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Textual Practice

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Accounterability

Peggy Kamuf

To cite this article: Peggy Kamuf (2007) Accounterability, Textual Practice, 21:2, 251-266, DOI:10.1080/09502360701264428

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Peggy Kamuf

Accounterability

We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004elections. The American people listened to different assessmentsmade about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at thetwo candidates, and chose me.

(George W. Bush)

In this ‘it is necessary to believe me’, the ‘it is necessary’, which is nottheoretical but performative-pragmatic, is as determining as the‘believe’. At bottom, it is perhaps the only rigorous introductionto the thinking of what ‘believe’ can mean to say.

(Jacques Derrida)

I believe that a topic has never caused me so much uncertainty as has theapproach to this question of the ‘counter’.1 My uncertainty, even my con-fusion, is at least in part my own doing, and thus my undoing. Withoutsufficient calculation, recklessly therefore, I gave in to the temptation tosmuggle ‘counter’ into the midst of another word, under cover of homo-nymy, and then accepted the curious result as a title: accounterability.Too clever by half, this meddling with the word accountability (whose for-tunes the OED documents no further back than 1794) adds still greaterconfusion to what is already a place of overdetermined crossing betweencalculation and narration, between count, account, and recount. As youknow, this family of words derives from computare , as do the Frenchhomonyms, both the verbs compter and conter and the nouns compte and conte , with an orthographic difference in French, however, that bidsto prevent the two threads of calculation and narration from tangling with each other to the extent they are liable to in English. In practice, of course, syntax or other elements of context usually manage to keep thetwo senses out of each other’s way, as do conventional habits of usage.

Thus, although accountability might very well be used to mean narratabil-ity, that is, the possibility of accounting for something through narrative,

Textual Practice 21(2), 2007, 251–266

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk / journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502360701264428

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one has almost no chance of making that intention understood given theinertia of habitual usage. Narrative accounting and computationalaccounting are even commonly thought to stand in a rough oppositionto each other, the former occupying a pole in the vicinity of an act of

witnessing or testimony, called, very loosely, subjective, while the latterlies at or close to the pole of what counts as objective fact, evidence, oreven proof. ‘Numbers do not lie’, ‘Read the numbers, the numbers tellthe story’, which is to say, the story of no story to tell; numbers, webelieve, do not narrate, interpret, invent, or make up the figures –unless they do sometimes, which is why one is well-advised to run thenumbers again, check and double-check them. Verification is alwayspossible, at least in theory. Another more patently ironic dictum advises:‘Put your faith in numbers’, in other words, in that which presumably

makes no claim on faith or belief, except, of course, the belief thatnumbers, counting, or quantification triumphs over belief.

The semantico-pragmatic range of ‘accountability’ has perhaps alwaysdisplayed a tendency to harden its connections to hard numbers, to theaccounting of accountancy, and to let its other more narrative, more‘subjective’ connections be subsumed and reduced to arithmetic figuration.This tendency can aptly be compared to what is called ‘bottom-line think-ing’, a phrase that already in itself bespeaks the will, or rather the wish, toreplace thinking by counting, to displace the responsibility of decision and

judgment from the ‘subjective’ place of thought to the balance sheet of summary numbers that, as we also say, ‘speak for themselves’. As if numeric representation had the greatest gravity, density, or solidity: itwould be what is left at the bottom of the testing container once allother superfluous, floating matter – language, discourse, narrative, testi-mony, belief and unbelief – has been poured off and discarded. In thisdownward pull, the term ‘accountability’ has moved to take over thesemantic field of ‘responsibility’, resulting in a certain overlay that showsup, for example, in the redundant names or titles of public organizations,institutions, and offices. A quick Googling of the aims and undertakings of organizations calling themselves, I cite at random, Centre for Corporate Accountability, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, theHispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, or the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative, among others, turns up no significant patterngoverning the choice of the one term over the other. (Perhaps that isbecause it little matters: corporate responsibility or accountability remains elusive regardless of what you call it.) Similarly, judicial insti-tutions and institutions of democratic government are held indifferently accountable or responsible by a variety of public interest groups. Wikipedia

provides here an interesting comment that bids to discriminate betweenthe terms: ‘In politics, and particularly in representative democracies,

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accountability (sometimes known as transparency) is an important factorin securing good governance. It constrains the extent to which electedrepresentatives and other office-holders can willfully deviate from theirtheoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption’. In other words,

accountability, a.k.a transparency, constrains responsibility, at least intheory.

There is, however, one public interest domain where this seemingly redundant overlay or overlap appears to have sorted itself out clearly infavor of accountability over responsibility and that is the domain of edu-cation. By virtue of its insistent application to the purview of this insti-tution, especially in the US and over the last ten years, the notion of accountability has acquired a certain number of specific, defining traitsthat seem destined to determine its future use.

