Abstract:
The measurement of performance in the public sphere is becoming increasingly trivial. As examples, take the measurement of the worth of academic scholarship using the numbers 1 to 4 (as in the English Research Assessment Framework) or by means of coloured 'traffic lights' (as is done in some prestigious Australian universities). Once brought into being, such numbers seem to be regarded as non-contestable. I ask what gives legitimacy to such reductionist, simplistic measurement systems? What gives legitimacy to the lack of moral consideration of the disturbing effects on people, such as anxiety, distress and loss of employment, that can be produced by such measurements? Arguing that the blind application of numbers to people as if there was no moral or ethical dimension to the calculation rests on a military discourse in mathematics I explore the development of this military discourse, tracing through a series of links from military engineering to civil engineering to mathematics education in universities and public schooling. I argue that the simplistic measurement strategies currently in wide use in public institutions lie within the military discourse of a measurement-by-number regime. As in the military, faculty members (or students) are required to compete, are stratified, ordered, graded, ranked, demoted or dismissed on the basis of measurement-by-numbers. I argue that training in the rigidities of school mathematics conditions people for a receptivity to this. School mathematics expects and requires little thought, no debate, no dissent, but rather a blind obedience to following procedure; it demands a silent submission to the rule of calculation. The envisaged end point is one of ‘trained incapacity’. Overwhelmed and silent, lacking the education and the confidence needed to engage mathematically, people do not critique the numbers that measure, judge, demote and dismiss. The deeply problematic measurement systems to which they are subjected within public institutions thus come to be seen as incontestable. Conditioned for a receptivity to governance-by-numbers by their schooling in mathematics, people are held to account by the frivolous simplifications of a technicist mathematics.