24/7 Snitching

Who is into anonymous slander? Ok, wrong question for those of you who like to lurk around X without revealing your names. This isn’t a post about the evils of anonymity on social media. It is a post about the evils of anonymity in performance feedback.

Do you work in a place where co-workers and clients are allowed, indeed regularly encouraged, to anonymously rate you online? Where, for example, anyone could claim to be a client of yours and tell your superiors how you are nasty, ignorant, rude, dress badly, look foreign, smell, etc?

Kinda odd that, no? Now imagine if, not only this was a regular feature of your work, but you also had to respond to anonymous slander with action plans, on how you will address comments and please, anonymous assailants.

Do you reckon this would increase your work satisfaction and general wellbeing?

That does not sound good? Well, bad news if you work at a university!

As part of an endless cycle of slobbering obedience to opaque metrics, like the National Student Survey (NSS) that final year students have to submit, many universities offer 24/7 feedback loops to their students.

How nice to be responsive to customer demands, right? I think not.

Why do people come to study? Universities flog ‘expertise’, ‘excellence’, and top-notch teaching. Said amazeballs is said to be delivered by experts in their fields, who are also brilliant teachers, implementing cutting edge pedagogies.

Applause all around. And, of course, what is the best way to assess cutting edge pedagogies? It is by asking people to anonymously comment on things they may or may not have done, by people they may or may not have met. Add to this the requirement of immediate responsive action, and you have an award-winning result, the Reactive University?, which prioritises meta concepts (like perceptions of user satisfaction) over expertise, experience and quality of delivery.

Now, don’t get me wrong. We ended up here not purely due to bean counting crazed middle managers. We ended up here for a whole stack of reasons that also feed into the decline of British higher education. But this post isn’t about academia’s problems at large, it is about this particular problem: anonymous slander.

Some universities are so keen to ‘close the feedback loop’, that they offer online and mobile apps that collect and disseminate the slander at the click of a button. Technology finally comes up with something cool: more online fakeness!

Hold on there Dr Yannis, you may be thinking. Perhaps YOU actually suck, and your students are trying to tell you.

Indeed, I suspect I may suck. The problem though is not my suckiness, it is the delivery system of this message.

Any teacher is part of a team. Students who attend a class, or are graded by a teacher, are non-stop encouraged to speak with them about how they are experiencing their module. There are module leaders they are also encouraged to talk to. There are course leaders. There are heads of school. There are faculty teams. There are also students’ unions and student reps, at every level of study for every course, class and module.

And teachers are really desperate for feedback because they want their students to have a good time and succeed in their study. We all want to improve our process and delivery.

Why then the introduction and promotion of anonymous snitching?

My bet is that this is not about real data. It is about the collection of bogus, anonymous, indefensible information that powers a machine of garbage. A machine that pretends to promote ‘data driven’ decision making, while it is designed to promote ‘drivel driven’ harassment. A machine that routinely delivers abuse towards women and teachers from minority backgrounds. Abuse towards those with non-standard accents or looks.

Here's a digital badge for using our snitching service!

But who cares right? Who cares about the experience of university employees? Everyone who does not like it can opt for the voluntary redundancy on offer. Anyone who does not like it, can also try and explain why anonymous randos don’t like them somehow, whey they reapply for their jobs. As the Orange Man says: "How sad".

@iGlinavos