The Teaching Excellence Framework’s Role in Constituting Gendered Inequalities in the Neoliberal University

Abstract

This thesis builds on feminist literature critiquing gendered practices in the university. Drawing on the feminist new materialist onto-epistemology of Karen Barad, which brings our attention to the productive nature of measurement apparatuses, it explores how neoliberal measurement tools in higher education help (re)constitute gendered inequalities amongst academic staff. Specifically, the research aims to ascertain how the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), a recently introduced measurement tool in the university, intra-acts with neoliberal values, research-intensive university cultures, and gendered norms, to produce gendered inequalities. The research analyses government policy papers surrounding TEF and qualitative provider submissions from the twenty-one Russell Group universities that applied for a TEF accreditation between 2017 to 2019. It analyses these documents using Bacchi’s framework, What is the Problem Represented to Be?, to interrogate and make visible the values and assumptions underpinning TEF and its emergence in its particular shape and form. It further examines how TEF in turn embeds and enacts these values and assumptions across three key aspects of higher education. First, the very nature of the university and its institutional goals and objectives. Second, the conception of teaching excellence within institutions. Third, the academic subject, and the production of ‘valued’ and ‘marginalised’ academic identities. The thesis analyses how these processes intra-act to constitute gendered subjects, practices, and inequalities. It shows three key dimensions of the gendering process. First, that the TEF process represents a continued privileging of ‘objective’ measurement practices, which feminist scholars have argued to be deeply flawed. Second, that TEF (re)produces the devaluation of practices that have historically been feminised. Finally, that the material effects of these practices reinforce patriarchal norms, by homogenising spaces where knowledge is made at the expense of a more inclusive set of values and identities.