Audit culture has transformed academic life into textual and discursive ‘things’ to be assessed, ranked, and differentially funded. This has created enormous amounts of new bureaucratic work, including entirely new jobs in universities – impact advisors, Research Excellence Framework (REF) managers, student survey teams, student experience officers – which redirect money and time away from doing teaching, research, and other front-line services, towards auditing them. Audit processes affect who gets to be an academic in UK higher education (HE), informing hiring, firing, promoting, and funding decisions. Doing meaningful research and teaching does not mean much if one's ‘outputs’ are not REF-able or if one's teaching does not ‘satisfy’ students. Thus, interpretations of the National Student Survey (NSS), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding processes, and the REF are profoundly important as they inform who gets to stay and who has to leave the sector, how bearable their working conditions are, and what kind of academic work they can do. And so, while academics might experience audit as a nuisance to get through as quickly as possible so they can get back to their ‘real work’, audit is a key mode of reproducing UK HE and academic culture in which we are complicit.

As my research has shown, academics have interpretive power in the translation between audit rules in institutional texts and actual practice. We are required to do audit processes in exchange for universities receiving public funding, alongside requirements for accountability, and these are implemented within deeply managerial and undemocratic university structures.