Textual Practice

ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

Accounterability
Peggy Kamuf
To cite this article: Peggy Kamuf (2007) Accounterability, Textual Practice, 21:2, 251-266, DOI:
10.1080/09502360701264428
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360701264428

Published online: 18 May 2007.

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Peggy Kamuf

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Accounterability

We had an accountability moment, and thats called the 2004

elections. The American people listened to different assessments
made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the
two candidates, and chose me.
(George W. Bush)
In this it is necessary to believe me, the it is necessary, which is not
theoretical but performative-pragmatic, is as determining as the
believe. At bottom, it is perhaps the only rigorous introduction
to 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 the
approach to this question of the counter.1 My uncertainty, even my confusion, is at least in part my own doing, and thus my undoing. Without
sufficient calculation, recklessly therefore, I gave in to the temptation to
smuggle counter into the midst of another word, under cover of homonymy, and then accepted the curious result as a title: accounterability.
Too clever by half, this meddling with the word accountability (whose fortunes the OED documents no further back than 1794) adds still greater
confusion to what is already a place of overdetermined crossing between
calculation and narration, between count, account, and recount. As you
know, this family of words derives from computare, as do the French
homonyms, both the verbs compter and conter and the nouns compte
and conte, with an orthographic difference in French, however, that bids
to 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 the
two senses out of each others way, as do conventional habits of usage.
Thus, although accountability might very well be used to mean narratability, that is, the possibility of accounting for something through narrative,
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis
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Textual Practice

one has almost no chance of making that intention understood given the
inertia of habitual usage. Narrative accounting and computational
accounting are even commonly thought to stand in a rough opposition
to each other, the former occupying a pole in the vicinity of an act of
witnessing or testimony, called, very loosely, subjective, while the latter
lies at or close to the pole of what counts as objective fact, evidence, or
even proof. Numbers do not lie, Read the numbers, the numbers tell
the story, which is to say, the story of no story to tell; numbers, we
believe, do not narrate, interpret, invent, or make up the figures
unless they do sometimes, which is why one is well-advised to run the
numbers again, check and double-check them. Verification is always
possible, 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 that
numbers, counting, or quantification triumphs over belief.
The semantico-pragmatic range of accountability has perhaps always
displayed a tendency to harden its connections to hard numbers, to the
accounting 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 thinking, a phrase that already in itself bespeaks the will, or rather the wish, to
replace 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: it
would be what is left at the bottom of the testing container once all
other superfluous, floating matter language, discourse, narrative, testimony, belief and unbelief has been poured off and discarded. In this
downward pull, the term accountability has moved to take over the
semantic field of responsibility, resulting in a certain overlay that shows
up, 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, the
Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility, or the Agribusiness
Accountability Initiative, among others, turns up no significant pattern
governing the choice of the one term over the other. (Perhaps that is
because it little matters: corporate responsibility or accountability
remains elusive regardless of what you call it.) Similarly, judicial institutions 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 between
the terms: In politics, and particularly in representative democracies,

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accountability (sometimes known as transparency) is an important factor