I’m going to take a few moments to enumerate several of these traits,but, as one cannot rely on numbers alone to tell the story, I will also haverecourse to bits of narrative and critical, counter-analysis. Indeed, the inter-est of this exercise, if any, is to find an opening in calculating, accountablelogic, to locate a space for other articulations between our accounts and ourabilities, the space precisely of a free space or free play that can be takeninto account only in the figure of the unknown, the factor of uncertainty,a factor of X, or, as it happens, of a certain – er – that, falling at the pointof exact bisection of accounterablity, sounds a pause, a brief hiatus, a little

time to think, to stop calculating and listen at another rhythm for some-thing else, for an incalculability and unforeseeability that cause theaccountability programme to stammer or stutter: account, er, ability. What one would be attempting to configure thereby is, if it needs to besaid, not the space of a word or of word play, but rather the premises of a counter-practice to the numeric evaluation that assumes a prevailing place in public discourse: as if it went without saying, as if it were self-evident, and therefore irresistible in its logic. A counter-institution of resistance to the irresistible logic of accountability: that is the virtualspace I will try to conjure in the space remaining. In calling it virtual, by the way, I understand neither unreal nor unrealizable. I will return inmy conclusion to the distinction of the virtual and the factual, which Jacques Derrida will help us discern with his analysis of testimony in itsdifference from what is called proof.

Before launching this enumeration, I must invoke at least one caveat.The principal context to which I will be referring is that of a prevailing dis-course about the institution of higher education in the US. This is not tooverlook the fact that a very similar discourse has taken hold elsewhere,notably in Canada, Britain, and doubtless in other predominantly Anglo-

phone societies with large public university systems such as Australia. Andthere are many signs of its progressive establishment among the rest of the

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European Union states, in France, for example. But as far as I can tell, andfor the moment at least, it is primarily the US version of the discourse thathas taken as its overall rallying cry our key word ‘accountability’, to thepoint that one may now commonly hear reference there to an ‘accountabil-

ity movement’.2 No doubt, the auditing and assessment exercisesmandated in Britain share many assumptions about the quantitative mea-surability of the value of research and teaching; despite that, the parallel isalmost never drawn with the British experience by the American move-ment’s advocates, whether because of ignorance, lack of curiosity, goodold American arrogance about what makes us so special and differentfrom the rest of the world, or the indisputable fact that higher educationin the US is ‘organized’ like no other in many respects. Whatever thereasons, the accountability discourse has emerged largely as the product

of a specifically US context, although it is clearly positioned for exportto the world market.3

By invoking this language of the market, you may be sure that I amnot merely yielding to a facile analogy. One of the central questions, as Isee it, is precisely whether or not there is analogy between the university and the market; consequently, whether or not there subsists a space of non-assimilable difference and thus of resistance, of accounterability,between them. I believe that this question has come to a head and to thefore in the US in ways it could not have done elsewhere by reason of at

least two determining features that set the US higher education ‘system’apart from almost every other.First, there is the not insignificant matter of the cost or price of

post-secondary education, which varies greatly but averages much higherin the US than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world. Thiscost is borne disproportionately by the students themselves, most of whom are thereby obliged to remain dependent on the financial supportof parents and family. Besides marking the accountability discourse withan unmistakable paternalism, as authorized by this prolonged dependence,the predominantly private billing of post-secondary degrees regularly permits the discourse to divert attention from the elephant-in-the-roomproblem of unequal access to those degrees.4 The second determining feature is the fact that there is no one deciding, controlling, funding, gov-erning, or regulating agency with purview over the entire system. It is thusprecisely not a system but a dispersion without rational direction, animmense proliferation of disconnected sites, not all of which even havegeographic coordinates, thus, a phenomenon approaching the bad infinity of always one more and then another and then another. This greatdispersion and diversity of American higher ed institutions (by one

count, there are close to four thousand of them) is, to be sure, a strengthto the extent it allows wider access than many more uniform, centralized,

