Public Lecture: Life with Metrics: The University, the Academic Plan, and You

Public Lecture by Professor Gaye Tuchman

Life with Metrics: The University, the Academic Plan, and You

Date: Friday 22 March

Time: 1:00-2:30pm

Location: Conference Room, Level 1, Sir Roland Wilson Building

Respondent: Professor Leigh Dale, University of Wollongong

The normal authorial career path does not include writing an ethnography of what some readers identify as one's employer and then retiring two years after publication by a leading university press. But that’s what Gaye Tuchman, Professor Emerita of Sociology at a very good American research university and author of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, appears to have done.

In this talk, Tuchman summarizes how academic capitalism has affected all aspects of professorial life – from what professors assign to students and how they submit grades to post-tenure reviews and the casualization (and feminization) of academic labor. Paying special attention to the commodification of the academic self, Tuchman argues that higher education today is an accountability regime – a politics of surveillance, control, and market management – disguising itself as the value-neutral and scientific administration of individuals and organizations.

Gaye Tuchman, professor emerita of sociology at the University of Connecticut, is author of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University. Her other books include the ground-breaking ethnography Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality; Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (now considered an early work in the digital humanities) and the co-edited Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, the first academic analysis of women and media published in the United States. She was one of the 17 founders of Sociologists for Women in Society, served as president of the Eastern Sociological Society, and was on the boards of the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

For inquiries about the lecture email Dr Julieanne Lamond: julieanne.lamond@anu.edu.au