in securing good governance. It constrains the extent to which elected
representatives and other office-holders can willfully deviate from their
theoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption. In other words,
accountability, a.k.a transparency, constrains responsibility, at least in
theory.
There is, however, one public interest domain where this seemingly
redundant overlay or overlap appears to have sorted itself out clearly in
favor of accountability over responsibility and that is the domain of education. By virtue of its insistent application to the purview of this institution, especially in the US and over the last ten years, the notion of
accountability has acquired a certain number of specific, defining traits
that seem destined to determine its future use.
Im 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 have
recourse to bits of narrative and critical, counter-analysis. Indeed, the interest of this exercise, if any, is to find an opening in calculating, accountable
logic, to locate a space for other articulations between our accounts and our
abilities, the space precisely of a free space or free play that can be taken
into 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 point
of exact bisection of accounterablity, sounds a pause, a brief hiatus, a little
time to think, to stop calculating and listen at another rhythm for something else, for an incalculability and unforeseeability that cause the
accountability programme to stammer or stutter: account, er, ability.
What one would be attempting to configure thereby is, if it needs to be
said, 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 selfevident, and therefore irresistible in its logic. A counter-institution of
resistance to the irresistible logic of accountability: that is the virtual
space 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 in
my conclusion to the distinction of the virtual and the factual, which
Jacques Derrida will help us discern with his analysis of testimony in its
difference 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 discourse about the institution of higher education in the US. This is not to
overlook the fact that a very similar discourse has taken hold elsewhere,
notably in Canada, Britain, and doubtless in other predominantly Anglophone societies with large public university systems such as Australia. And
there 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, and
for the moment at least, it is primarily the US version of the discourse that
has taken as its overall rallying cry our key word accountability, to the
point that one may now commonly hear reference there to an accountability movement.2 No doubt, the auditing and assessment exercises
mandated in Britain share many assumptions about the quantitative measurability of the value of research and teaching; despite that, the parallel is
almost never drawn with the British experience by the American movements advocates, whether because of ignorance, lack of curiosity, good
old American arrogance about what makes us so special and different
from the rest of the world, or the indisputable fact that higher education
in the US is organized like no other in many respects. Whatever the
reasons, the accountability discourse has emerged largely as the product
of a specifically US context, although it is clearly positioned for export
to the world market.3
By invoking this language of the market, you may be sure that I am
not merely yielding to a facile analogy. One of the central questions, as I
see 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 the
fore 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 higher
in the US than almost anywhere else in the industrialized world. This
cost is borne disproportionately by the students themselves, most of
whom are thereby obliged to remain dependent on the financial support
of parents and family. Besides marking the accountability discourse with
an 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-room
problem of unequal access to those degrees.4 The second determining
feature is the fact that there is no one deciding, controlling, funding, governing, or regulating agency with purview over the entire system. It is thus
precisely not a system but a dispersion without rational direction, an
immense proliferation of disconnected sites, not all of which even have
geographic coordinates, thus, a phenomenon approaching the bad infinity
of always one more and then another and then another. This great
dispersion and diversity of American higher ed institutions (by one
count, there are close to four thousand of them) is, to be sure, a strength
to 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 substitute a nominal category for what has no distinct essence. Unless the US
university 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 state
or other representatives of shared public interest. For the accountability
movement, it is a matter of staking out, by rendering concrete, the
markets 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 as
to 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 just
like that of a market, but one which simply is the market for a specific commodity, the post-secondary diploma. It must be: the force of this logic would
be that of the markets own drive to saturate every domain of possible experience without remainder, to translate all difference into itself, as the universal
value equivalent. In the US this translation is largely complete. Only pockets
of 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, was
officially set in motion on 19 September 2005 when the current US
secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, announced the formation of
a federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education. We dont
ask a lot of questions about what were getting for our investment in
higher education, said Secretary Spellings on this occasion. And as a
result, were missing some valuable information to help guide policy .. . .
And parents have a tough time getting answers about the way it all
works .. . . [I]ts time to examine how we can get the most out of our
national investment.6 How to get the most for ones investment that
of government, that of parents is the question for which accountability
is the answer. Consequently, the charge to this commission, which is due to
submit its final report in September 2006 is clear: devise measures for
rendering the university more accountable to its investors.
Its 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 movements proponents. And to begin this
enumeration, Ill turn right away to the question of quantitative
measure, of numbers. At the core of the concept of accountability is

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what educational market managers call value-added assessment, which

attempts to measure what a particular college or university contributes
to its students knowledge and capabilities during their four or five
years, in the words of Richard H. Hersh who is one of the principal advocates 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 up
the Collegiate Learning Assessment Project that has devised a longitudinal
test for university students to be administered at the beginning and the end
of their programmes of study. Test results from different institutions may
then be compared to determine which one added more value relative to
cost or, in a phrase that regularly returns in this context, which institution
gives the most bang for the buck. Even though the test designers insist that
it 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 to
return at least briefly to that question later.
To be accountable to investors means to be able to produce evidence
of value added. By evidence, Hersh and his fellow accountabilists would
have one believe they are promising the contrary or rather the neutralization of, precisely, belief. Writing for The Atlantic Monthly, Hersh stages
a typical scene in which the demand for such a neutralization is addressed
by the sceptical, potential investor, in other words, the parent, to the
accountable, answerable officer of the institution, its president (and
Hersh is also staging here his previous experience as a university president):
What makes your college worth $35,000 a year? Its a hard question
for a college president to answer, especially because its usually raised
at gatherings for prospective students and their anxious, check-book
conscious parents. But it also provides an opportunity to cast ones
school in a favorable light to wax eloquent about admissions selectivity, high graduation rates, small classes, and alumni satisfaction.
The harder question, though, comes when someone interrupts this
smooth litany: But what evidence is there that kids learn more at
your school? And as I fumble for a response, the parent [notice
its a question of kids and that the questioner is assumed by this
scenario to be the parent rather than any one of the prospective students who are in the room from now on only as infantilized objects
of this exchange between adults] presses on: Are you saying that
quality is really mostly a matter of faith?
The only answer is a regretful yes. Estimates of college quality are
essentially faith-based, insofar as we have little direct evidence of

