A senior law enforcement officer in the Uzbekistani capital, Tashkent, was recently caught on tape demanding that officers fabricate reports about their success in rounding up ‘vagrants’. When an arbitrary target set for an arbitrary deadline looked like it would be missed, Abror Khudoyberdiev, of the Almazar District of Department of Internal Affairs, sent this panicked message to his inspectors: ‘Each of you register a vagrant. Bring a relative and register them as a vagrant. Register yourself as a vagrant.’

This ludicrous incident is typical of the unintended consequences of Outcomes-Based Performance-Management (OBPM) schemes. Unfortunately, as many UK academics can attest, it has become a common way for UK universities to ‘manage’ staff, resulting in great workplace stress. My own institution is no exception: in 2015 senior management attempted to foist a particularly obnoxious OBPM model on the university, the infamous ‘Raising the Bar.’ Fortunately, as our example also shows, these can be defeated by creative and concerted collective action.

Target culture and the public sector

Outcomes-Based Performance Management (OBPM) is the use of targets and measurement systems to monitor, evaluate, and improve individual employee and organisational outcomes. It has been used variously in Cold War East European command economies to manage industrial production, and in West European and US health and educational sectors. Cataloguing how it invites bias, cheating and gaming the system in order to avoid punishment, in his famous ‘Campbell’s Law’, Donald Campbell concluded that ‘The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’

A classic example is the Blair government’s headline target of a patient being seen within four hours of entering an Accident and Emergency (A&E) unit. This sounds like a fine thing, and the government was able to use seemingly positive results to try and fool commentators and the public into thinking their reforms were working. But in a deep dive into what actually happened, Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood found extensive evidence of gaming the system. Hospital trusts drafted in extra staff to A&E and cancelled scheduled operations elsewhere for the period over which performance was measured; patients were made to wait in ambulance queues until managers were sure they could be seen within four hours of admittance; trolleys were redesignated as ‘beds’ by placing them in hallways, and the like. Like the hapless Tashkent cop forced to fabricate vagrancy reports, the goal of desperate managers becomes hitting targets to keep their jobs, not real delivery of socially useful goods: ‘what matters is what’s measured’, Bevan and Hood concluded.

‘Raising the Bar’ at Newcastle University

Education and educators have been particularly high up the league table of most tortured victims of OBPM schemes. ‘Teaching to the test’ is a well-known problem of high-school education. My university, Newcastle, stands as an example of the worst excesses of ‘The Metric Tide’. In 2015-16, it launched ‘Raising the Bar’ (RTB). A classic example of OBPM, it set academics a range of crude targets for annual grant capture, publications, and PhD supervisee completions as a way to align individual working practices with particular management goals. These goals were entirely products of a flawed imperative that equated success with the university’s position in league tables: for example, ensuring the university was in the world’s ‘top 200’ universities and having ‘at least 10 subjects (Units of Assessment) which are ranked top 50 in the world’.

The implementation of RTB was insidious. Heads of department were instructed to assess all staff against some fairly arbitrary metrics and flag them as ‘Green’ or ‘Red’ in a traffic-light system. Academics were not told their colour, but ‘greens’ were to be reassured about their position, and the ‘reds’ summoned to special RTB review meetings from which ‘inferences may be drawn by individuals.’ For ‘reds’ who didn’t improve, an accelerated ‘capability procedure’ would be implemented to coerce them into either signing teaching-only contracts or leave the university.

Managing staff performance against goals that are not in their power to fulfil – for example, winning rather than simply applying for grants – was crass and cruel. Unsurprisingly, RTB created great fear and anxiety in the institution. Union casework indicated that it unleashed a culture of bullying as staff were told informally that they ought to look elsewhere for work. These effects were experienced differentially: colleagues who recently had extended periods of maternity or sickness leave, or heavy teaching and service loads, were particularly disadvantaged. The Newcastle UCU branch produced posters highlighting the anger and distress RTB was causing:

_{Campaign posters produced by Newcastle Branch of the University and College Union, Autumn 2015.}

Resisting RTB

Newcastle staff were repeatedly told by management that RTB was inevitable, and we just needed to ‘play the game’. But it’s a myth that we can ‘play the game’ without it reworking and re-languaging our fundamental sense of what scholarship is. So, we resisted, in four ways.

