Managerialism and the academic profession: quality and control

Abstract

It is a little over a year since new arrangements for the external assessment of teaching quality were introduced into British higher education. The long-term effects of quality assessment may not be known but it is possible to see in its introduction the latest stage of a process which has over the last fifteen years been shifting decisively the balance between academic autonomy and public accountability in higher education.
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\nIn the following essay, Martin Trow elaborates this view and considers some of the dangers for quality in higher education that arise from the current forms of quality assessment. In a commentary on Professor Trow's thesis, Dr Paul Clark, Director of Quality Assessment at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, points to some of the benefits of quality assessment.
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\nWhat both contributions do is to remind us that current debates about the assessment of quality in higher education are about much more than the meeting of external bureaucratic requirements: they are about the purposes of mass systems of higher education and the institutional cultures and structural arrangements through which they are to be achieved.