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state-supported university systems. However, even to speak of ‘the’university in the US is to commit something like a category mistake, to sub-stitute a nominal category for what has no distinct essence. Unless ‘the’ USuniversity or the sector of so-called higher education is essentially a market,

its near-infinite dispersion reined in, contained, and regulated by nothing other than the forces that also direct capital and commercial markets.Here, then, is where the question of analogy, or not, arises most pertinently:in the place of the center or agency of the non-system left vacant by the stateor other representatives of shared public interest. For the accountability movement, it is a matter of staking out, by rendering concrete, themarket’s claim to this empty control centre, which means essentially closing the gap kept open by any residual analogy. It is, in other words,not a question of merely reinforcing by repeating the analogy between the

university and the marketplace, but of dispensing with it altogether so asto close down a residual space of difference. The university must be said,must be found, in other words, must be made to occupy a space not justlike that of a market, but one which simply is the market for a specific com-modity, the post-secondary diploma. It must be: the force of this logic wouldbe that of the market’s own drive to saturate every domain of possible experi-ence without remainder, to translate all difference into itself, as the universalvalue equivalent. In the US this translation is largely complete. Only pocketsof resistance remain, here and there, notably in ‘the’ university. Now it is

time to close these down. This is, as I read it, the aim and the purpose of the accountability movement.5

One could say that the movement, at least in its current guise, wasofficially set in motion on 19 September 2005 when the current USsecretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, announced the formation of a federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education. ‘We don’task a lot of questions about what we’re getting for our investment inhigher education’, said Secretary Spellings on this occasion. ‘And as a result, we’re missing some valuable information to help guide policy . . . .

And parents have a tough time getting answers about the way it allworks .

. . .

[I]t’s time to examine how we can get the most out of ournational investment’.6 How to get the most for one’s investment – thatof government, that of parents – is the question for which accountability is the answer. Consequently, the charge to this commission, which is due tosubmit its final report in September 2006 is clear: devise measures forrendering the university more accountable to its investors.

It’s time to examine more closely what is meant by accountability.To do so, I am going to rely on selected passages from documents

produced principally by the movement’s proponents. And to begin this

enumeration, I’ll turn right away to the question of quantitativemeasure, of numbers. At the core of the concept of accountability is

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what educational market managers call ‘value-added assessment’, ‘whichattempts to measure what a particular college or university contributesto its students’ knowledge and capabilities during their four or fiveyears’, in the words of Richard H. Hersh who is one of the principal advo-

cates of this new form of testing.7 This ‘what’ ought to be expressible,Hersh believes, in the form of hard data. To this end, he has headed upthe Collegiate Learning Assessment Project that has devised a longitudinaltest for university students to be administered at the beginning and the endof their programmes of study. Test results from different institutions may then be compared to determine which one added more value relative tocost or, in a phrase that regularly returns in this context, which institutiongives the most bang for the buck. Even though the test designers insist thatit is not a matter of measuring, as one commentator puts it, ‘the particular

facts students have memorized but how well they have learned to think’,the evaluation is meant to provide a clear metric that boils ‘thinking’down into data. There would be much more to say and to think, of course, about what is being counted here as thinking, so I will try toreturn at least briefly to that question later.

To be accountable to investors means to be able to produce evidenceof value added. By ‘evidence’, Hersh and his fellow accountabilists wouldhave one believe they are promising the contrary or rather the neutraliz-ation of, precisely, belief. Writing for The Atlantic Monthly , Hersh stages

a typical scene in which the demand for such a neutralization is addressedby the sceptical, potential investor, in other words, ‘the parent’, to theaccountable, answerable officer of the institution, its president (andHersh is also staging here his previous experience as a university president):

‘What makes your college worth $35,000 a year?’ It’s a hard questionfor a college president to answer, especially because it’s usually raisedat gatherings for prospective students and their anxious, check-book conscious parents. But it also provides an opportunity to cast one’sschool in a favorable light – to wax eloquent about admissions selec-tivity, high graduation rates, small classes, and alumni satisfaction.

The harder question, though, comes when someone interrupts thissmooth litany: ‘But what evidence is there that kids learn more atyour school?’ And as I fumble for a response, the parent [noticeit’s a question of ‘kids’ and that the questioner is assumed by thisscenario to be ‘the parent’ rather than any one of the ‘prospective stu-dents’ who are in the room from now on only as infantilized objectsof this exchange between adults] presses on: ‘Are you saying thatquality is really mostly a matter of faith?’

The only answer is a regretful yes. Estimates of college quality areessentially ‘faith-based’, insofar as we have little direct evidence of

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how any given school contributes to students’ learning. (Italicsadded)

Having confessed to this regretted reliance on faith, Hersh then draws the

lesson from his little narrative: ‘This flies in the face of what most peoplebelieve about college . .’. Which is to say, most people believe that it is nota matter of belief. But in fact, and although they might not want to believeit, what they believe is belief. Hersh and the accountabilists, however, claimto be able to offer the end of belief, if you can believe that. ‘Believe us’, they say, ‘we’re not asking you to believe us’. In other words, belief supports andgives credence to what passes for non-belief, here called ‘evidence’.

