Being an academic: authorship, authenticity and authority

The author's experience of three common academic activities – the production of a portfolio, the preparation of a CV and the submission of a research assessment report – are related respectively to authorship, authenticity and authority. A comparison is made of how the 'being of' an academic is expressed in these three textual enactments of academic life. The author analyses how his experience illustrates 'the terrors of performativity' (Ball 2003) and he concludes that this illuminates how personal violation parallels our barbarous treatment of the environment and many of the peoples in it; as our education becomes more systematised, more managed, more 'effective' in economic terms, it offers less and less of a barrier to social barbarity.