You wanna know how boring this conversation is? Boring enough that I had to take a week off before I could get it up to write the post.
For all of our concerns about the state of higher education as well-meaning faculty members, it strikes me as odd that we spend as much time as we do talking about issues over which we have very, very little control – such as the casualization of academic labor, the funding and cost structures of colleges and universities, whether or not we should have Division I athletics, the tenure system, etc., ad infinitum. Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not at all saying that those things aren’t worth talking about. I’ve talked about many of them, if not all of them. But here’s the thing: in my experience, full-time, tenured faculty have very little power over any of the items on that list. Where full-time, tenured faculty do have power is over issues of curriculum and assessment, both of which are linked to accreditation (which, in case you haven’t noticed, most universities want). But wow do people not want to take ownership over those boring, practical things.
To be fair, I can understand the reluctance of many of my colleagues for jumping into these issues with both feet. Curricular change at an institutional level takes time, political savvy, a thick skin, and a willingness to put the perfect to the side in favor of the good. It’s stressful. Often thinking about curriculum on a broad scale – and by “broad” we might just mean having to think about all of the courses in one’s own department as opposed to just thinking about the courses that one herself teaches – means that we have to understand and respect perspectives different from our own, and accommodate them, and the results might mean that we lose some of the turf we’ve carefully protected. Assessment is a pain in the ass, and it seems like adding a layer of work beyond what we already do for little to no compensation. It can mean having to think carefully about things like online instruction, the necessity for having some parity across sections of a course, in spite of one’s own personal classroom preferences, the reality that we can’t just ignore contingent labor but rather that we have to reckon with the consequences of contingent labor on curriculum. (In the case of the accrediting agency that governs my institution, they will penalize you if you don’t have a certain number of f/t faculty teaching certain blocks of the curriculum, so faculty members do ignore part-timers and their teaching schedules at their own peril.) And then there’s the paranoia. You guys have colleagues like this: the ones who refuse to turn in their syllabi at the start of the semester, to reveal what assignments they give on the course syllabus, or who think that we should come up with “fake” assessment tools that will “give the accreditation people what they want” but that won’t actually reveal anything about what’s actually going on with curriculum and instruction “lest it be used against us.” (And if you think you don’t have colleagues like this, you may need to take a walk across campus to your philosophy, English, or foreign language departments, for surely there is at least one of these types housed there.)
It strikes me that there is a heck of a lot more potential for faculty to take back universities by taking control of curriculum and assessment, though, than there is by faculty complaining in the NY Times or by crying about how their academic freedom is compromised. Here’s the thing: if you’re not using your academic freedom to affect your institution and your students in a positive way, then you’re kind of a free-loading douche. With freedom comes responsibility and all that. And no, working on issues related to curriculum and assessment is not at all sexy and it’s not fun and the results are slow in coming. Also, it means going to more meetings than you want and people who would like to avoid such work begin to treat you with suspicion, suggesting that you are a “tool of the administration.” I know, sounds awesome to you, right? But at a local, grass-roots level, I really do believe that these are the areas in which we might see results, and with that being the case, it’s people with tenure who need to get in there and get their hands dirty because tenure gives them the authority to do so.
So am I wrong about this? If it is through these annoying bureaucratic concerns that we can get some power back to faculty, how can that work? What should be our focus as we think about curriculum and assessment within our own disciplines? How does that translate to thinking about these issues within larger groupings within our institutions? Are the issues different here for private vs. public institutions? For research universities vs. teaching-intensive places? How do issues of curriculum and assessment intersect with issues related to funding? Can we make the relationship between these work to our advantage? Thoughts?
[This was not at all the post I felt like writing this morning, but I knew if I didn't force myself to do it then I'd never get it done and my stupid little series would be dead before it was finished. Perhaps I'll do the post I really want to write later. We'll see.]
I don’t know about how much power it gives us, but our faculty is constantly tinkering with our curriculum so that we can produce stronger students. Our student reputation in the workforce is very important to us. And who knows, maybe some day one of them will strike it rich and give us money.
I think you should to a separate post about online education. It is 2/3 of my current teaching load.
On a certain level I agree with you: this *is* where the power is. My experience of assessment has been that it makes formal and explicit what we used to do informally and implicitly. And I’m not sure that adds a lot.
Old version: “Hey, have you noticed that our students are having trouble with X?” “Yes, yours too? Hmm, maybe we should see how we can help them develop X as a skill”.
New Version: Program Learning Objective 3 is X. Have 3 colleagues read 14 papers, and use a rubric to evaluate use of X. Determine that X needs work. Design interventions.
The outcome of New version is the same, but the time is dramatically increased, especially when you have to write the report that is required to document that you have done new version, and not old version.
What drafting our Program Learning Objectives does do (ideally) is make us all think about ourselves as doing something collective and cumulative, where the work of different classrooms is connected. And maybe the new requirement that we include course learning objectives on the syllabus and connect them to program ones will also help students see connections…
PS The other reason that assessment doesn’t feel empowering is that it’s an outside requirement.
