Historical Reflections on Accountability

Fueled by the conservative backlash against the 1960s and the global demands of capitalism, the current demand for accountability masks a broader agenda.

By Richard Ohmann

"For the good of all" opens up a vast space for ideological dispute and for the antiprofessional cynicism that, as literary critic Stanley Fish has argued, festers endemically within professional groups, not just among the envious laity. Still, even cynics tend to think they serve the needs of others. And except in times of deep conflict (such as the years around 1970), professionals with different allegiances live comfortably together, under the capacious roof of that "all."

To speak of professors: most believe that open inquiry and free debate advance the interests of a democratic society. For liberals, that may be enough. Conservatives tend to identify the good of all with the good of the sovereign individual, while people of the left inflect it toward the good of those lacking wealth and power. At this level of abstraction, accountability is not especially controversial, nor exacting. Certainly it was not so for this person of the left, who taught at Wesleyan University for thirty-five years. Accountability to my students meant: plan the course, show up in class, keep it moving, comment thoughtfully on papers, mentor when asked, submit grades, write recommendations—the usual packet of services. My obligation to my departmental colleagues: take on my share of core courses and administrative duties. To administrators and trustees: just don’t make scenes, I guess; the thought rarely crossed my mind. My responsibility to society as a whole: I cheerfully held myself accountable to the wretched of the earth, the workers, the women, the racially cheated and despised, the queers, the reds, all the disempowered. Aside from earning me the enmity of a few colleagues and students, this noble commitment was virtually risk free at Wesleyan, as were the commitments of faculty conservatives and liberals.

I know that accountability imposes itself more obstinately in the working lives of teachers at less privileged institutions and of teachers without tenure at all institutions. Still, when faculty members have been able to define our own obligations to society, we have charted a high road—the good of all—that practitioners can travel easily together in spite of different values and allegiances, and without much fuss about ways in which our specific work meets those obligations, or doesn’t.

Lexicon of Markets

This mild regime of self-policing has been under pressure for some time. It articulated well enough with such concepts as responsibility and obligation. But accountability, the more salient concept in recent decades, is different, and in major ways. First, as its root suggests, accountability means keeping score, being able to show that the efforts of an instructor, department, or institution actually move toward a desired end. Doing that requires framing the goal precisely enough to permit agreement on the state of affairs that would constitute its fulfillment, and on the amount of progress made in its direction at any point. Accountability entails measurement, in short, and that provokes academic resistance. How can the complex things we value most be reduced to numbers? we ask.

Quantification of aims and accomplishments may seem less rebarbative to scientists than to humanists. Everyone in the arts and sciences, however, is likely to be put off by the ideas and language of business that have trailed along with accountability in its migration into the university. A 1994 book titled Measuring Institutional Performance in Higher Education, edited by Joel W. Meyerson and William F. Massy, works in a semantic medium of "client feedback," "stakeholders," "make-or-buy options," "output" (of departments), "use synergy," and the like. The book carefully recommends to educators common business practices such as total quality management, business-practice reengineering, and benchmarking (comparing your performance by quantifiable measures to "best practices" at other institutions).

In October 1999, University Business, a magazine produced by the publishers of Lingua Franca, sponsored a conference called "Market-Driven Higher Education." Speakers there used a lexicon of "markets" (e.g., students), "product," "brand" (your university’s name and aura), "value added" (including, I guess, to students as labor power), "marginal cost," "deals," and "resource base" (the faculty, chiefly). They taught participating administrators why to want, and how to get, "customization," "knowledge management," "just-in-time learning," "strategic partners," "faculty management," good "assessment models" (though some said that no good ones exist), and "policy convergence" (which I took to mean consistency and the left hand’s awareness of what the right hand is doing).

