The Emergence of the Thoughtless University: An Arendtian Perspective on the Italian Third Mission Metric Regimes

Purpose This paper aims to understand how academics experience the metrification of Third Mission activities and how these evaluative processes reshape the conditions for labour, work and action within the contemporary university. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts an autoethnographic reflection and semi-structured interviews with academics, university leaders, Third Mission delegates and early-career researchers operating within the Italian higher education system. Findings The findings reveal that Third Mission evaluation generates growing procedural burdens, uncertainty regarding evaluative criteria, inequities in recognition and workload allocation and a widening gap between institutional narratives of societal value and academics’ everyday practices. Metric-driven evaluation reorients engagement activities toward procedural compliance, privileging what is reportable over what is relational, ethical and transformative. These findings suggest the need for evaluation systems that recognise the qualitative, relational and ethical dimensions of societal engagement and that preserve academic agency, plurality and responsibility. Originality/value The paper contributes to interdisciplinary accounting research by extending debates on metrification and accountability to universities’ societal engagement. By mobilising Hannah Arendt's distinction between labour, work and action, it conceptualises the Third Mission evaluation as a process that risks transforming academics into labourers of metric compliance, eroding spaces for thinking, meaning and genuine public action. The study offers a novel theoretical lens for understanding how performance regimes reshape academic subjectivities and public value.