The efficiency question
Three episodes into the affirmative turn, the argument has a shape. In Episode 10 I defended slow time. In Episode 11, the encounter with what has not yet been written down. In Episode 12, the campus as the infrastructure that physically underwrites both. Each of these is something the university does that resists being sped up, scheduled in advance, or delivered as content. This episode names the logic all three keep running into, and the thing that logic most wants to abolish: failure.
Under neoliberal rationality the university is interrogated in the vocabulary of operations management: throughput, retention, time-to-degree, contact hours, outputs per full-time equivalent. In Türkiye the vocabulary sometimes arrives with a state accent: the three-year undergraduate degree I discussed in Episode 6 is, among other things, an efficiency argument about how much of a young person’s life education is permitted to take. Elsewhere it arrives as software, in dashboards that flag a student as “at risk” before she has had the chance to stumble.
My claim is simple and, I suspect, unfashionable. The things the university does best are inefficient by nature, and the most important of them is giving people somewhere to fail without being destroyed by it. An institution that cannot tolerate waste, detour, and dead ends does not become a leaner university. It becomes something else.
The idolatry of efficiency
The heading of this section is not mine. Roy Schwartzman (2017) used it in a critical autoethnography of educational consumerism, and the subsection beneath it carries the phrase I have borrowed for this whole episode: the virtues of pedagogical inefficiency. His argument is more careful than a blanket rejection. Efficiency, he concedes, belongs in the mechanical parts of the institution: processing financial aid, running the canteen, returning feedback faster. The trouble begins when efficiency is promoted to the prime educational objective.
Once students are configured as customers and education as a service, a chain of consequences follows. In a market, the producer succeeds by placating the consumer. Rigour, however, is a demand placed on the consumer, and demands reduce the ease of obtaining the service. So rigour gets penalised. Schwartzman recounts an anonymised tenure case in which a newly appointed course director brought the grade distribution of a mass introductory course down from roughly nine in ten students receiving an A or B to about two thirds. Student evaluations promptly collapsed, and those evaluations then surfaced in nearly every rationale offered against his tenure. Nobody had to decide that rigour was a fault. The system decided it for them.
The same logic now arrives automated. Jeremy Knox’s (2017) critique of learning analytics is useful precisely because it is not technophobic: he built an experimental analytics tool in order to understand what such tools do. His diagnosis is that analytics construct a narrow vision of education as a binary of success or failure, a vision “driven by the demands and world view of managers and the economic framing of education” (Clow, 2013, p. 693, as cited in Knox, 2017). The sharpest part of his argument concerns prediction. Predictive analytics tries to engineer a future in which students stay on track and never fail. What this overlooks, he argues, following Willis (2014, as cited in Knox, 2017), is the educational value of failure itself, and the richness of interruption and chance that a non-deterministic future allows. An early-warning system is designed to make the detour unnecessary. But the detour is frequently where the education was.
Master teachers give time
Against this, Schwartzman offers a sentence I would happily see carved over the door of every faculty building: “Teaching takes time; master teachers give time — they don’t ‘spend’ it.” His examples are the kind every scholar can match from memory. A visiting professor whose dialogues spilled over office hours and wrecked the syllabus’s neat temporal bins. A philosophy professor who, rather than cancel an upper-level Wittgenstein course that had enrolled three students, taught it anyway as a weekly three-hour symposium at his home. Measured in contact hours, these were absurd misallocations of labour. Schwartzman’s verdict is that the students left with something no accountability measure could register, and he names it precisely: a gift.
Andrew Herrmann’s (2017) contribution to the same special issue gives us the view from the other side of the desk, from an untenured faculty member being pressed to squeeze ever more students into a mass lecture. What he says he lives for are the mentoring moments that appear on no workload model: a three-hour conversation with a graduate student who has come in to announce she is quitting, spent untangling her doubts one by one, at the end of which she decides to finish. Herrmann is also exact about the climate in which such moments now have to happen: “Academic freedom has been replaced by academic fear.” That sentence matters for this episode. Fear is what turns failure from something one can afford into something one cannot.
In the last episode I drew on Wittel’s (2018) argument that education is fundamentally a gift relation, one obscured when it is delivered as a state service and obscured further when it is sold as a commodity. The sangria-fuelled Wittgenstein symposium is that argument in practice. It is also worth noting where the cost of defending the gift currently falls. Valovirta and Mannevuo (2022) show how academics experience time as guilt and time poverty, and how the time-management advice offered to them tends to individualise what is a structural problem. The gift of time is still being given. It is increasingly being given out of hours, by people who feel guilty about it.