First, we articulated a collective grievance. We organised meetings across the university. We read the latest scholarship on the flaws of OBPM and drew on the expertise of colleagues who worked on the topic. We invited external speakers. Groups of academics in their own disciplines and in broader collectives (like the Newcastle University Women’s Network) wrote joint, open letters to university managers and governance bodies.

Second, we shaped the narrative. The posters displayed around the university, the coverage in local and national media, and working with students to ask their parents to complain to the university, all articulated a powerful critique of RTB as coercive, anti-intellectual and ultimately harmful to the university. A very long message sent from the Vice Chancellor to the Executive Director of Corporate Affairs, obtained by a subsequent Freedom of Information request, shows just how much this rankled senior managers:

As you know, the temperature is rising fast on the UCU local action, and I think the local campaign will get very active over the next week or so. I expect they will deploy all the tactics we have seen before and likely a few more: misinformation about ‘targets’, getting the students mobilised, a one-sided view of the ACAS negotiations, etc. Just over this Bank holiday weekend so far I have already received a number of emails from students (from English, this time) about the marking boycott, and I expect more to come. The parents will be next, probably followed by the press. I would expect a social media campaign too.

This indicates that university staff’s success in shaping the narrative irked university executives.

Third, we presented an alternative vision and vocabulary. A key strategy was not simply to oppose a harmful idea, but to articulate an alternative vocabulary of excellence in academia. Under the title ‘Improving Research Together’ (IRT), we launched a document recognising the desire to improve performance (who doesn’t want to do better research?), but to do so in a collegial and empowering way that recognised this desire by giving staff the freedom and resources to succeed. Opening with the words, ‘Newcastle University exists to further human understanding of the universe for the benefit of humanity’, IRT resisted RTB by restating the intrinsic value of public education. A Change.org petition calling on the university’s senior management to ‘end coercive performance management at Newcastle University’ and instead sign up to IRT garnered 2,701 signatures (accompanied by numerous critical comments) from academics worldwide within three days.

Fourthly and finally, we took collective action. University managers tried to mollify us with a proposed memorandum of understanding that softened the language but not content of RTB, so UCU branch members voted to take Action Short of a Strike in the form of a marking boycott beginning 3 June 2016. Management wrote to staff threatening to deduct pay at a rate of 100% but then backed down in the face of staff resolution and the increasingly bad publicity. On the next working day, Monday 6^th June, they agreed to withdraw RTB and, draw on the approach suggested in IRT to work with staff to develop a ‘collegial approach to improving research’.

Mobilising for lasting change

Outcomes-Based Performance-Management schemes are beloved by university managers because they seem to offer simple pathways to institutional improvement. In reality, they corrupt and distort education and can cause great distress for those working on the frontlines of research and teaching.

Although academics have subjected such schemes to extensive critique, we have generally been pessimistic about our ability to resist them, preferring instead to offer mitigation strategies and grudgingly accept the inevitably of the relentless march of neoliberalism in academia. The defeat of RTB showed that successful mobilisation against what Stefan Collini called ‘the logic of punitive quantification’ is an available option. It also led to an immediate improvement in university culture. More staff joined the union branch and activists successfully ran for Senate as a way to try and hold senior management to better account in the future.

A decade later, Newcastle, like many other universities, has been caught in a funding crisis. But there has been no management attempt to roll out another OBPM system across the university, and some school or departmental initiatives along these lines have been resisted.

But perhaps the greater challenge has been the internalisation of the type of values and distorting practices that RTB sought to instil through external coercion. Many of us working in higher education voluntarily subject ourselves to unnecessary metrics exercises. For example, we create Google Scholar profiles to generate flawed ‘H-indexes’ or cultivate followings and profiles on neoliberal platforms like Academia.edu which monetise academic visibility and transform researchers into self‑branding, target-hitting entrepreneurs. We boast on our websites about the cash values of grants we have won. In doing so, we make the same error as RTB – mistaking the end product of innovative research for the means to undertake it.

In a shrinking higher education sector marked by precarity and uncertainty, we face a real dilemma of how to respond to incentive structures that encourage academics to think of scholarship not as a vocation but as competitive career. We need to figure out ways to fight the battle against target culture in our own practices as well as on the picket lines.