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“Kontorstyre og skjemavelde” – Or, The death of academia by a thousand forms


While doing my daily browsing of the news this morning I ran across a delightful quote. In an article about how the government of Norway is instituting administrative bloat in the country’s national railway company, Jens Kihl and Kjetil Magne Sørenes write that, far from reducing the public bureaucracy connected to the railways, as they promised to do, the conservative/populist coalition government is introducing “kontorstyre og skjemavelde.”

Those words are great descriptors of not only the changes the neoliberals are bringing to Norway, but also the changes neoliberalism has already wrought on the university in the United States. A straightforward, dictionary translation of the terms would render them as something like “office rule and red tape,” and that would certainly be a functional translation. But skjemavelde has more connotations. It resonates with enevelde (absolute monarchy), and might better be rendered as “dictatorship of the forms” or “formocracy.” Literally it means being overwhelmed by forms, something that calls to mind that famous scene from Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil in which the guerilla plumber Tuttle (played by Robert De Niro) is attacked by hundreds of paper forms flying in from all directions and adhering to him, enveloping him in a writhing, rustling mass of bureaucratic forms until he simply disappears in the paperwork.

What a great metaphor for academic work today. From assessment, which has emerged from complete obscurity to become the main subject of department and division meetings over the two decades of my career so far, to expense reports, travel authorization forms, student warning forms, student curricular review forms, annual faculty activity reports and the diverse clutter that fills my inbox on a daily basis, the university has completely overwhelmed and obscured its purported mission to create knowledge and educate students (Wißenschaft and Bildung).

From a perspective from the factory floor of the teaching machine, it often seems that my primary purpose now is to fill out forms and produce assessments. But, having been trained in broader, theoretically informed analysis, I have at least some of the intellectual tools needed to step back and get an idea of the bigger picture. And in that picture it becomes clear that the dictatorship of the forms is really there to guide me towards my true goal: convincing parents that we are, in fact, providing a product, so that they can be convinced to shell out obscene amounts of money to send their sons and daughters to my institution, which in turn allows the administrators to earn their outrageously bloated salaries. This is what neoliberal education is about.

It’s bureaucratic rule through formocracy—kontorstyre and skjemavelde—as a means to a consumerist university marketplace with precious little time to waste on intellectual critique.

Let’s sell some academic widgets to our customers, folks!

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