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how any given school contributes to students learning. (Italics

added)
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 people
believe about college . .. Which is to say, most people believe that it is not
a matter of belief. But in fact, and although they might not want to believe
it, what they believe is belief. Hersh and the accountabilists, however, claim
to be able to offer the end of belief, if you can believe that. Believe us, they
say, were not asking you to believe us. In other words, belief supports and
gives 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 within
the circle of belief to the extent that any possible or probable meaning
attributed to it depends on ones faith in an interpretation. In speaking
not of proof but of evidence, nevertheless, the accountability discourse
begins to slide toward irrefutable certainty, onto the ground of the sure
thing, which is, I suppose, what every market investor dreams of. One
hears this slide in the reference not just to evidence but to direct
evidence, which promises a non-mediation, a direct path toward the
end-user in accountability discourse, the consumer or potential investor
who need not question the provenance, production, or packaging of said
evidence. It is thus an appeal to credulity in the face of the highly complex
process that would have to go into designing, administering, and evaluating the said test for the said evidence, a complexity that the accountabilists
themselves readily admit.
Before leaving this scene, I want to mention one more of its details
which can be read onto a larger stage with larger stakes. The expression
faith-based is used in quotation marks and recalls thereby its particular
use in recent American political discourse.10 The term began to resonate
most loudly on 29 January 2001, when Bush delivered his first State of
the Union Address and announced his administrations intention to
pursue a Faith-Based Initiative. This new FBI is, as Bill Berkowitz puts
it, primarily aimed at reducing the size but not the spending of
government by shifting the responsibility for delivering a host of services
from governmental agencies to faith-based organizations. A central point
the [Bush] administration has argued from the outset is that faith-based
organizations had been discriminated against historically, and it was
going to do all in its power to level the playing field, giving religious
groups the opportunity to apply for and receive government grants.11
From the outset, this FBI has been understood, on both the right and
the 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 Hershs unmistakable nod
in the direction of the language of Bushite neoconservatism: it is certainly misleading in its apparent impulse to disavow whatever is
faith-based in the assessment of the quality of an institution, and
Im even tempted to think it is quasi intentionally so, a quasi deliberate
misdirection or miscue. For the accountability movement does not only
accommodate and even favour the aims of the so-called faith-based
initiative; the two ideas trace their impulse to the same source. The
current resident of the White House could even claim a certain paternity, that is, not only of the new FBI but of the accountability movement, which had its test run in the University of Texas system when
President Bush was then Governor Bush and Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings was his Senior Advisor overseeing what her official
biography refers to as the nations strongest school assessment and
accountability system.12 (Thus, when I earlier said that the accountability movement officially began in 2005 with the appointment of the
Commission 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 estimates of the quality or efficiency of these institutions. Just as the FBI
was meant to correct, in the words of Bill Berkowitz cited a moment
ago, 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 perceived 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 the
benefits of value-added assessment. And yet, it would be credulous
indeed, I believe, to overlook the numerous conjunctions between, on
the 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 universities, which gives rise to a distressingly vitriolic display of resentment,
when it is not merely inane or ignorant (but, alas, the two attributes
demonstrate a regular affinity for each other) and which has found eager
reception among numerous rightwing-dominated state legislatures
that have ultimate authority over their public university systems.14 The
appeal to what I earlier described as a neutralization of belief by the
accountabilists 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 two
efforts have a mutually reinforcing effect, if they are on a trajectory of convergence, even if they are not, at least for the moment, being advanced by
the same players under a same banner, then accountabilism deserves to be
countered 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, it
should be, and I believe it must be.
These imperative modalities invoke an order of necessity, here, the
necessity of a countering resistance. Such an invocation, however, seems
to be immediately suspended if one adds, as I just did, I believe. The
necessity of necessity should not, ought not to be a matter of anyones
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 remain
utterly heterogeneous with each other. And yet, this contradictory mode
of necessary belief is that of a common, even pervasive experience, the
experience of testimony. A witness, as Derrida has written, is whoever
speaks, writes, or otherwise testifies in the space opened up by the imperative: you must believe me, it is necessary to believe me. I cite here at greater
length the passage from which was drawn my second epigraph:
It is necessary [Il faut] to hear and understand this you have to
believe me [vous devez me croire]. You have to believe me does
not have the meaning of theoretico-epistemological necessity. It is
not presented as a probative demonstration to which one has no
choice but to subscribe to the conclusion of a syllogism, in the
course of an argumentation, or indeed to the display of a thing
present. Here, you have to believe me means believe me because
I tell you to, because I ask you to or as well I promise you that I
will tell the truth and be faithful to my promise, and I undertake
to be faithful. In this it is necessary to believe me, the it is necessary, which is not theoretical but performative-pragmatic, is as determining as the believe. At bottom, it is perhaps the only rigorous
introduction to the thinking of what believe can mean to say. . .
What is believing, what are we doing when we believe (which is to
say 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 to
think testimony.15
Im introducing this thinking of testimony at a countering crossroads with
what Ive been calling the accountability movement or discourse (but

