Traphagan makes an excellent point.  I have also long maintained - in conversation with patient friends and colleagues - that "business" is an entirely inappropriate metaphor for understanding or regulating what happens in universities.  

Anthropologists like Cris Shore and Susan Wright (1999), Marylin Strathearn (1997), Strathern and contributors (2000), again Shore (2008), and other social anthropologists have identified and studied the spread of "audit culture" and the marketization of higher education since the 90s, and documented some of its distorting effects on teaching and research, and the effect of this cultural change on the working lives of academics.

The costs of the audit process itself is rarely, if ever assessed. Nor has a serious public challenge ever been mounted, to my knowledge, to the logical circularity of the processes involved attempting to establish public trust in academic processes, although studies like Power (1995) do reveal major flaws and deceptions that often accompany a reliance on numerical and audit-style assessment in general, and even its pointlessness.

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