Part of the panicked response to this campus’s recent accreditation trouble has been, as I have documented, a more deliberate effort on the part of our campus administrators to coerce our cooperation in the invocation of the magic words “assessment” and “institutional effectiveness.” More on the magic words in a moment, but today there was a “workshop” devoted to explaining in detail the assessment rubric that accreditation agencies are working from, and explaining (to many of us, for the first time) what exactly is expected of campus units both big and small. The presenter was a professor of psychology and, more importantly, a vice chancellor of Institutional Effectiveness from a campus somewhere out of state.
That the session was led by a woman who makes the bulk of her living doing this sort of thing was not lost on me. From a practical standpoint, though, she had many useful suggestions and a relatively painless procedure we could follow to help get our individual departments into compliance. Inasmuch as she could do an adequate job, she did so. Still, one can also tell that despite her protestations to the contrary, she is a True Believer.
Initial considerations after sitting through an exhausting 7 hours of work:
a. It is stunning how thoroughly the TQM jargon (think Senge’s The Fifth Discipline) that was actually current about 20-30 years ago in the business world has filtered down through the layers of educational bureaucracy to be presented as “best practices.”
b. It is also clear that the purpose of SACS and other accreditation agencies is to provide work, a carrot, and a whip — so that we can be certified able to do more work for SACS. The implicit threat today (of suspension) may be real, but it is also clear that there will always be new criteria for compliance so that we have to keep generating new paperwork and new positions to handle that paperwork. Such as vice chancellors for institutional effectiveness. It’s clear that there is a fairly powerful figure on this campus whose eyes are firmly set on grabbing that position for himself.
c. The magic words “institutional effectiveness,” “outcomes,” “assessment,” “closing the circle,” and “data” were used so many times that the humanists (especially those of us who are of the literary and philosophical bent) were pained to hear so much begging of the question. But as we were reminded, “assessment is here to stay.” Until the new set of carrots and sticks are promulgated.
d. this is all pretty clearly a first step in removing more and more curriculum and instruction decisions from the hands of faculty and placing them in the hands of administrators who will be answerable to the feds. The K-12 model will be applied to the four year college (some already use the term “K-16”) and standardization of assessment and evaluation tools will make the college experience unrecognizable to even those of us who were in school ten years ago.
e. our campus leadership has shown itself to be bumbling in other ways, and many of them have paid with their jobs, but it is still infuriating to think about how none of this was communicated to us with any clarity two years ago, when it would have made more sense. We were told, in fact, by one of the faculty shills for the whole process that none of this would shape instruction in any way. Well. It was a poor and bald faced lie then, and that insistence has hurt us all.
f. if I didn’t have a family to support, I would be looking for a job overseas. Anywhere overseas.
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