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perhaps the better word is culture, since this movement irrigates and is
irrigated 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 accounterability, then its leverage would have to pivot around what situates the
experience of belief beyond any institution or faith-based organization.
In the face of the convergence to which Ive just pointed (between accountabilism and faith-based politics, with, dont forget, the blessing of a
market that stands to saturate one of the last hold-outs to the calculations
of its bottom line), it will perhaps be seen as counter-intuitive for the
post-Enlightenment university to seek leverage in such an opening to
belief, 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 to
be the principal countering thrust of Enlightenment has run aground
on the shoals of the religious faith that is resurgent not only in North,
Central, and South America, the old New World, but throughout postcommunist Eastern Europe, the new Old World? Whereas for large
parts of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and the South Pacific
region, 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, the
cradle of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, where this inheritance is
now being put to the test of a migration, as driven by marketplace globalization, from the unenlightened rest of the world, with a result that is
not only potentially explosive but one that has already produced deadly
explosions. The point and the question is: If Enlightenment, as the historical counter-force to faith-based social and political institutions, is
in retrenchment, under siege, or simply at a standstill throughout the
world, doesnt this signal that the encounter is still to come, not
between belief and unbelief, but rather within the general space that
Derrida sees defined by the performativo-pragmatic imperative you
must believe me? A new Enlightenment, a second (or third or fourth
or nth) Enlightenment would seek to think this groundless ground of
belief as the conditioning limit on every possible encounter with
another, 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 mentioned earlier, the accountability discourse tags as its principal aim the
assessment 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 Education