Now, when jurists or scientific experimenters speak of ‘evidence’, they patently do not mean ‘proof’, that which compels assent and procures an

epistemological or theoretical certainty. Evidence, however, remains withinthe circle of belief to the extent that any possible or probable meaning attributed to it depends on one’s faith in an interpretation. In speaking not of proof but of evidence, nevertheless, the accountability discoursebegins to slide toward irrefutable certainty, onto the ground of the surething, which is, I suppose, what every market investor dreams of. Onehears this slide in the reference not just to ‘evidence’ but to ‘directevidence’, which promises a non-mediation, a direct path toward theend-user – in accountability discourse, the consumer or potential investor

– who need not question the provenance, production, or packaging of saidevidence. It is thus an appeal to credulity in the face of the highly complex process that would have to go into designing, administering, and evaluat-ing the said test for the said evidence, a complexity that the accountabiliststhemselves readily admit.

Before leaving this scene, I want to mention one more of its detailswhich can be read onto a larger stage with larger stakes. The expression‘faith-based’ is used in quotation marks and recalls thereby its particularuse in recent American political discourse.10 The term began to resonatemost loudly on 29 January 2001, when Bush delivered his first State of the Union Address and announced his administration’s intention topursue a ‘Faith-Based Initiative’. This new FBI is, as Bill Berkowitz putsit, ‘primarily aimed at reducing the size – but not the spending – of government by shifting the responsibility for delivering a host of servicesfrom governmental agencies to faith-based organizations. A central pointthe [Bush] administration has argued from the outset is that faith-basedorganizations had been discriminated against historically, and it wasgoing to do all in its power to level the playing field, giving religiousgroups the opportunity to apply for and receive government grants’.11

From the outset, this FBI has been understood, on both the right andthe left, as a gloves-off move to tear down the remaining defenses

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around the concept, never very secure in the US, of the separation between,as one says, church and state, state and religion.

Now, with this in mind, consider again Hersh’s unmistakable nodin the direction of the language of Bushite neoconservatism: it is cer-

tainly misleading in its apparent impulse to disavow whatever is‘faith-based’ in the assessment of the quality of an institution, andI’m even tempted to think it is quasi intentionally so, a quasi deliberatemisdirection or miscue. For the accountability movement does not only accommodate and even favour the aims of the so-called faith-basedinitiative; the two ideas trace their impulse to the same source. Thecurrent resident of the White House could even claim a certain pater-nity, that is, not only of the new FBI but of the accountability move-ment, which had its test run in the University of Texas system when

President Bush was then Governor Bush and Secretary of EducationMargaret Spellings was his Senior Advisor overseeing what her officialbiography refers to as ‘the nation’s strongest school assessment andaccountability system’.12 (Thus, when I earlier said that the accountabil-ity movement officially began in 2005 with the appointment of theCommission on the Future of Higher Education, I was not taking into account this prior history in Texas.)13

Here, then, is a further reason to be skeptical when an advocate of accountability-for-the-university promises relief from ‘faith-based’ esti-

mates of the quality or efficiency of these institutions. Just as the FBIwas meant to correct, in the words of Bill Berkowitz cited a momentago, the historical ‘discrimination . . . against faith-based organizations’– meaning essentially their containment to the private sector – so too,and in basic accord, the accountability movement works to correct a per-ceived discrimination within the university against ‘kids’, i.e. students,whose views are ‘faith-based’ and/or conservative – meaning, essentially,to correct an alleged predominance on university faculties of left-leaning ‘liberals’. This articulation is rarely made explicit by those who assert thebenefits of value-added assessment. And yet, it would be credulousindeed, I believe, to overlook the numerous conjunctions between, onthe one hand, the accountability discourse, which gives itself the cover of so-called objective measurement and ‘direct evidence’, and, on the other,the discourse mounted against this alleged bias of faculty in US univer-sities, which gives rise to a distressingly vitriolic display of resentment,when it is not merely inane or ignorant (but, alas, the two attributesdemonstrate a regular affinity for each other) and which has found eagerreception among numerous rightwing-dominated state legislaturesthat have ultimate authority over their public university systems.14 The

appeal to what I earlier described as a neutralization of belief by theaccountabilists should be re-evaluated, therefore, in this other, larger

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context of the ongoing pressure to dismantle the faith-neutral policies of public agencies, including those with purview over education in general,higher education in particular. If, as I believe one should argue, the twoefforts have a mutually reinforcing effect, if they are on a trajectory of con-

vergence, even if they are not, at least for the moment, being advanced by the same players under a same banner, then accountabilism deserves to becountered in the name of the oldest principles of the post-Enlightenment,non-faith-based university. It deserves to be, that is, it ought to be, itshould be, and I believe it must be.