We’ve done just what you said, Dr. Crazy, and gotten out in front of the assessment thing. At some points, it feels icky. But then I look at what we’ve developed in our department — developed a three-course core sequence that all works rationally together, had students put together portfolios, and generally made sure that we’ve got a qualitative assessment program, and I’m proud of what we’ve done. Our faculty (most of them) give a damn; our students rock the house. When they get that history degree, they know they’ve worked for it, and so do we.
I’m actually our college’s representative to an assessment showcase for our university’s regional accreditation board, which is something that I *never* thought I’d say. I’ll have to blog about that at some point, perhaps tomorrow.
I agree about curriculum being something that faculty, at most places, have power over, but assessment is, I think, a gray area. I’ve been in the trenches on both counts the past few years, until being thankfully pulled out by a sabbatical, and while I agree that faculty need to stay out in front on curriculum, for their students and for themselves, I’m not so sure that’s always possible or desirable with assessment.
Moving from what faculty already do to assess student learning, and what administrators and accreditors mean when they talk about assessment is not always seamless. I think that assessment, is, at some level, an administrative function, but that faculty have an interest in setting the terms as much as is possible. My confidence in what administrators and accreditors want gets shaken every time a new turn of phrase is declared and a new round of meetings is called to talk about objectives or outcomes or themes or whatever it is that week. Faculty can control how they respond to such missives and declarations, but we have little control over the setting of the agenda. I am reminded of this whenever I listen on one side to how various tools will be acceptable for assessing student learning, but see on the other side that only quantitative data that can be crunched through whatever assessment package the university just bought is being used or taken seriously.
Assessment has become an industry, and as university faculty, most of aren’t experts in “assessment”, we’re experts in our subject areas. I’m not sure how faculty can take assessment back, keeping it relevant to what we do for our students and what we do in our fields, but I can agree with you that doing so seems important nonetheless.
[...] Reassigned Time 2.0, Dr. Crazy makes the case for college and university faculty to use their power over curriculum and assessment in productive [...]
You naughty girl, you said the A word!
LaLaLaLa I can’t hear you! (hands over ears)
Seriously, this is a really big deal where I live, since we will be in either the 2nd or 3rd group to have to deal with reaffirmation of accreditation (I think I got that right) where Learning Outcomes and Outcomes Assessment has to be dealt with quite seriously in the 5-year report and VERY seriously when the 10-year cycle completes.
We weren’t blindsided as much as some were, but we were happily expecting to submit our QEP analysis that had been worked on for years when we got the word from SACS about what would be expected Real Soon Now. And it won’t just be SACS, from what I hear, so this is a very important conversation that I will gladly join here and in my own blog.
This is NOT the flavor of the month. If admins are talking about it, but only in vague terms, that means they have not gotten the Word From On High via one of the conferences our admins and faculty have attended to gear up for this. We have very specific expectations, driven by the faculty (thank goodness), from our agency.
I didn’t want to highjack your comments, so I wrote a post on this. I tend to agree with what you say, but from all of the comments and my experience, a lot of how the assessment stuff goes down depends on who is allowed to drive the process.
Hi, all – have been busy with other stuff, but yes, Clio (and others) are right that assessment isn’t only up to the faculty. I think the reason that I wanted to emphasize its connection to curriculum, though, is because I think a lot of faculty (at my institution) want to act like assessment isn’t their business… and they do so at their peril. At the end of the day, if faculty don’t participate in figuring out what gets assessed and how that assessment happens, the data that will be generated is going to then drive curriculum in ways that they don’t want. This is hugely important in English particularly as it relates to assessing writing programs: do we want a standardized test imposed on writing courses, or do we want to come up with a more effective assessment tool for understanding how writing courses work (as just one example)? And if we get the standardized test (which does mean less work for faculty) then how is that going to shape what happens in writing courses? (I’ll tell you how: the focus will move to grammar and punctuation and away from process, which all research shows *does not make students better writers*.)
So I guess what I think is really this: that if we care about curriculum we *have* to care about assessment. And we have to collaborate as much as is possible in determining how assessment at our institutions works. We can’t just leave it to the assessment folks and hope for the best, if we want to retain control over curriculum.
Does that make sense?
(So this isn’t me disagreeing that the process is often not faculty driven – I think I’m focusing more on the apathy or downright resistance a lot of faculty have to participating as opposed to the administrative side of it.)
“Here’s the thing: if you’re not using your academic freedom to affect your institution and your students in a positive way, then you’re kind of a free-loading douche.”