Commission:
The economic demand for a better-prepared workforce has never
been 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 education
must address the capability and capacity to think and develop and
continue to learn. It is essential to achieve a new set of skills for a
new century, such as: problem solving, critical thinking and
written communication skills.18
Now, no doubt this list of so-called new skills is at least surprising, but let
us disregard the absurd insinuations that universities have somehow neglected 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 universitys principal task,
and what is here being demanded of it, is to transmit, foster, and
augment the capability and capacity to think. Such a capacity or capability is, therefore, the measurable value that ought to be added by the university experience. This, we are told, is our responsibility in the university
and that for which we should be held accountable. Fine. Lets say we accept
and endorse that responsibility (or rather, reaffirm it) and, what is more,
lets say were ready to demonstrate our willingness to be held accountable
to that responsibility right here in the encounter with this very text or
test.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 administrations has been overcome.20 As a sign of good will, we would demonstrate, 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 an
evaluation of how well we do on the test.
For the purpose of this simulation, then, well put ourselves in the
place 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 positions 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 the
global, competitive workforce. This is not said in so many words,
but that would be precisely what signals it as an unexamined assumption. I do not share this assumption and my university experience
has, I believe, been the richer for it; moreover I believe this despite
the fact that, in another sense, I am now far poorer because my
parents refused to continue subsidizing my studies ever since I
changed my major to the Programme in Critical Thinking. No
doubt like the author of these assertions, they were willing to
invest in my university degree only so long as I promised an appreciable 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 continue to learn, aims that, I agree, should motivate university teaching, learning, and research. To adduce some evidence of my
enhanced ability, I might apply to the excerpt something I learned
to recognize when I read for one of my courses, among many
other remarkable works, Jacques Derridas essay Platos Pharmacy.21 When the statement distinguishes critical thinking from
specific, factual knowledge, it is in fact repeating (and very uncritically I might add) an ancient opposition between what Plato called
the living memory that animates logos, and hupomnesis, two
ancient Greek words that mean roughly thought, speech, reason,
on the one hand, and rote memorization and repetition, on the
other. And what Ive read about the similar distinction Rabelais
made, about 2000 years later, between the tete bien pleine and the
tete bien faite helps me to recognize another variation on factual
knowledge 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 deeper
than the repetition of the word new. Likewise, the term skills
draws my critical attention because its use in this context disturbs
considerably the apparent, but very vague distinction being drawn.
This disturbance raises questions, such as: if critical thinking is
called a skill, then how is it different from those other, technical
skills acquired by rote memorization and the repetition of factual
knowledge? Can one acquire this so-called skill by bypassing the
said factual knowledge and the exercise of memorys techniques,
which is perhaps what the author means here by the impossibly
vague reference to traditional approaches? No, I dont believe so.