These imperative modalities invoke an order of necessity, here, thenecessity of a countering resistance. Such an invocation, however, seemsto be immediately suspended if one adds, as I just did, ‘I believe’. Thenecessity of necessity should not, ought not to be a matter of anyone’s

belief, we believe. Necessity should not merely invite or encourage belief but compel it and therefore eliminate it. To speak of a necessary belief,for example, is to cross, it seems, two orders that ought to remainutterly heterogeneous with each other. And yet, this contradictory modeof necessary belief is that of a common, even pervasive experience, theexperience of testimony. A witness, as Derrida has written, is whoeverspeaks, writes, or otherwise testifies in the space opened up by the impera-tive: you must believe me, it is necessary to believe me. I cite here at greaterlength the passage from which was drawn my second epigraph:

It is necessary [Il faut] to hear and understand this ‘you have tobelieve me’ [‘vous devez me croire’]. ‘You have to believe me’ doesnot have the meaning of theoretico-epistemological necessity. It isnot presented as a probative demonstration to which one has nochoice but to subscribe to the conclusion of a syllogism, in thecourse of an argumentation, or indeed to the display of a thing present. Here, ‘you have to believe me’ means ‘believe me becauseI tell you to, because I ask you to’ or as well ‘I promise you that Iwill tell the truth and be faithful to my promise, and I undertaketo be faithful’. In this ‘it is necessary to believe me’, the ‘it is necess-ary’, which is not theoretical but performative-pragmatic, is as deter-mining as the ‘believe’. At bottom, it is perhaps the only rigorousintroduction to the thinking of what ‘believe’ can mean to say . . .

‘What is believing’, what are we doing when we believe (which is tosay all the time, and as soon as we enter into relation with the other):this is one of the questions that cannot be avoided when trying tothink testimony.15

I’m introducing this thinking of testimony at a countering crossroads withwhat I’ve been calling the accountability movement or discourse (but

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perhaps the better word is ‘culture’, since this movement irrigates and isirrigated by a very broad swath of other formations, institutions, practices,and beliefs)16 for at least two sets of reasons, which I will try to lay out,necessarily schematically, in the space remaining.

First set of reasons: if it is a matter of calling up a possible accoun-terability, then its leverage would have to pivot around what situates theexperience of belief beyond any institution or ‘faith-based organization’.In the face of the convergence to which I’ve just pointed (between accoun-tabilism and faith-based politics, with, don’t forget, the blessing of a market that stands to saturate one of the last hold-outs to the calculationsof its bottom line), it will perhaps be seen as counter-intuitive for thepost-Enlightenment university to seek leverage in such an opening tobelief, that is, to the thinking of belief as the ground, the groundless

ground of experience of every kind in the world with others. If so,however, then must one not also conclude that what long appeared tobe the principal countering thrust of Enlightenment has run agroundon the shoals of the religious faith that is resurgent not only in North,Central, and South America, the old New World, but throughout post-communist Eastern Europe, the new Old World? Whereas for largeparts of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the South Pacificregion, it is patently inaccurate to speak of a ‘resurgence’ or ‘return’ of religion, as if it had undergone there some eclipse or interruption.17

This leaves the relatively small territory of northwestern Europe, thecradle of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, where this inheritance isnow being put to the test of a migration, as driven by marketplace globa-lization, from the ‘unenlightened’ rest of the world, with a result that isnot only potentially explosive but one that has already produced deadly explosions. The point and the question is: If Enlightenment, as the his-torical counter-force to ‘faith-based’ social and political institutions, isin retrenchment, under siege, or simply at a standstill throughout theworld, doesn’t this signal that the encounter is still to come, notbetween belief and unbelief, but rather within the general space thatDerrida sees defined by the performativo-pragmatic imperative ‘youmust believe me’? A new Enlightenment, a second (or third or fourthor nth) Enlightenment would seek to think this groundless ground of belief as the conditioning limit on every possible encounter withanother, every act of testimony given or received.

But, precisely, what is called thinking? This question can take us to a second set of reasons to invoke the problematic of testimony. As I men-tioned earlier, the accountability discourse tags as its principal aim theassessment of ‘thinking’, ‘critical thinking’, which is usually not specified

any further than by way of contrast to ‘factual knowledge’. For example,here is another typical formulation by the authors of the ‘Issue Paper’ on

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‘Accountability / Assessment’ written for the Future of Higher EducationCommission:

The economic demand for a better-prepared workforce has neverbeen greater. The college education needed for the competitive,global environment in the future is about far more than specific,factual knowledge and traditional approaches. College educationmust address the capability and capacity to think and develop andcontinue to learn. It is essential to achieve a new set of skills for a new century, such as: problem solving, critical thinking andwritten communication skills.18

