The automatic university: new coded spaces of higher education

Universities are increasingly organised and managed through software, powered by code and fuelled by data. With the proliferation of data processing software across higher education driven by key regulatory bodies and policy centres, universities are becoming highly-coded spaces where forms of automated management are embedded in multiple tasks and systems – from robotic process automation in administration to automated grading, AI tutors and classroom analytics.

This presentation provides an analysis of the emergence of the ‘automatic university’ as an imagined future ‘smart’ institution that is already being instantiated in the present through diverse technical projects, policy interventions, commercial pressures and sectoral interests. These imaginaries and programs of automated management on the campus are controversial: they suggest a redeployment of expertise to increasingly capable machines; privilege technical models of education; embed public HE institutions in private for-profit infrastructures; catalyse new markets for ‘data solutions’ sellers; have the potential to induce new anxieties among staff and students; and may bring about reactive organisational behaviours, with unanticipated consequences.

About the speaker

Dr Ben Williamson is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh.