Accountability Measures in Higher Education and Academic Workload: A Ten-year Comparison

Abstract

At the core of New Public Management (NPM) reforms sit the concept of accountability of publicly funded organizations. In Canada, it is suggested that provinces have increased the number of accountability procedures imposed to universities and those measures would have had an impact on professors' academic workload. This study relies on the Canadian faculty's perspectives collected through the 2007 Changing Academic Profession (CAP) study (n = 1151) and the 2017 Academic Profession in the Knowledge Society (APIKS) study (n = 2968). Descriptive statistics and a MANOVA comparing the scores of five variables in 2007 and 2017 suggest that academic workload increased significantly in ten years, academic acvities are significantly more evaluated, although less by academics themselves, female academics report dedicating more time to administrative tasks and being more frequently evaluated, and senior administrative staff and external reviewers are perceived as being more involved in the evaluation of academic activities in 2017 than in 2007. Our interpretation is that accountability measures could increase professors' admministrative burden and grant more authority to non-academic staff. Key words: accountability; academic workload; academic profession; new public management; Canadian universities.