Now, no doubt this list of so-called ‘new skills’ is at least surprising, but letus disregard the absurd insinuations that universities have somehow neg-lected these ‘skills’ up until now. Let us instead sketch a brief analysis of these performative assertions, which, I admit, could be endless. They begin by drawing the clear inference that the university’s principal task,and what is here being demanded of it, is to transmit, foster, andaugment ‘the capability and capacity to think’. Such a capacity or capa-bility is, therefore, the measurable value that ought to be added by the uni-versity experience. This, we are told, is our responsibility in the university and that for which we should be held accountable. Fine. Let’s say we accept

and endorse that responsibility (or rather, reaffirm it) and, what is more,let’s say we’re ready to demonstrate our willingness to be held accountableto that responsibility right here in the encounter with this very text ortest.19 And to do so, we could simulate the sort of test of ‘critical thinking’that the accountabilists hope to see generally adopted, once what they invariably identify as the ‘resistance’ of university faculty and adminis-trations has been overcome.20 As a sign of good will, we would demon-strate, on the contrary and in a counter-move, our commitment to‘critical thinking’ and to our responsibility by responding as critically as

possible to the sample argument just cited and even by submitting to anevaluation of how well we do on the test.

For the purpose of this simulation, then, we’ll put ourselves in theplace of an imaginary test-taker who might have been one of our students.

Pencils ready? Begin.

Test instructions:‘Analyze the above excerpt and write a brief essay in which you agree

or disagree with its arguments, explaining the reasons for the pos-itions you take’.

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Response:‘First, I note the assumption that, according to this statement, my university education ought to have been a preparation for theglobal, competitive workforce. This is not said in so many words,

but that would be precisely what signals it as an unexamined assump-tion. I do not share this assumption and my university experiencehas, I believe, been the richer for it; moreover I believe this despitethe fact that, in another sense, I am now far poorer because my parents refused to continue subsidizing my studies ever since Ichanged my major to the Programme in Critical Thinking. Nodoubt like the author of these assertions, they were willing toinvest in my university degree only so long as I promised an appreci-able return of marketable skills. Nevertheless, I believe that my

program of study, and this will be my second point, has definitely enhanced my ‘capability and capacity to think and develop and con-tinue to learn’, aims that, I agree, should motivate university teach-ing, learning, and research. To adduce some evidence of my enhanced ability, I might apply to the excerpt something I learnedto recognize when I read for one of my courses, among many other remarkable works, Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Plato’s Phar-macy’.21 When the statement distinguishes ‘critical thinking’ from‘specific, factual knowledge’, it is in fact repeating (and very uncriti-

cally I might add) an ancient opposition between what Plato calledthe living memory that animates logos , and hupomnesis , twoancient Greek words that mean roughly thought, speech, reason,on the one hand, and rote memorization and repetition, on theother. And what I’ve read about the similar distinction Rabelaismade, about 2000 years later, between the te ˆ te bien pleine and thete ˆ te bien faite helps me to recognize another variation on ‘factualknowledge’ vs. ‘critical thinking’. Thus, when I read this call to ‘a new set of skills for a new century’, I am able to respond critically (having also along the way picked up a little ‘factual knowledge’)rather than be fooled by an appeal to newness that goes no deeperthan the repetition of the word ‘new’. Likewise, the term ‘skills’draws my critical attention because its use in this context disturbsconsiderably the apparent, but very vague distinction being drawn.This disturbance raises questions, such as: if critical thinking iscalled a ‘skill’, then how is it different from those other, technicalskills acquired by rote memorization and the repetition of ‘factualknowledge’? Can one acquire this so-called skill by bypassing thesaid factual knowledge and the exercise of memory’s techniques,

which is perhaps what the author means here by the impossibly vague reference to ‘traditional approaches’? No, I don’t believe so.

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I call as a witness, once again, Plato, who was after all such a cleverguy that people are still studying his works almost 2500 years later:he too thought he could draw a line between logos and hupomnesis ,so as, in effect, to measure and evaluate the former by itself in distinc-

tion from the latter. He ran all manner of tests on his disciples, butfinally could never adduce anything like a proof or even convincing evidence that his teaching of logos produced better critical thinkersthan did the techniques of the Sophists.

So what is the answer? Which is the better, even the besteducation? I believe . . ..‘.

Time’s up. Stop!

So, how do you think our imaginary testee did? Who will answer that ques-tion for the future, that is, and I quote the test statement again, for ‘thecollege education needed . . . in the future’? This is not at all a rhetoricalquestion since someone certainly will come forward to perform the evalu-ation, and most likely someone who believes he or she already knows how to calculate the future and which future to prepare for. Before being cut off,however, our imaginary student had perhaps started to give a differentanswer, or rather a different testimony . Like every testimony, this onesays: you must believe that I am telling you truthfully what I believe to

be true. It takes responsibility for this belief in response to all the testerswho are asking for evidence, if not proof, of what has been added, ornot, by years of study, who demand a metric to determine if our test-ifier gained or wasted an education, produced profit or loss on an invest-ment. How will ‘critical thinkers’ of the future respond to this demand?