Administrators are becoming fluent in this language. But it feels alien to many faculty members, and not chiefly because of academic distaste for business. Some professors are hostile to business, some are not. Yet all can see that the discourse of books on accountability and of the University Business conference is one for managers, not the managed. And while it is no secret that universities have ever-expanding administrations, many faculty members cherish the hope that administrators are managing on behalf of the faculty and the students, taking care of the business side so we can teach and students can learn. But when politicians, business executives, trustees, or university presidents call for accountability in higher education, they are asking administrators to plan, oversee, and assess our labor, not just the endowment.

Well, isn’t that what managers do? Exactly so, and the accountability movement would be of little interest except that it brings managerial logic into the area of self-management to which all professions aspire, and which the stronger ones were able to stake out in an uneven and conflicted historical process beginning more than a hundred years ago. Accountability, when achieved, turns back that process. Its advocates stigmatize the foot-dragging of professors as whiny and selfish (which it may sometimes be), but more pertinently as retrograde. And that it always is—in just the way that Luddite resistance was retrograde in its time and the resistance of doctors is retrograde now. These were and are defenses against new relations of production, imposed from without, to reduce or eliminate the control that groups of workers have exercised over their labor.

That brings me to the last major way in which accountability differs from obligation or responsibility. In the utopian regime of my employment at Wesleyan, or at least in my fantasies about it, I could hold myself responsible to the disempowered and identify my efforts with democracy and equality. After all, most people here and abroad are disempowered. But there was an obvious problem with this comfortable position: the wretched of the earth do not organize militantly to support academic progressives or the politics latent in much of our scholarship and pedagogy since the 1960s. But business and the right organize effectively against them. Our accountability, in short, is not to the disempowered but to the powerful. Academe would not be exploring this topic if boards of trustees, legislators, conservative foundations, corporations, and so on did not want to make teachers and knowledge workers in general more responsive to their purposes, or if they did not have power enough to advance that project.

Thirty-five or fifty or eighty years ago, these groups not only lacked such power: they had not even hit on the project. Why not? Why now? In answer, I will put two skeletal narratives to work. The first is more or less internal to education. In it, the years between 1945 and 1970 brought rapid expansion of the university system, owing partly to prosperity and a growing cohort of young people. Also, the U.S. economy was growing rapidly in industries such as communications and petrochemicals that required highly trained knowledge workers and an enlarged research apparatus. Meanwhile, Cold War leaders mobilized the university to do combat against the Soviet Union and its allies; that meant funding science, technology, and other fields thought critical to the dominance of capitalism and Western democracy. These new tasks required no dramatic change in the university’s procedures or its structure of relatively autonomous departments and research units. The academic profession flourished through this period, buoyed by a proliferation of graduate programs, full employment for new entrants, and public demand for higher education.

Backlash

The right took countermeasures. Some of its new foundations zeroed in on education and intellectual life, building and circulating ideology and attacking the versions of democracy that had grown out of the sixties movements. Mainstream conservatives and neoliberals mounted a critique of U.S. education (especially K–12 schooling) through commissions and reports that proclaimed our "nation at risk" and called for "excellence." These official reports harmonized with media events like the "literacy crisis" of the mid-1970s and movements such as "back to basics" a bit later. Candidates ran for high office on school-reform platforms; the last two occupants of the White House have even aspired to be "education presidents."

Framed by this narrative, calls for accountability can be grasped as part of a complex reaction against the social movements of the sixties and seventies, and as sallies in culture wars that are often explicitly political.

The other narrative is economic, and it embraces far more than the university and the educational system. It too begins with the postwar boom, seen as the cresting of corporate, Fordist capitalism in the United States and of our dominance in the world economic order. Around 1970, those arrangements began to unravel. The dollar faded against stronger currencies. The U.S. balance of trade turned negative and has remained so. Unemployment began a steady rise from its 1969 level of less than 4 percent, a level it did not approach again until the current boom. Real wages, up substantially since 1945, stalled for a few years after 1970 and then went into a decline from which they have not recovered. The economy stagnated. Growth in productivity slowed to a trickle. The world became a far less secure place for American capitalism’s project of development in this time of globalization.

