Margaret Archer interviewed in Times Higher Education

See the full interview here:

What has changed most in higher education in the past 10 years?

Bureaucratic incursion, expressed through the regulation of funding, reward and recognition for departments and individuals, via performance indicators and sanctions. Their consequences are completely negative: collegiality becomes competition; informal esteem becomes a formal hierarchy; concern for students becomes “keeping office hours”; journals are selected for their “impact factor”, articles are written with a weather eye to “citation indices” and so forth.

What are the best and worst things about your job?
The best thing in university life is the academic freedom that we are busy losing and the worst are the new bars on the iron cage of bureaucracy that are taking it from us.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/people/qa-with-margaret-archer/2013413.article