These questions put to the test our thinking of belief and faith,testimony and proof, calculation and the incalculable. And, therefore,perhaps above all, what is called, more and more facilely, more andmore mechanically, ‘critical thinking’. You may of course take all thetime you like to think about your answers, but be aware that the test isalready in progress.22

University of Southern California

Notes

1 See Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). My uncertainty is occasioned, more specifically, by the ingenious title, ‘Counter-Movements’, under which Simon Morgan Wortham convoked the colloquium

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at which this paper was first presented. It is, nevertheless and despite my dis-comfiture, without hesitation that I thank Simon for his generous gifts of spaceand time to think together counterwise. His own work on counter-institutionswill have been the provocation to take rigorous account of a countering drive

that Derrida’s thought engages at every turn. He has thus done the remarkableand difficult thing of counter-signing that oeuvre across the very counter itextends toward a reader capable of a thinking-with that comprehends a think-ing-against, that is to say, counter.

2 The latest advocates of this ‘movement’ – not surprisingly – show a near totallack of awareness of its history, as if it had sprung up like a mushroom. For a concise reconstruction of this history in both the US and British contexts, seeRomuald Normand, ‘De l’accountability aux standards: la traduction europe-enne des politiques de la performance’ (http://ep.inrp.fr/EP/r_a_venir/r_eval_pol/i18nlayer.2005-09-19.5980046756/fr/document_view). Notice

that Normand, writing in French, does not even attempt to translate theterm ‘accountability’ even as he is concerned to trace the effective translationof the ‘thing’ into the European context.

3 In ‘Creating a Higher Education Accountability System: The Texas Experi-ence’, which is the text of remarks read before the National Commission onthe Future of Higher Education and dated December 2005, the author,Geri H. Malandra, touts repeatedly the inevitable spread of accountability,which she effectively likens to a disease: ‘Accountability is catching’ (p. 6),‘Accountability is contagious’ (p. 7). Malandra is Associate Vice Chancellorfor Institutional Planning and Accountability at the University of Texas.

See http://www. ed.gov /about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/2nd-meeting /geri-malandra.pdf 4 See Doug Bennett, ‘Deaf and Dizzy Lawmakers’ (Inside Higher Education , 6

April 2006 [http://www.insidehighereducation.com/views/2006/04/06/bennett]): ‘Accountability, not access, has been the central concern of thisCongress in its fitful efforts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. TheHouse of Representatives has especially shown itself deaf to constructive argu-ments for improving access to higher education for the next generation of young Americans, and dizzy about what sensible accountability measuresshould look like’. See also the same Web journal, 15 April 2005, ‘College

Access: Comparing Countries’ [http://www.insidehighereducation.com/news/2005/04/15/intl]. On affordability, the US ranks 13 out of 16 indus-trialized countries; on access it was ranked 4 out of 13, a relatively goodshowing that is probably accounted for by the inclusion of non-bachelor-degree institutions in the category of US higher education.

5 Although it is certainly not just a question of language, the drive to close thegap between the market and the university also depends on carrying over a vocabulary from the experience of consumerism. Here is Charles Miller, thechair of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in his IssuePaper titled ‘Accountability /Consumer Information’: ‘Any number of excel-lent consumer shopping sites could serve as models for the revised collegesearch site. While shopping for a postsecondary institution is not exactly the

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same as shopping for a car, many on-line shopping sites embody extensive flexi-bility that allows consumers to specify their needs and interests and to compareproducts that meet criteria set by the consumer. A system that allows comparisonof postsecondary institutions could give consumers the ability to eliminate inap-

propriate schools . .’. (http://www.ed.gov /about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html). When is the admission of ‘not exactly the same’ tantamount toenforcing, all the same, a sameness of the compared terms? For a trenchantanalysis of such reductive parallels to ‘market discipline’, see Mike Sostericet al., ‘The University, Accountability, and Market Discipline in the Late1990s’, in Electronic Journal of Sociology (www.sociology.org) (1998).

6 ‘A National Dialogue: Commission on the Future of Higher Education’,http://www.ed.gov /news/speeches/2005/09/09192005.html

7 ‘What Does College Teach?’, The Atlantic Monthly , November 2005.8 Jay Mathews, ‘Measure by Measure’, The Atlantic Monthly , October 2004.

