The Digital Walls of the University: Translating New Metrics of Labour, Education, and Mobility in the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has drastically accelerated the reconfiguration of the borders between the university and the outside world. In this scenario, the walls of the university, whose function is the discrimination of the university’s external and internal elements, are satisfied via units of artificial measure (metrics) that organise the social division of labour and continuously retrace the boundary between the “foreign” and the “internal.” If earlier reforms in higher education aimed at widening access and improving academic success, on the one hand, and adapting to the demand of the labour market for a more “flexible” workforce, on the other, the exponential use of digital platforms in education strongly focuses on establishing a real-time translatability among different demands within a single tool of governance. While educational institutions exponentially rely on indexes, which are intended to both measure the fluctuations and the demands of the labour market in real time, it is urgent to rethink how we translate technology across social, economic, and cultural fields and to formulate teaching and learning machines capable of responding to the complexities and the challenges of the present.