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From The Editor: How Are We Doing?
Ellen Schrecker
Shape up, slim down, eliminate the deadwood. The call for accountability in higher education has become a cliche. Colleges and universities, we are told, must not only become leaner, meaner, and more efficient, but they must also demonstrate that the "products" they turn out (a.k.a. graduates) are fully equipped to function in the competitive global marketplace of the new millennium. The unstated assumption here is that the academy has failed in this task. A related, and perhaps more deleterious, assumption is that faculty members, routinely portrayed as radical deadbeats or out-of-touch obscurantists, have caused that failure and must be called to account. Though the academy certainly has its problems, it’s hardly ready for triage. Nor is it obvious that the current demand for accountability addresses any of the problems that higher education actually faces. Nonetheless, the rage for assessment has become so ubiquitous that Academe decided to take a closer look.
For faculty members, the most troubling aspect of this campaign may well be its provenance. As Jean Avnet Morse and George Santiago, Jr., of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools point out, their organization’s new emphasis on having the institutions it accredits demonstrate the efficacy of their operations by assessing their "outcomes" is a response to "increasing public demands for accountability." Since those demands come mainly from business executives and politicians, it is possible that they may be masking a managerial, rather than an educational, agenda. Such, at least, is one conclusion Richard Ohmann reaches as he looks at the broader forces behind that campaign.
Moreover, because the pressures for accountability originate outside the academic profession, they clearly threaten the faculty’s role in college and university governance. Whatever their ostensible objective, assessment procedures and educational reforms devised by and for state legislatures, trustees, or administrators invite abuse. If, however, faculty members are involved from the start, the results can be both useful and fair.
What to measure is also at issue. All too often, complex intellectual activities are either translated into misleading statistics or else presented as vacuous platitudes. This problem is especially acute when it comes to assessing what goes on inside the classroom. As a result, more and more schools are relying on teaching portfolios, collections of materials whose pedagogical benefits Peter Seldin describes. But, as Candace Burns explains, the champions of those portfolios ignore the existing research on teaching effectiveness, while providing little solid evidence so far that compiling such a dossier improves classroom performance.
Nonetheless, despite its potential dangers, the drive for accountability does offer an opportunity. There’s no reason why academics can’t do the accounting themselves. After all, who can better define the criteria for a good education? Already, a group of professional organizations under the aegis of the Modern Language Association and the AAUP is working on a project to persuade accrediting bodies to consider the proportion of full- and part-time teachers when evaluating an institution. Such ventures bear replication, especially since they operate in a real-world environment in which administrators, trustees, and state legislatures can also be called to account.
Ultimately, if faculty members are to have a say about what counts within the educational process, we must reshape the current debate about higher education. We cannot duck the assignment, nor cling to outdated assumptions about the nature of academe. At the same time, we must, as Robert Bellah reminds us, recognize the ethical as well as the cognitive value of our scholarship and teaching. Above all, we must insist on a true accounting of what we do. Measuring an education only by dollars and cents cheats everybody involved.
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