Strategies of Knowledge Alchemy in Global Higher Education

In this paper, I explore some of the strategies that various actors such as performance index producers, university administrators and national governments use to increase the value of academic institutions. In the hands of skilful actors, knowledge alchemy can increase the value of an academic institution by converting a piece of knowledge into a more valuable numerical form (data) and using it instrumentally to improve its position in global HE. In contrast to knowledge alchemy as an increase in value, knowledge devaluation is the symmetrically opposite transformative strategy, necessary for knowledge alchemy to work. For instance, elevating the teacher/student ratio as the main numerical representation of teaching quality requires that other types of representations of teaching quality are delegitimized. A third transformative strategy that various actors use in a second stage of knowledge alchemy is reproduction or duplication. Knowledge alchemists copy-paste indicators or parts of them to other data tools that they then use as ‘new’ tools to value novel objects. Certain types of knowledge, such as those produced by leading institutions like the INSEAD or international organizations like the OECD, are more prone to reproduction than other types of less legitimate knowledge. Eventually, this repetitive activity leads to simulation, where tools and discourses increasingly refer to one another, detaching themselves from the referent, the ‘real’ reality of higher education they originally were supposed to scientifically represent.