It responded with strategies, familiar enough by now, that are perhaps creating a new economic order: the rapid movement of capital around the globe, a proliferation of new products and services, corporate restructuring and waves of mergers, downsizing and increased use of temporary and part-time labor, outsourcing, subcontracting, and so on. This system, still in formation, has been variously named globalization, turbo-capitalism, the "regime of flexible accumulation," and the knowledge society. That last term may be critical for grasping the place of higher education in the new order. For if knowledge today is not only an accomplice in the making of other goods, but also the most dynamic area of production, we could expect intense efforts on the part of business to guide its development, control its uses, and profit from its creation and sale.

Accountability Movement

Over the next five years, dozens of books were published with titles such as Accountability and Reading Instruction; Accountability and the Community College; Accountability for Educational Results; Accountability for Teachers and School Administrators; Accountability in a Federal Education Program; Accountability in American Education; Accountability in Education; Accountability in the Elementary School Curriculum; Accountability, Program Budgeting, and the California Educational Information System; and Accountability: Systems Planning in Education—to mention only those with "accountability" as the first word. Accountability had abruptly become an established idea joined at the hip to education, a recognized field of study, a movement.

By no means did Lessinger’s book inaugurate this movement. Accountability in American Education (a 1972 anthology of articles and speeches on the subject), edited by Frank J. Sciara and Richard K. Jantz, includes contributions from as early as 1969. It suggests that accountability, "one of the most rapidly growing and widespread movements in education today," began "as a flickering spark in the twilight of the sixties." Writers seeking origins tend to mention the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, amendments to it that required program audits, the beginning of the National Assessment Program in 1969, a 1970 speech by President Nixon, and so on. But beyond specific acts, speeches, and books, or vague and timeless agents such as the "federal government," "concerned taxpayers," and "alarmed administrators," it is clear that three main forces drove the movement.

One was an intense fiscal crisis of the state, brought on partly by war spending, but expressed chiefly as disillusionment with Great Society programs. In a 1970 speech included in Accountability in American Education, Terrel H. Bell, a deputy commissioner in the Office of Education (who later served as Reagan’s secretary of education), noted that his department’s annual budget increased from $500 million to $4 billion during the sixties, and that Congress had poured "literally billions of dollars" into the schools, often into "crash programs" for which the schools were "comically unprepared." Money alone could not buy good education, Bell reported. (Does this sound familiar?) Washington now wanted "results," wanted "to be sure that every dollar invested in an educational program will produce a payoff . . . that can be measured and that can be proved."

Nixon’s man did not specify which "expensive will-o-the-wisps" Wash-ington had now rejected, but the early literature shows that accountability was partly a counterthrust against liberatory ideas and experiments in "open education," that is, against the critique of schooling mounted by sixties visionaries and radicals. That reaction was the second force driving the accountability movement.

T. R. McConnell, another contributor to the Sciara and Jantz anthology, identifies a third force—more specific to higher education. This was a reaction against "turmoil and disruption on the campuses." "[P]olitical action by students and faculty members," McConnell argues, had produced a "mounting distrust of higher education by the public" and an "increasing demand for colleges and universities to justify what they are doing and to disclose the effectiveness and efficiency of their operations." In short, it is no coincidence (as Marxists like to say) that accountability emerged and gained strength as a coherent movement exactly when the postwar U.S. economy was tearing at the seams, and when the right began to organize itself against sixties movements.

Tightening of Market’s Grip

I could now argue at great length that this hypothesis organizes a variety of seemingly discrete events and situations into its tidy gestalt. But I cannot do that here. Instead, I offer a few brief examples of the way this historical project is playing itself out.

The thirty-year job "crisis" for Ph.D.’s, the campaigns against tenure and for post-tenure review, the heavy reliance on part-time and adjunct faculty, the outsourcing and subcontracting of many academic and support tasks: these events and practices respond, of course, to local pressures on administrators and trustees and (one must admit) to self-destructive inertia among the leadership of academic disciplines. But beyond that, one can see in the casualization of academic labor the same process of dispersal and degradation that capital initiated against the core workforce in almost every industry in the years just before and after 1970. The regime of flexible accumulation brings accountability to us in this form, whatever the designs or motives of its local agents.

