The following article is a critical institutional analysis of the academy; its purpose is to turn our critical gaze inward to openly examine higher education's tenure, promotion, and peer-review practices. These practices, once meant to ensure quality and rigour, now instead operate as sites of subjugation, perverted by the audit culture so pervasive at my institution and, I would suggest, many others as well. The paper aims to interrogate a system where indentured academicians are either forced into academic servitude by the heavy debt loads they carry or are consciously or unconsciously players in the audit culture game. The subsequent pages will provide a brief overview of the audit culture, its effects, a critique, and, with the intent to move beyond critique, propose alternatives to be added to peer-reviewed journal articles as measures by which to credibly evaluate our scholarly work.
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