The Social Suffering of Some Homo Academicus(es): Digital Time Machine and Time Control

Digital communication between academic in their activities of teaching, students and administration has transformed pedagogy from a disciplinary logic between the first two actors, to a biopolitics of population via logic of surveillance and time control in the name of fairness, diversity and protection in the favour of the third one. A parasitic and dissymmetric logic of control of time and place of both students and staffs has been developed by a series of mechanisms that we will investigate. Most of them are based on the surveillance of the time spent by professors and researchers in answering to demands of students, as well as the speed to which they answer any question. Narratives developed along the line of public-private managements have invaded the sphere of university. The first one is presenting the university as a company which has a brand, which has a community of staff working for the promotion of the brand in competition with others, and which is called by the top administration a ‘community’ that they try to keep growing in a pastoral way. It insists that ‘community managers’ are in charge of their ‘pool’ of professors and need to ‘vitalise’ them by insuffling team-work and spirit. The time allocated to these activities is rising and considered by old and new colleagues as the worst loss of time ever. The symbolic violence of this time stolen to their research and to their attention to pedagogy is now less and less invisible, and complaints grow in many discussions and recently a subject emerging during strikes for more traditional topics. The second narrative of this time control is addressed to students who now, regarding the amount of money they pay for the service to get a diploma, have right of ‘consumers’ and are entitled to have a look at the productivity of the ones who deliver the services. Here also the speed and time of delivery become more central than the quality of the content and the pedagogic relation. Based on reports of individual academics who accepted to do an ethnographic journal of one month of their everyday relations and the practices that ‘itch’ them the most for a collective article in the journal PARISS, we will develop about digitisation, evaluation, and their techniques of ‘time control’ and digital ‘time machine’ as the forms of symbolic violence who are now at the core of the social suffering of the academics engaged in the ‘global anglophone competition for the higher education market’.