These labor practices take part in a larger set of changes. The list could be long, but just let me mention distance learning; burgeoning adult education; the buying and selling of courseware; the intensive marketing of academic research; "partnering" between corporations and universities for that purpose; the effort of administrations (and legislators) to assess and compare programs by bottom-line accounting; the rapid growth of for-profit universities, selling job-related training and credits; the proliferation of learning companies (to the great interest of Wall Street); and the existence of 1,800 "corporate universities" (General Electric started the first in 1955).

All of these developments support the widespread observation that the university has become more and more like a business—an idea voiced not only by academic critics of the change, such as Bill Readings, Lawrence Soley, Cary Nelson, and David Noble, but also by advocates, including many speakers at the University Business conference and writers for Business Week (for example, see "The New U: A Tough Market Is Reshaping Colleges," December 22, 1997).

Incursions on Autonomy

Along these lines, the January–February 1999 issue of University Business included this "clipping": "In 1955, not a single health care company appeared on the list of the top fifty U.S. corporations as measured by market capitalization. Today, seven of America’s richest companies are in the health care industry. Where the health care market was forty years ago, the education-and-training market is right now."

My point here is how the reorganization and extension of capital’s work have challenged the professions. Our self-managed intellectual capital (our specific bodies of knowledge), along with our creed of public service, legitimized our partial autonomy for a hundred years. The commodification of knowledge and professional services conflicts directly with that autonomy. If medicine, with all its prestige and power, has given up big chunks of its territory, why expect professors to do better in the new regime? In fact, most professions (worldwide) are losing ground. (See Elliott A. Krause, Death of the Guilds: Professions, States, and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present, 1996.) Accountability, viewed on the broad canvas painted here, is not just an extra demand on professions. It erodes their historical conditions of possibility.

K–12 Education

Privatization works more deeply through the project of companies, such as Edison Schools, that contract with school districts to "manage" learning. Voucher systems, if they gain ground against hot opposition, will be a further step. Whether or not the charter-school movement tends in the same direction remains to be seen, but it definitely signals a tectonic shift in the way public schooling sorts children out—i.e., by reproducing the economic and social system.

Let me mention another sign, which has perhaps been less noted: high-stakes testing. More than half the states now have, or are developing, standard curricula linked to tests that will determine whether students can graduate. In Massachusetts (where I serve on a local school board), the first trial run of the tests, in 1998, placed 39 percent of tenth graders in the lowest of four categories: "failing." And a total of 72 percent fell into the bottom two categories, prompting the observation that in the Commonwealth, unlike Lake Wobegon, three-quarters of our children are below average. Predictably, students in vocational schools, special education, and inner-city schools, where English is for many a second language, failed in droves.

The professed aim of educational reform in the Bay State is to guarantee all students a good education. But unless something bends, reform will produce a much higher dropout rate five years from now. Why block the different paths toward a diploma that have been open to different kinds of students, and push them all along this single track? Without guessing at "real" motives, it is clear that high-stakes testing schemes will make for more surgical channeling into the job market and the class system—under the banner of accountability, needless to say. The official ideology of public education now is that of the market. When George Bush sent Congress his Educational Excellence Act of 1989, he cited exactly four benefits of "educational achievement": it "promotes sustained economic growth, enhances the Nation’s competitive position in world markets, increases productivity, and leads to higher incomes for everyone."

Culture Wars

To be sure, unity of understanding deriving from big historical narratives can shade into paranoia. Buyer (and seller!) beware. Yet courses of action pursued without such understanding are likely to be scattered, contradictory, and, at worst, self-defeating. So the effort seems worth the risk, and I offer these large, pear-shaped thoughts to those enmeshed in a thousand local skirmishes over accountability.

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