Controversies in the Data Society 2020

Universities are increasingly organized and managed through software, powered by code and fuelled by data. In the influential book Code/Space, Kitchin and Dodge (2011) argued that software introduces a new governing logic of ‘automated management’ into diverse spaces and practices. With the proliferation of data processing software across higher education, universities are now becoming code/spaces where forms of automated management and governance are embedded in multiple tasks and systems—from robotic process automation in administration and algorithmic recruitment to automated grading, AI tutors and classroom analytics. This presentation provides an initial analysis of the emergence of the ‘automatic university’ as an imagined future ‘smart’ institution that is already being instantiated in the present through diverse technical projects, political interventions, commercial pressures, and sectoral interests. These imaginaries and programs of automated management on the campus are controversial: they suggest a redeployment of expertise to increasingly capable digital software; reconceive of campuses as ‘mini smart cities’; privilege technical models of education; embed public HE institutions in private for-profit infrastructures; catalyse new markets for ‘data solutions’ sellers; have the potential to induce new anxieties among staff and students; and are likely to bring about new organizational behaviours, with unintended side effects and unanticipated consequences.