Luis Bonilla-Molina [1]

Traducción sujeta a revisión. Original en español

I recently came across the grading scale for the entrance exam for a Latin American public university. Reading it became the best snapshot of a critical moment for higher education institutions, which, paradoxically, is perceived by some as a stellar one.

Measure, evaluate and prioritize that something remains

The capitalist mode of production, starting with the third industrial revolution [2], demanded a structural adjustment of school systems and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to produce a new coupling between training-employability-commodities-profits-reproduction. The idea synthesis of this requirement was that the time for the production of scientific innovation had been shortened, technology was being dynamized by digital technology and the disciplinary mode of generating knowledge was becoming obsolete.

Capitalism required a rapid transformation, but it knew that due to the reproductive nature of schooling, this change could be slow. It had to be sponsored, led, guided, and monitored for it to materialize. First, educational multilateralism, with its culture of consensus, was insufficient to address the task alone, so the president of the most powerful nation in the world himself convened the International Conference on the World Education Crisis (1967), establishing the idea of «crisis» and cycles of reform, something that has continued for almost six decades. Second, from this conference, the conclusion was reached that the only way to accomplish this gigantic task was to reorganize all the world’s educational systems around an institutional evaluative culture [3] with very concrete political operations, which would end up being expressed in what we know today as academic publication systems (bibliometrics), university accreditation, rankings, and more recently the approach to academic-student mobility and the international processes for the recognition of studies, degrees, and training. Third, multilateralism, especially UNESCO, was relegated to the role of constructing narratives that legitimized these operations and made the influence of the economic sphere on the intellectual sphere less evident, especially in the form of educational standardization.
The paradigm underlying this approach was that if dynamics of evaluation, classification, and ranking were implemented, the entire system would move in the expected direction. It was a kind of preview of continuous improvement, typical of Total Quality Management (TQM). Thus, what we have now naturalized as everyday practice in the university was set in motion, after six decades of hegemonic construction.

Where capitalism seems to have failed was in its capacity to transform institutional archetypes, something that was necessary to reconfigure academic culture, allowing it to align with the three demands that motivated it. The weight of university organizational development centered on faculties, schools, and departments around disciplines stifled any change in the intended direction.
For their part, anti-capitalist educational resistance, accustomed to criticizing the disciplinary mode of generating knowledge, failed to emerge with «alternative models,» and the lack of transformative creativity took refuge in the notion of transdisciplinarity as a cross-cutting axis of knowledge management. This surrender of critical thinking did not contribute to the emergence of popular universities, nor did it pave the way for the university dreamed of by the capitalist center. However, this situation is not something to complain about; on the contrary, it is evidence of the difficulties in fostering a paradigmatic rupture from below. I know, some colleagues will say that this open secret should not be mentioned in public, and in defense of the university, it is better to continue with the «naked emperor» complex. I am sorry to disappoint you.

Ponder as ideology 

From a public policy, the foundations of exchange operations became an ideology. Publication recognition systems (ISBN, ISSN, and later) ended up being built on ISO (International Standards Organization) business standards, initiating an unprecedented phase of standardization. This was followed by the growing convergence and standardization of standards and arbitration procedures, and publication recognition mechanisms, leading to the establishment of differentiated, hierarchical «indexes» with prestige derived from overcoming obstacles to publishing.
But since university students write «a lot,» especially in the fields of social and human sciences, a mechanism had to be found to address the concrete, the useful, and the susceptible to use in symbolic and material reproduction, and the social reengineering demanded by the dominant system. Brevity, synthesis, and economy of reading time to locate the relevant seem to be the demands of capital. Books began to lose importance in the hierarchical systems of the academic career, and when they are evaluated, they are given greater weight when they pass through the filter of an editorial committee that focuses on justification, methodology, proposal, and application or impact; the rest is often superfluous and can be problematic.

Critical thinking was also subjected to the straitjacket of measurement, forcing it to progressively abandon questioning the system and shift to operational questions, anticipating potential operating limitations—in other words, it was relegated to a functional context. The old critical thinking was labeled «ideologized,» «outdated,» and «not appropriate for academia.» Evaluation took on the face of ideology.   

Eternal present 

The important thing is to stay up-to-date; it seems to be the leitmotif of evaluative culture—especially neoliberal culture—and in this direction, a sense of history, and even worse, of the future, was considered dispensable. The important thing was—and is—that the reference lists in publications not exceed the last five years of their publication date. It went so far as to say that some libraries «removed» classics because the available copies had been published forty years earlier. In the rules of the competition I mentioned at the beginning, only the candidate’s publications from the last five years were valid; everything else was superfluous and, above all, ineffective.
But this led to productivism. That is, to the false equating of quantity with quality. In the aforementioned criteria, of the 100 points required, 50%, or 50 points, were for peer-reviewed, indexed, and standardized articles in high-circulation journals. If we examine, for example, the case of Brazil, where a Qualis A4 article, which corresponds to a significant number of publications by academics from that country, can represent 1.5 or 2 points on criteria like these, the applicant would have to have published at least 25 articles in 5 years to achieve the maximum score, at a rate of five articles per year (almost one every two months), if they aspired to optimal recognition upon admission. But publishing in these journals and systems is not just about writing, but about managing its publication, and in some cases, it depends on whether the university where you work has paid for the right to publish there. Therefore, publishing requires writing and dedicating hours to managing its success.

