Teaching Rites and Wrongs: Universities and the Making of Anthropologists (C-SAP Monograph 2)

To what extent are recent changes in higher education impacting on classroom teaching? And how are they being experienced by new teachers? University reforms over the last twenty years are not simply to do with the change in scale caused by expansion. The change is also one of an accelerating pace and complexity in the production, distribution and monitoring of institutional knowledge within a ‘risk society’, and the changing relationship of individuals to such knowl¬edge. A torrent of policy initiatives have accompanied public expectations for ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ across the public sector. Rothblatt describes the UK as ‘obsessed with evaluations of every kind’ (1997: 278), and Shore and Wright aptly label this process one of ‘coercive accountability’ (Shore and Wright 1999).