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Yet, as David Graeber has recently illustrated, it is paradoxically built on rigorous systems of rules, metrics and managers. The potential transition to a market-based tuition and researchfunding model for higher education in Australia has, not surprisingly, been preceded by managerialism, metrics and bureaucratisation (rendered hereafter as ‘MMB’) in the internal functioning of universities in the last decade. This article explores the effects of MMB on the lives of academics, the education of students, and the culture and functioning of universities. By examining some of the labour activities of academics, work scheduling and time use, we demonstrate that MMB reduces the efficiency and quality of academic teaching, research and administration. Even more worrying, by qualitatively assessing the language, values and logic increasingly present in the academic culture of higher education in Australia, we show that MMB does not simply fail to improve universities or accurately assess academic achievement, it replaces the core values of education with hollow bureaucratic instrumentalism.  \nKeywords: bureaucratisation, managerialism, metrics, transvaluation ofvalues  \nThen raising the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he [Socrates] drank off the poison. And hitherto most ofus had been able to control our sorrow; but now when we saw him drinking, and saw too thathe had finished the draught, we could no longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast; so thatI covered my face and wept, notfor him, but at the thought of my own calamity in having to partfrom such a friend.–Plato, Phaedo  \nThe importance of measurement and standardisation for contemporary systems of control is an enduring theme associated with modernity (Weber, 1978 [1922]; Foucault, 1990 [1976]; Scott, 1998) . The rise of such regimes and mentalities has not only been understood as altering structures of power but also contributing toa loss of heterogeneous forms of value, community and imagination (Alexander, 2013; Graeber, 2001; Graeber, 2015) . Perhaps most famously, Weber, writing of changes in both global spirituality (2001 [1905]) and university systems (1946 [1919]) of his own day, described the effects  \nof such processes as ‘disenchantment’(Entzauberung) . The ethnological studies tracing systems of control and subsequent disenchantment in the context of religion (Eliade, 1987), economy (Polanyi, 2001 [1944]), the family (Lasch, 1995) and sex (see Robinson, 2014 on Weber) remain seminal works in 20th Century social sciences.Such transformations are no longer research questions only tobe explored in the field.The rationalisation triumvirate of metrics, managerialism and bureaucratisation (MMB) now organise the educational, professional and intellectual terrain of many universities, their academics and students.  \nvol. 58, no. 2, 2016 The Death of Socrates Yancey Orr & Raymond Orr 15  \nA U S T R A L I A N U N I V E R S I T I E S ’ R E V I E W  \nReflecting this general trend in humanism’s response to modernity, we offer a small study within the context of the academy that explores such systems of control and the subsequent disenchantment of secular society’s once sacred place.  \nThis article presents a series of examples of what MMB can do to education, thereby providing feedback for academic administrators as well as analytical techniques for understanding MMB’s effects for academic staff, with their responsibility as stewards ofthe university, apart from simply ‘employees’ of it. To these ends, our examination of MMB in the academy is divided into two sections.The first addresses labour inefficiencies through how, by its o","cbCaitvyA51hLGIq","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaitvyA51hLGIq","pdf",953237,11,"English","# Introduction\n## MMB’s effects on academia and education\n## Labour inefficiencies and comparative method\n## Values, behaviours, and disenchantment in university life\n## Clarifying what managerialism means in the MMB model","[{\"question\":\"What is the main focus of the article?\",\"answer\":\"The article explores how managerialism, metrics, and bureaucratisation (MMB) affect academics’ work, students’ education, and the culture and functioning of Australian universities.\"},{\"question\":\"How does MMB affect academic work and educational quality?\",\"answer\":\"By examining labor activities, work scheduling, and time use, the article argues that MMB reduces the efficiency and quality of academic teaching, research, and administration.\"},{\"question\":\"Why does the article criticize MMB’s impact on university culture?\",\"answer\":\"It contends that MMB does not simply fail to improve universities or assess achievement accurately; it replaces education’s core values with hollow bureaucratic instrumentalism, reflected in changing language and logic.\"}]","The Death of Socrates - Managerialism, metrics and bureaucratisation in universities | PDF",1792079569,28]