9 ‘The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in whichconviction creates what is obvious’. This is Proust’s narrator mulling overthe problem of how to know whether or not Albertine is lying to him aboutthe nature of her relations with a lady friend. The phrase translated as ‘evidenceof the senses’ is ‘temoignage des sens’, the witness or testimony of the senses.For a reading of Proust’s analysis of this ‘testimony’ in its connections to jealousy, see the chapter ‘Jealousy Wants Proof’, in my Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

10 Hersh repeats the phrase, also in quotation marks, at the end of his essay:‘Nonetheless, value-added assessment offers an excellent place to start, and a

chance for higher education to demonstrate that ‘faith-based’ answers aboutquality are no longer acceptable’. For a very similar gesture, see CharlesMiller and Geri Malandra, ‘Issue Paper: Accountability / Assessment’ (http://www.ed.gov /about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/miller-malandra.pdf):‘Today, most people must ‘take on faith’ what college quality might be becausethere is a lack of reliable ways of documenting and assessing what studentslearn, and how their experiences compare among institutions’ (p. 4).

11 Bill Berkowitz, ‘A quiet fifth anniversary for Bush’s faith-based initiative’, inMedia Transparency , 2 March 2006, http://www.mediatransparency.org /story.php?storyID¼113

12 See http://www.ed.gov /news/staff /bios/spellings.html?src¼

gu; the samebiography recalls that she has a daughter in university and that she ‘is thefirst mother of school children [sic] to serve as US Secretary of Education’.

13 See again Malandra’s report ‘Creating A Higher Education Accountability System’. It should also be noted that this Commission’s chair, CharlesMiller, was previously Chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and was, in Malandra’s words, the ‘instigator’ of ‘a system-wideaccountability framework’. Spellings’ commission is thus quite clearly stacked in favor of the accountabilists.

14 For a recent broadside from this camp, see the ‘report’ issued by the AmericanCouncil of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded by Lynne Cheney (Dick’s wife and former director of the National Endowment for the

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Humanities in the Bush I regime), which is a self-described defender of ‘intel-lectual diversity [sic] on campus’. Titled ‘How Many Ward Churchills?’, thedocument purports to provide evidence of ‘liberal bias’ in US university curri-cula. (Ward Churchill was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of

Colorado who published an infamous and deplorable comparison betweenthe victims of the attack on the WTC Twin Towers and the engineers of the Nazi genocide, calling them ‘little Eichmanns’. He was recently firedfrom his tenured position for research misconduct.) For this document, see:http://www.goacta.org /publications/reports.html. As for actions in state leg-islatures, there have so far been hearings and/or legislation introduced in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, New York, Pennsylva-nia, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and doubtless other state capitals.

15 Derrida, ‘Poetics and Politics of Witnessing’, in Sovereignties in Question ,Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, ed. (New York: Fordham University

Press, 2005), pp. 76–77; trans. modified.16 Miller and Malandra, for example, assert (that is, perform while appearing merely to refer to) a ‘national culture of evidence and assessment’ (op. cit., p. 7).

17 On this question of the return of the religious (rather than religion), seeDerrida, ‘“Above All, No Journalists!”‘in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber,eds. Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 61 ff.

18 Miller and Malandra, ‘Issue Paper: Accountability / Assessment’, p. 3.19 The reduction of text to test is perhaps one way to measure what is at stake; see

Miller and Malandra’s paper for a slip from the former to the latter, which atleast on one occasion appears to be inadvertent: ‘In the most recent National

Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) survey, less than one-third of collegegraduates could demonstrate an ability to read complex tests [sic] and makecomplicated inferences’ (p. 2).

20 Hersh (op. cit.) writes, for example: ‘To date academe has offered little inresponse, apart from resistance in the name of intellectual freedom andfaculty autonomy. These are legitimate professional prerogatives, but unlessthe academy is willing to assess learning in more rigorous ways, the cry forenforced accountability will become louder, and government interventionwill become more likely’. For a quite different assessment of the chances of resistance, see A. Bradney, ‘Accountability, the University Law School and

the Death of Socrates’, Web Journal of Current Legal Issues (2002).21 Given the experience being testified to here, what would our imaginary test-taker have responded if the test statement had included this other unqualifiedassertion, found elsewhere in Miller and Malandra’s document: ‘Collegecourses are not designed to foster critical thinking’ (p. 5). By what knownmeasure could that be judged a responsible affirmation?

22 Avital Ronell, in The Test Drive , poses essential questions to and about thistesting regime (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Fora provocative resistance more specifically aimed at the RAE, see NicholasRoyle, ‘Night Writing’, in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 112–14; see also, Simon MorganWortham’s chapter in Counter- institutions titled ‘Auditing Derrida’, pp. 85–118.

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