Due to the recent outbreak, legitimate concern is being expressed in various media about technological surveillance. Are governments going to monitor our displacements through new apps to get extensive data for epidemiologic studies? How many companies are going to implement surveillance to watch their employees that have been doing remote work for the last weeks?

I recently stumbled on an article from the NY times about a new software called Hubstaff that companies can use to ensure that their employees are indeed working from home.

Following this reading, I asked myself the question: what is the situation in academia? A quick search on the internet made me discover the works of Rosalind Gill, a professor of cultural and social analysis at City University of London. She had written a substantial article about neoliberal academia that you might want to consult there.

I am not going to recapitulate her social analysis of how academic labor is submitted to the same trends as the corporate world. This would be plagiarism and would require a lot more words than what this post is aiming to.

Instead, I chose to look at what kind of tools universities have to monitor their employees and ensure they are productive enough.

US universities typically contract with Google or Microsoft to handle their email services. My workplace chose Outlook and I get from this webmail service regular analytic reports detailing my correspondence. This report typically describes with whom I have exchanged the most, if I have answered out of my working hours or not, and how much time I have dedicated on average to the emailing task. No doubt my home institution is getting the same report.

Besides, it is frequent for academics to use the same laptop for work and leisure time. The frontier between the lab and the home hence becomes blurry. When you are at work, all the connections to the institutional network are not private. But when you are at home? Access to publications often requires using the institutional VPN. You can then assume that all your connections are no longer private, even if you are in your bedroom, choosing to place an Amazon order between two paper readings. 

This being said, it has not been the university strategy to try to enforce a strict regulation of its employees, at least not for the subset of them engaging into teaching and research. Academics are encouraged to pressure themselves through other types of performance metrics. These criteria include funding, publications, peers and students’ evaluations. I am hoping the university is not clocking academics and using network analytics to decide whether or not you get your tenure or an extension of your post-doctoral contract. I believe instead that all this information is compiled and stored. Ready to be used if one day your institution needed additional arguments to pressure you. 

It is still marveling to me that we became so sophisticated in the establishment of surveillance metrics while remaining desperately behind in terms of science reproducibility. If we can keep track of all our online activities and displacements, it should not be that hard to implement protocols for accurate and portable studies.