This led to the emergence of a «green path,» the predatory academic market, whose appeal lies in managing the publication of these articles. This «alternative market» has a series of components that not only conflict with ethics but also affect increasingly precarious teaching salaries. However, this explains why in some cases, a dozen academic articles can be published in a single year—not to offend exceptional cases, but rather to refer to the average.

This productivism influences salary scales, program league tables, accreditation, and university rankings. Publishing increasingly becomes the center of pedagogical reason for being, leaving behind the idea of the university that prefigures another way of living in the world. You are worth what you publish; it is the extension of you are worth what you have, in a now with pretensions of perpetuation.


Capitalism built hegemony in six decades: but did it achieve its goal?

From 1967 to the present, capitalism achieved an «Everyone In» approach, effectively eliminating the outside world from the system; an unprecedented achievement in the history of Latin American universities. Even revolutionary Cuba, subjected to a criminal economic blockade, has long since entered the accreditation race, and with it, bibliometrics. Others are exploring less parametric scientific evaluation criteria, other ways of measuring academic productivity, but most end up paying tribute to the classification mechanisms designed by the system.
Without alternative external references, capitalism built the hegemony of evaluative culture, which it outlined with the narrative of an «educational crisis» at the 1967 conference convened by President Lyndon Johnson. But did evaluative culture, especially bibliometrics, achieve the purpose for which it was promoted?

My interpretation is that the opposite happened, because bibliometrics ended up confusing publication date with innovation, also creating a barrier to the expression of new ideas with the vigor and freedom that creativity requires. An academic exploring a cutting-edge topic today, from which some innovation emanates, must first convince their peers and students to mention their idea in one of their peer-reviewed papers or articles, in order to discuss the new idea with sufficient references (at least 10). By the time they manage to publish and now be cited, the innovative proposal has surely lost its meaning, or it was developed by a researcher from an independent center, funded by private capital, which has other degrees of freedom and does not require publication in bibliometric systems for recognition. All this, even if each of them later makes their proposals fashionable in Scopus, do they at that moment express innovation or the time of mass consumption? In the end, if you want to publish five articles a year, as required by the aforementioned competition, it’s best to take the safe highway, writing about a topic that others have already addressed and recycled in publications of recent years, thus killing the possibilities for innovation in the academic world. We academics are forced to think every day about where we will publish and the impact it will have on our careers, to live on the hallucinatory edge of productivist success.

When the Ouroboro complex [4] expresses the loss of futureability

Academia seems to have entered a dynamic in which it prides itself on incessantly biting its own tail, like the mythological dragon-serpent. Bibliometrics did not generate a virtuous spiral that promoted transformation, but rather a cycle that seems to shrink every day.

Today, for example, the university aligns itself with climate change initiatives promoted by the Sustainable Development Goals—the system—and lacks the capacity to push them toward a more radical position, because innovation has become about adapting, about constructing arguments that favor alignment. It doesn’t embrace initiatives like degrowth or promote other possible developments with facts. On the contrary, it is more concerned with entering the digital transformation of education, purchasing more computers, satellite connections, developing powerful intranets, and incorporating generative artificial intelligence into its dynamics, than with considering, valuing, and building resistance to the predatory consumption that these «innovations» have on an element as vital as water, or their impact on the growing desertification of the planet, a product of open-pit mining of lithium and other rare earths.

This emptying of the future project is putting the existence of the face-to-face university, the university we knew, at strategic risk. Capital seems to be relinquishing the role of the university as the axis of the innovation-production-governance relationship, as evidenced by the transition to what has been called the micro-accreditation of learning, something we will explore in more depth in another article.

Bibliometrics seems to have led the university into a dead end, from which it can only escape by appealing to its tradition of dissent, rebellion, and commitment to social change, something that can reposition it as an alternative.  

Will bibliometrics save the university?

Not at all, bibliometrics paves the way for its destruction. Of course, a central task of the university is publishing; that’s not what we’re questioning, but rather the legitimization and normalization of an evaluative, classificatory, and productivist dynamic imposed from outside. This calls into question the very validity of university autonomy today, because a university that doesn’t decide its destiny and how it is expressed in everyday life ends up accepting only limited autonomy.
At a time when the most powerful nation on the planet has launched a new offensive on education with precedents of this magnitude only known in the one initiated by Johnson (1967), it is time to think, from the university world itself, how we see ourselves in the next 100 years, what is the academic legacy that we will leave to the new generations.

Milei took a first step by eliminating Argentina’s Ministry of Education, a course Trump has confirmed with the aim of dismantling the United States Department of Education and redoubling the attack on universities. This mistakenly seems to be interpreted as sensationalism from far-right figures, but that’s not the case. The capitalist system is changing its assessment of the role of universities in sustaining and reproducing the system, and yet the Factory 4.0 switch , a symbol of the fourth industrial revolution in the mode of commodity production, has not yet been turned on. When will we wake up and realize this?    

[1] Visiting professor at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), Brazil. Research Director of the International Research Center Other Voices in Education of the CLACSO network. Coordinator of the Working Group Digital Capitalism and Critical Pedagogies.
[2] Authors such as Ernest Mandel in late capitalism place its beginnings in the 1950s. In my case, I prefer to do so in 1961 when the UNIMATE robot began to be used in the automotive industry, that is, computing and robotics reached the factories.

[3] Which would become the neoliberal evaluative culture in the late seventies, deepening its processes and effects.
[4] Mythological snake or dragon that bites its tail, forming a circle that prevents transformation.