consistent story about the unit’s work. To put the framework into action, an SL staff member leads a workshop for each unit in which the unit participants identify 1-5 objectives, steps to be taken, and the measures that will be used to assess progress.. The image below, provided to me by my interlocutor, outlines the assessment structure.

The outline and the workshops align closely with my interlocutor’s lectures in the Higher Education program at OISE, which often featured Dr. John Kotter’s 8-step process for leadership in organizational change. 

Kotter’s 8-step process includes:

1. create a sense of urgency
2. build a guiding coalition
3. form a strategic vision
4. enlist a volunteer army
5. enable action by removing barriers
6. generate short-term wins
7. sustain acceleration
8. institute change

Later on in the lecture, students were instructed to use Kotter’s steps for change to outline their own experiences and how each step was used, or to imagine how they would have led a change using them. I found this parallel quite compelling for the purpose of our ethnography; not only is conducting the Assessment Frameworks a form of audit that ‘renders visible’ the goals and impact of the SP, but teaching how to assess with frameworks, how to constitute change and assess progress is an example of the new cultural epoch of audit and managerialism in higher education (Shore & Wright 58). The SL culture, as I understand it thus far, has transformed financial, objective, and quantified issues such as GPAs and drop-out rates into abstract social goals, such as student-centered learning, equity, and diversity. It has then attempted to retranslate abstract social goals into measures, timeframes, data points, baselines, and targets – the essence of audit. 

Works Cited

Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. “Coercive accountability.” Audit Cultures, 8 Dec. 2003, pp. 69–101, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203449721-7.