Two kinds of failure, and a third
Here I need a distinction, because failure is a word the efficiency regime also loves. Silicon Valley made a creed of it: fail fast, fail often, build-test-fail-iterate. That is not the right to fail I am defending. Fail-fast failure is failure made cheap and quick, so that it can be discarded before it teaches anything that might slow the next iteration. It is failure as a line item in the cost of production.
The failure I mean is slow, owned, and formative. The hypothesis that collapses after a year of fieldwork and forces you to rethink the categories you arrived with. The chapter that will not come right until you discover you were writing the wrong chapter. The seminar paper that is wrong in an interesting way and is marked as such by someone who had time to notice the interesting part. This kind of failure cannot be iterated past. It has to be lived through, and it needs an institution willing to wait while that happens.
There is a third kind, which nobody celebrates and which the efficient university manufactures at scale: attritional failure. Herrmann notes in passing what the research on large lectures keeps finding. The larger the lecture, the more disconnected the students; the more disconnected, the more likely they are to fail. This is the irony at the heart of the efficiency trap. The institution that optimises for throughput produces precisely the failure it then measures and deplores in its retention figures, while forbidding the failure that would actually teach.
Schwartzman has a small, devastating story about where this leads. A student in his communication theory course came to his office, astonished to learn that she could choose her own research topic. No one, she told him, had ever asked her what she wanted to write about. A few days later she dropped the course, explaining that she did not like “this freedom thing” after all. He reads this as risk avoidance, less a fear of failing than a lack of the equipment and will to make independent choices, both of which years of schooling had trained out of her. A student who has never been allowed to fail has, in the same stroke, never been allowed to choose.
Failure as method
This is where the argument rejoins Episode 11. Ethnography is, among other things, a disciplined practice of failing. The fieldworker arrives with categories, and the field refuses them. The moments of misunderstanding, the questions that turn out to be the wrong questions, the embarrassment of having misread a situation: these are not noise in the data. They are frequently the data. A great deal of what the discipline has learned it learned because someone stayed long enough to be wrong, and then stayed longer.
The contrast with the machines is instructive. A language model is trained to minimise prediction error; its output regresses towards the expected. That makes it superbly useful and constitutionally incapable of the productive mistake, the moment when the world refuses to behave as the pattern predicts and the refusal is the discovery. When a plausible answer is available instantly and on demand, the human capacity to be wrong in a way that teaches becomes more valuable, not less. So does an institution organised to protect it.
The same holds one level up, for researchers rather than students. In Episode 7 I quoted researchers describing the absurdity of competitive grant writing: being forced to predict results in advance, and needing much of the work already done in order to be funded to do it. A funding system that requires the outcome to be known before the research begins has abolished the right to fail at the level of the discipline. What it buys in predictability it pays for in discovery.
What defending inefficiency would mean
None of this is a plea for chaos or an excuse for bad administration. Schwartzman is right that the mechanical parts of the university should run well. The question is which parts are mechanical. Defending pedagogical inefficiency means at least three things.
First, protecting slow time where it actually lives: in supervision, in seminars that run over, in reading groups and office hours that no timetable can contain. Episode 10 made the general case; this is its everyday form.
Second, decoupling the evaluation of teaching and mentoring from throughput metrics. If satisfaction scores and completion rates are allowed to stand in for education, rigour will continue to be penalised and mentoring will continue to be done for free, at night, by the people least able to afford it.
Third, reasserting that academic freedom includes the freedom to be wrong: to pursue the risky, non-obvious question that may end in a dead end, without that dead end ending a career. For students this means assessment that leaves room for productive failure. For researchers it means funding that does not demand the result in advance.
The university is not an assembly line
The university is not an assembly line, and students are not raw material to be processed into frictionless human capital. What it offers, at its best, is a human-scale space of care, trial, error, and slow transformation, a place where getting it wrong is part of the work rather than a defect in it.
Efficiency asks how little time an education can take. The honest answer, which the university exists to keep giving, is: more than anyone budgeted, and some of it will be spent being wrong. In an age when machines can supply the likely answer instantly, the right to take time, to fail, and to learn from failing is not a luxury the institution can no longer afford. It may be the main thing it still has to offer.
References
Clow, D. (2013). An overview of learning analytics. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(6), 683–695. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2013.827653
Herrmann, A. F. (2017). The beatings will continue until morale improves. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(4), 347–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617706127
Knox, J. (2017). Data power in education: Exploring critical awareness with the “Learning Analytics Report Card.” Television & New Media, 18(8), 734–752. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476417690029
Schwartzman, R. (2017). Unma(s)king education in the image of business: A vivisection of educational consumerism. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(4), 333–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708617706126
Valovirta, E., & Mannevuo, M. (2022). Affective academic time management in the neoliberal university: From timeliness to timelessness. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 25(5), 1307–1323.
Wittel, A. (2018). Higher education as a gift and as a commons. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16(1), 194–213.
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