Threatened accountability: about talking “Bullshit” in education

Abstract

In his bestseller On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt observes an increasing trivialization both in human communication and the production of written texts. At first sight, Bullshit seems to be a kind of utterances similar to a lie. Yet, the liar maintains the distinction between true and false, whereas the Bullshiter neglects this distinction. In this respect, Bullshit comes close to the bluff. What is the cause of the rising Bullshit production? Frankfurt suggests that it is due to a flattening of the political discourse. But how can we explain this phenomenon for his part? Despite the high level of his analysis, Frankfurt forgets to mention a characteristic feature of the contemporary market society, namely the increasingly important role of marketing. Since the culture of competition and marketing is entering more and more Higher Education, practices that originally had nothing to do with Education, such as boasting, deceiving, ranking and benchmarking, are pervading and perverting Higher Education, too. This article describes and analyzes the queer excrescences of this process.