Contemporary academia increasingly no longer needs to control anyone directly. The most effective supervision now works quietly. It moves into calendars, task lists, evaluation sheets, and inner voices that do not allow one to “let go”, because every break looks like a loss of points. This is a mechanism in which pressure does not come only from above. It becomes internalized and starts to drive itself.
This is precisely what the article “We supervise ourselves: Collective autoethnography of ‘(Wo)Men of Points’” addresses. The authors are Professor Oskar Szwabowski, Professor Piotr Zańko, and Dr Dorota Mackenzie, a researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Kozminski University. The text takes the form of a collective autoethnography written in a punk aesthetic. Instead of polite academic argumentation, there is shouting, irony, and a deliberately rough poetics. This is a conscious methodological choice for describing the experience of an academy governed by numbers and rankings.
When control becomes internal
The strongest impact of the article strikes directly at the core mechanism of contemporary academic management. A system of evaluation based on points and parametric indicators does not merely measure work. It reprograms it. Points function like a currency, and with them comes a logic of constant calculation of profitability. Where to publish, what will pay off, what will improve the institutional category, and what is a luxury without budgetary justification. In such an arrangement, external supervision no longer needs to shout. It is enough for it to operate like an algorithm. The rest is done by the individual, who begins to supervise themselves.
This is a form of self-maintenance of the regime, at work, at home, and in the rhythm of everyday life. The text repeatedly returns to the image of a treadmill, where the body and attention are permanently tied to production. More papers, more reports, more indicators. The collective “we” speaks of burnout as a consequence of a system that rewards speed and quantity rather than meaning and epistemic usefulness. The mechanism is particularly brutal because it combines performance pressure with constant uncertainty about the rules of the game. The point lists may change, the status of an “A-level employee” may be reversed, and political or organizational decisions can rearrange the ranking landscape overnight.
Managing what is dead
The authors describe this environment as necrophilic. It is a strong metaphor, but a logical one within their argument. Academia is managed through what is dead, countable, and easily placed in a table. Points, citations, indices, slots. The entire economy of indicators creates a spectacle in which the real value of knowledge is obscured by its numerical representations. In this narrative, the production of knowledge begins to resemble an assembly line. A paper is expected to deliver parameters, not necessarily to change how we understand the world, respond to real problems, or generate social improvement.
The Polish context is also important. The authors describe it as a hybrid of market and feudal logics. On the one hand, there is hard competition and accountability. On the other, hierarchies, dependencies, and conservative mechanisms of control. This mixture, they suggest, amplifies structural violence. It produces isolation, a sense of meaninglessness, the breakdown of community, and growing cynicism. The academic is no longer simply a researcher or a teacher. They become a worker in a system that is capable of devaluing everything that does not generate points, including care, time, process, and sometimes even basic life experiences.
A diagnosis rather than comfort
The article is not comfortable reading. That is precisely why it is so valuable. It diagnoses the side effects of a system that was intended to increase quality and competitiveness. The authors show that an indicator-driven culture can successfully produce measurable outputs while simultaneously degrading what should be the core of academia. The sense of research, intellectual autonomy, professional ethos, and community.
They also pose a question about managerial responsibility. If an organization designs a motivational system almost exclusively around numbers, it should not be surprised that people learn how to produce numbers, even at the expense of quality, health, and relationships. From this perspective, the punk form is not decoration. It is a method. If rational arguments cannot break through the wall of KPIs, what remains is a performative gesture that scratches that wall.
The conclusion is not that measurement should be abolished. It is rather that measurement without humanizing safeguards turns into a system of self-destruction. In such a case, the university gets exactly what it measures and loses what it cannot measure, even though this is what sustains its reputation over the long term. The quality of thinking, intellectual courage, mentoring, a culture of debate, and meaningful education.
Resistance as community
At the end of the text, one more important motif appears. Resistance does not take the form of an external manifesto. It takes the form of building a micro-community. Collective writing, intertwining voices, rough poetics, and shouting serve a therapeutic function, but also an organizational one. They produce bonds and remind us that academia is alive only when the people who create it are alive.
The most efficient systems can also be the most destructive if they optimize a single variable at the expense of everything else. Academia, sooner or later, pays the price for that.
