This paper discusses increasing managerialism at universities, using a specific university in South Africa as a case study. The increasing role of managerialism has brought various ways in which the ‘performance’ of academics and the ‘impact’ of research is measured. The paper argues that whilst the specific dynamics of this relationship take different forms in different countries, and in different universities within different countries, the increased role of managerialism has had a specific impact on the discipline of anthropology. The changing nature of anthropological fieldwork, debates around the meaning of ‘evidence’, and what I call ‘time and the various turns’ are all, I argue, a result of the burgeoning role that quantification of results plays in our work lives. Increased managerial control of academic research pursuits, the role of performance measurement, the centrality of the politics of securing funding in placing ‘impact’ at the core of the research process has had two contradictory, but closely related consequences. On the one hand, at the confluence of such complex dynamics, we see an increase in the obscurity of ‘mainstream’ debates in Anthropology, in which increasingly broad arguments are based on increasingly ‘thin’ data from less time ‘in the field’. On the other, the drive to engage with ‘the public’ and produce evidence of ‘impact’ has led to the escalation for the potential of stereotypical ideas of ‘the anthropologist’ outside of the academy. The paper thus discusses contemporary issues around ‘Public Anthropology’, ‘expert opinion’, ‘media engagement’ and the potential for caricature through the (re)defining of Anthropology and its practitioners in the public eye. How do we gauge the moral obligation to ‘give back’ against a managerial impulse to measure, and what have the implications of this been for theoretical debates in Anthropology more broadly?