Evaluated Through Performance or Performing Evaluation? An historical investigation of the role of Vice-Chancellor committees in shaping the genesis of managerial governance in English and Italian universities

The New Public Management literature represents an intersection of different disciplinary traditions and importantly explores how management ideas and practices play a part in governing public institutions through evaluation criteria. However, the debate on higher education focuses on State-level developments, whilst being too general when analysing university contexts. This tendency hinders a proper understanding of how management and evaluation practices first emerged and developed within universities. To remedy this gap, this study advances an historical investigation of the first uses of such practices within the English and the Italian university sectors. I argue that whilst scholars acknowledge that vice-chancellors have acquired managerial roles, they tend to limit their conceptualisation of these agents to mere subjects of governance as NPM principles emerged. As a result, they underplay the role of groups who consistently developed and launched evaluation practices within the university context. From this critique, the thesis examines the rise of managerial governance in universities by historicising vice-chancellor committees’ use of evaluation practices. In so doing, the study critically analyses committees’ actions in relation to States’ policies. It also draws out the gradual and bottom-up construction of an evaluation-managerial nexus. The study’s key historical argument is that performance assessment indicators in English and Italian universities did not emerge from State policies geared at creating competition between universities but entered university walls due to the active role of vice-chancellor committees. Far from being mere marketizing instruments imbued with a competitive logic, performance assessment indicators are extremely contested technologies which reflect constantly changing power struggles between university groups and between university and non-university groups. The educational evaluation indicators analysed here were first constructed by research networks in the post-war international context, in the midst of a “planning movement” tracing back to the 1960s at the OECD. As vice-chancellors borrowed these practices, they frequently re-articulated them for acquiring greater leverage of power within universities, developing a managerial connotation of evaluation. Explaining the rise of managerial governance through evaluation in terms of universities’ forced adaptation to the pressures of the New Public Management paradigm, I argue, generalizes the complex and still largely unexplored historical lineages of these practices.