Panopticon Advising: Surveillance Capitalism in Service of the Completion Agenda

As academic advising has been subsumed under the banner of institutional retention and the completion agenda, advising technologies have created new opportunities for tracking and sorting students. This has resulted in what we call panopticon advising, a philosophy and approach to advising characterized by intensive surveillance, intrusive outreach, and pursuit of retention above all other goals. We define and critique panopticon advising through the lens of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society and Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics, considering how surveillance technologies and friendly power lead to increasingly extractive and prescriptive relationships between students and advisers. We conclude without easy solutions, but rather questions that advisers must grapple with to determine if a future of panopticon advising is one they can live with.