Suppose you are a philosopher, trying to decide which of your colleagues should be made redundant. It’s a bit like one of those thought experiments (beloved of philosophers) in which you have to decide who should be saved from drowning. But in many universities, the thought experiment is, unfortunately, real (albeit not involving any real water). In December last year, the university where I work announced plans to cut 400 jobs and close one of its campuses. Almost all staff were informed that we were ‘at risk’. In March, my colleagues and I put in our applications to be saved. At the end of April, applicants were notified of their outcomes (I was among the lucky ones: safe, for now).

In those thought experiments, it’s typically stipulated that all ways out of the dilemma are blocked. There is no way to save everybody: someone has to go. In our case, it was less a stipulation and more a realistic assessment. A way out of the dilemma was to fight the cuts, most obviously by going on strike. But a series of errors and miscalculations made the prospects of success from industrial action even dimmer than usual. The regional union office dragged their feet over approving the ballot for so long that by the time the strikes began, the teaching term was nearly over. Then the local branch voted overwhelmingly for the most tepid possible action: an on-off, slowly-slowly strike, ‘escalating’ from two days per week to four, just in time for the end of term. Management were not exactly quaking in their boots.

So it has long been clear that many would have to go. But who, and by what criteria do you choose? In practice, of course, it wasn’t up to most of us to decide. The decision was placed in the hands of a panel of heads of departments and managers. The ‘criteria’ that the university published were, unsurprisingly, too vague to be useful: cuts should be made on the basis of what serves the ‘work needs’ of the department and the ‘business needs’ of the university. The consensus among academics and managers alike, it turned out, was that both needs are best served simply by retaining the best people, and shedding the weakest links. The selection should be made ‘on merit’.

There are several problems with this, not least of which is the fact that academic ‘merit’ is notoriously impossible to quantify, and the attempt to do so invariably distorts the thing you are trying to measure, introducing an array of perverse incentives: to prioritize speed and quantity over quality (or whatever is currently regarded as ‘quality’ over the real thing); to cleave to established disciplinary norms and fashions; to publish ‘clickbait’ in the hope of boosting citations regardless of their nature (all publicity being good publicity). Academics are aware of this, at least in principle, but have long since learned to identify their self-worth and that of others with their performance according to various proxies (‘outputs’, REF ‘stars’, ‘grant capture’).

Judging people by their performance according to more or less arbitrary metrics also tends to discriminate against those – disproportionately members of disadvantaged and under-represented groups – whose circumstances have impeded them from jumping through the requisite hoops. Not to worry: ‘extenuating circumstances’ can be accommodated, by measuring those, too. The panels thus proposed to sort employees’ traumas and tribulations into three categories according to their effect on performance at work: ‘mild’, ‘moderate’ and ‘severe’. It would then be possible to adjust merit scores to acknowledge the degree of impairment (one point for ‘mild’, two for ‘moderate’?) and so arrive at a fair and objective numerical assessment of value.

Even if merit could be meaningfully measured in this way, there is another problem. Simply put: ‘merit’ (whatever that is) is not the only thing that matters, and perhaps not even the main thing. This can only fail to be obvious thanks to the triumph of an atomistic mode of thinking. A sports team is not just as good as the sum of its parts. Its strength depends on the balance of skills, its members’ ability to complement each other. Something similar holds of a philosophy department. Not because we are a ‘team’, in perpetual competition with other departments and institutions (much as our managers might like to make that dream a fuller-fledged reality). But because you need a diversity of specialisms to make a viable academic department, in philosophy as in other subjects. What if, when you have finished cutting, you find that you have only ethicists left, or only critical theorists?

You would think it would make sense to wield the knife with some idea of the shape of the department you want to end up with. But, the consensus holds, penalizing people for having one specialism rather than another would not be fair. After all, who is to say which areas are central to a discipline, or what a ‘balanced’ department should look like? These are matters on which reasonable people disagree – whereas ‘merit’ is something we can measure according to commonly accepted standards. The dispiriting truth is that many academics have actually come to believe that the supposed measures of merit are the same as merit itself. At first, we told ourselves we were just playing the game. But soon the air quotes and the eye-rolls fell away like discarded safety wheels, and now we trundle along, jabbering about ‘impact’ and ‘deliverables’ with scarcely a hint of irony.

If academics take measures of merit at face value, this may be because they still believe that this is a game they personally can win: the weakest link will not be me. While this might look like complacency, the underlying mindset seems to me to reflect a deeper loss of confidence in our own judgement. One of the striking things about the proliferation of measures and metrics is a peculiar kind of recursive emptiness. How do you know you have merit? Because your article got three stars, or because it was published in a highly ranked journal, which indicates that it is a good journal. Somebody thought that somebody thought that somebody thought that something was good (or clicked on it a lot, or gave it money). In all this, judgement is strangely missing, endlessly delegated or deferred.

It is this way of thinking that can make rating your colleagues out of four look less problematic than making a judgement about what ‘merit’ might mean. The same lack of confidence is implicit in the assumption that whatever skeleton crew remains after the cuts will simply adapt to teach whatever needs to be taught (or to ‘deliver’ what needs to be ‘delivered’). This again might at first blush look like self-assurance: we can teach anything. But in reality, it’s the opposite. Anyone, on this logic, can teach any subject. Expertise is irrelevant. Why bother with things like PhDs at all? Why not just give everyone an IQ test? What matters, after all, is not specialist knowledge or experience but all-purpose mental agility, an ability to assimilate information quickly and a willingness to deliver the goods, ideally at short notice and on low pay. By forfeiting judgement, we make ourselves redundant.

Read on: Lorna Finlayson, ‘Rules of the Game?’, NLR 123.