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I call as a witness, once again, Plato, who was after all such a clever
guy 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 distinction from the latter. He ran all manner of tests on his disciples, but
finally could never adduce anything like a proof or even convincing
evidence that his teaching of logos produced better critical thinkers
than did the techniques of the Sophists.
So what is the answer? Which is the better, even the best
education? I believe . . ...
Times up. Stop!
So, how do you think our imaginary testee did? Who will answer that question for the future, that is, and I quote the test statement again, for the
college education needed . . . in the future? This is not at all a rhetorical
question since someone certainly will come forward to perform the evaluation, 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 different
answer, or rather a different testimony. Like every testimony, this one
says: 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 testers
who are asking for evidence, if not proof, of what has been added, or
not, by years of study, who demand a metric to determine if our testifier gained or wasted an education, produced profit or loss on an investment. 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 and
more mechanically, critical thinking. You may of course take all the
time you like to think about your answers, but be aware that the test is
already 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, CounterMovements, 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 discomfiture, without hesitation that I thank Simon for his generous gifts of space
and time to think together counterwise. His own work on counter-institutions
will have been the provocation to take rigorous account of a countering drive
that Derridas thought engages at every turn. He has thus done the remarkable
and difficult thing of counter-signing that oeuvre across the very counter it
extends toward a reader capable of a thinking-with that comprehends a thinking-against, that is to say, counter.
The latest advocates of this movement not surprisingly show a near total
lack 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, see
Romuald Normand, De laccountability aux standards: la traduction europeenne 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 the
term accountability even as he is concerned to trace the effective translation
of the thing into the European context.
In Creating a Higher Education Accountability System: The Texas Experience, which is the text of remarks read before the National Commission on
the 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 Chancellor
for Institutional Planning and Accountability at the University of Texas.
See http://www. ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/2nd-meeting/
geri-malandra.pdf
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 this
Congress in its fitful efforts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The
House of Representatives has especially shown itself deaf to constructive arguments for improving access to higher education for the next generation of
young Americans, and dizzy about what sensible accountability measures
should 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 industrialized countries; on access it was ranked 4 out of 13, a relatively good
showing that is probably accounted for by the inclusion of non-bachelordegree institutions in the category of US higher education.
Although it is certainly not just a question of language, the drive to close the
gap between the market and the university also depends on carrying over a
vocabulary from the experience of consumerism. Here is Charles Miller, the
chair of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in his Issue
Paper titled Accountability/Consumer Information: Any number of excellent consumer shopping sites could serve as models for the revised college
search 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 flexibility that allows consumers to specify their needs and interests and to compare
products that meet criteria set by the consumer. A system that allows comparison
of postsecondary institutions could give consumers the ability to eliminate inappropriate schools . .. (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/
reports.html). When is the admission of not exactly the same tantamount to
enforcing, all the same, a sameness of the compared terms? For a trenchant
analysis of such reductive parallels to market discipline, see Mike Sosteric
et al., The University, Accountability, and Market Discipline in the Late
1990s, in Electronic Journal of Sociology (www.sociology.org) (1998).
A National Dialogue: Commission on the Future of Higher Education,
http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2005/09/09192005.html
What Does College Teach?, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2005.
Jay Mathews, Measure by Measure, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2004.
The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which
conviction creates what is obvious. This is Prousts narrator mulling over
the problem of how to know whether or not Albertine is lying to him about
the nature of her relations with a lady friend. The phrase translated as evidence
of the senses is temoignage des sens, the witness or testimony of the senses.
For a reading of Prousts 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).
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 about
quality are no longer acceptable. For a very similar gesture, see Charles
Miller 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 because
there is a lack of reliable ways of documenting and assessing what students
learn, and how their experiences compare among institutions (p. 4).
Bill Berkowitz, A quiet fifth anniversary for Bushs faith-based initiative, in
Media Transparency, 2 March 2006, http://www.mediatransparency.org/
story.php?storyID113
See http://www.ed.gov/news/staff/bios/spellings.html?srcgu; the same
biography recalls that she has a daughter in university and that she is the
first mother of school children [sic] to serve as US Secretary of Education.
See again Malandras report Creating A Higher Education Accountability
System. It should also be noted that this Commissions chair, Charles
Miller, was previously Chairman of the University of Texas Board of
Regents and was, in Malandras words, the instigator of a system-wide
accountability framework. Spellings commission is thus quite clearly
stacked in favor of the accountabilists.
For a recent broadside from this camp, see the report issued by the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded by Lynne Cheney
(Dicks 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 intellectual diversity [sic] on campus. Titled How Many Ward Churchills?, the
document purports to provide evidence of liberal bias in US university curricula. (Ward Churchill was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of
Colorado who published an infamous and deplorable comparison between
the victims of the attack on the WTC Twin Towers and the engineers of
the Nazi genocide, calling them little Eichmanns. He was recently fired
from his tenured position for research misconduct.) For this document, see:
http://www.goacta.org/publications/reports.html. As for actions in state legislatures, there have so far been hearings and/or legislation introduced in
Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and doubtless other state capitals.
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.
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).
On this question of the return of the religious (rather than religion), see
Derrida, Above All, No Journalists!in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber,
eds. Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 61 ff.
Miller and Malandra, Issue Paper: Accountability/Assessment, p. 3.
The reduction of text to test is perhaps one way to measure what is at stake; see
Miller and Malandras paper for a slip from the former to the latter, which at
least on one occasion appears to be inadvertent: In the most recent National
Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) survey, less than one-third of college
graduates could demonstrate an ability to read complex tests [sic] and make
complicated inferences (p. 2).
Hersh (op. cit.) writes, for example: To date academe has offered little in
response, apart from resistance in the name of intellectual freedom and
faculty autonomy. These are legitimate professional prerogatives, but unless
the academy is willing to assess learning in more rigorous ways, the cry for
enforced accountability will become louder, and government intervention
will 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).
Given the experience being testified to here, what would our imaginary testtaker have responded if the test statement had included this other unqualified
assertion, found elsewhere in Miller and Malandras document: College
courses are not designed to foster critical thinking (p. 5). By what known
measure could that be judged a responsible affirmation?
Avital Ronell, in The Test Drive, poses essential questions to and about this
testing regime (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For
a provocative resistance more specifically aimed at the RAE, see Nicholas
Royle, Night Writing, in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University
Press), pp. 11214; see also, Simon MorganWorthams chapter in Counterinstitutions titled Auditing Derrida, pp. 85 118.