The Master’s Tools: Neoliberal Knowledge Governance through Algorithms

• In Event: STS and Universities - II

Abstract

“Customer relationship management” (CRM) software, developed in 1970s and in wide US use since the 1990s, ideally automates easy but tedious tasks, finds complex patterns in the accumulated data sets, identifies the craft knowledge of long-time successful practitioners, and guides expert decision-making. Achieving that first goal in such systems has been far easier than the rest, as early STS studies of AI expert systems showed. Current US university admissions software systems, derived from CRM, were first launched in private schools where turning undergraduates into donors is crucial; an application is the beginning of a customer relationship. Those systems now organize graduate admissions too.
Increasingly management software circulates in US academia under the guise of efficiency, transparency, and fairness, meanwhile embedding rigid hierarchies and categories, limiting lateral communication, restricting flexibility, and eschewing complexity As we search for qualified applicants the tools metonymically isolate our bits of processual actions; analysis of everyone’s accumulated bits returns to us as synecdochal best practices. Critical commentary lurks as ironic jokes about the metaphor of excellence, justifying the software governance regime and our compliance with the results, as we accept the surveillance of our clicks. What is counted defines what counts; quantification establishes new criteria for evaluating admissions, hiring, advancement, subjects of inquiry, course design, research collaborations, and knowledge circulation. Using the software we learn to act as we should, performing new normativities under surveillance. What are the implications and alternatives, as we use these master's tools to rebuild the house where we teach and learn? 1

1. Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (1984)

Author

• Sharon Traweek, UCLA