I’m getting a needlepoint of this framed, and displayed prominently over my desk.
nice blog, bookmarked, keep goin’
This is a topic very much at the fore on my own campus (a 4yr, private college uncomfortably split between liberal arts and comprehensive/professional programs). We’ve just ratified (after 5 years of planning and debate) a new core curriculum that substantial portions of the faculty aren’t happy with (confession: I’m one of them). This core is in many ways shaped by the demands of external/accreditation assessment (online 4yr portfolios and using the language of student learning outcomes, for example). I’m in English, so I’m framing my comments from a liberal arts/humanities perspective.
I’m going to echo a couple of folks in the following: One the one hand, we’ve integrated assessment into the core, so we’re ahead of the game (Notorious PhD). On the other hand, there was a general perception that the college’s admin pushed for this core at the expense of?/without real recognition of? the impact it will have on faculty, especially in terms of the relationship between contingent and f/t faculty. I think this has exacerbated the feeling of “us vs them,” with the admin on the “them” side (Crazy, Pion).
Two things frustrate me: 1) The gap between the existing methods of assessment (grading etc, as Shaun Huston mentioned) and the technologies (a la Foucault) of the assessment machine, such that the assessment we already do doesn’t seem to count because it doesn’t fit into the quantitative models accreditation bodies use/desire. This connects to Dr Crazy’s comment about meaningful ways of assessing college writing in particular.
2) The lack of critical reflection/dialogue about the very process and ideology of assessment. When/why did assessment come into its current form? What’s the relationship between assessment as it is now and programs like No Child Left Behind? I’m concerned that, while we as faculty should indeed try to own assessment to preserve our and our students’ best interests, we’re conceding the terms of debate/discourse to a language that is inherently at odds with what we’re trying to achieve as teachers.
(I hope the long comment doesn’t try anyone’s patience too much.)
Just to piggy back on Sensible’s comment (we’re deep in accreditation, and assessment right now): to pretend we haven’t been doing assessment all along is foolish. What is now called assessment is, I think, best understood as a “mystified concept”. So now what makes assessment real is the defined learning outcomes and the documentation of the process.
At least for our accreditor, even if you do qualitative assessment (how are students writing?) you present the results in a quantitative way to make it real. And that tells us that????
How many of us are mid-accreditation panic? We sure are, and while the last one got us started on assessment, we (my dept) have never gotten past what Crazy’s talking about – that many faculty simply resist the critical review of their own practices and resist any attempt to get them off their behinds. They are, routinely and predictably, prime examples of “free-loading douches.”
Add Clio’s musings, and voila! Welcome to my world.
Shorter Dr. Crazy: “Hey, Dr. Provost Douche. Nice accreditation you’ve got. It’d be a real shame if anything happened to it.”
I used to work at a (small, private) college where the administration was very hostile to the faculty. This was the kind of place where administrators would tell faculty members, “You don’t like your salary? You don’t like the resources your department is getting? Well, there’s the door!” This is also a school where administrators were caught embezzling money and resources from the college.
In such an environment where there is next-to-no faculty-admin trust, working together for assessment and accreditation can be almost impossible to do in any kind of meaningful way. It’s also an environment where some faculty seize on assessment as a way to curry favor with the admins, so that small scraps of resources will be thrown in their or their department’s direction.
Now, I do believe that assessment, done properly and in an environment of mutual respect and trust, can be very effective to improve the quality of educational programs, if only as a way to create a mechanism whereby faculty think and talk deeply about their teaching and curriculum. But I also empathize with cynical faculty at institutions that are completely dysfunctional.
Given this, one has to realize that there is a huge element of personal perception going on with faculty’s view of assessment. At my former college, I’m sure that the faculty who were acting like stool pigeons for the admins thought they were doing good work in their attempts to get assessment going. But other faculty who had had it up to their eyebrows with the administration perceived these efforts at assessment as a complete farce. And both sides were correct, at least on some levels!
Thus, I get very dismayed when I hear comments like this by Dr. Crazy:
“Here’s the thing: if you’re not using your academic freedom to affect your institution and your students in a positive way, then you’re kind of a free-loading douche.”
I think this statement completely misses many of the frustrations that faculty members have. I’m not saying that it’s necessarily correct for disgruntled faculty to wave the academic freedom flag in their complaints about assessment. Academic freedom is a deep and complex topic. But isn’t your statement, Dr. Crazy, similar to saying that if you’re not exercising your right to free speech, then you’re just a free-loading douche on the back of democracy? (Although some people probably believe that’s true, I suppose! I don’t think everyone needs to be an activist, though, do be part of a democracy. And I don’t believe every academic needs to exercise their academic freedom to teach in the way that they believe to be the most effective or to be a good scholar.)
Tom,
I get your criticism, and all I can say is that as a faculty member who does the work that others use erroneous claims about academic freedom to weasel out of, I get pissed off. I was imagining an institutional context when I wrote this post that is basically functional. (I mean, every institution has its quirks, but I definitely wasn’t addressing the sort of institutional context that you discuss in your comment.) When I say that people are free-loading douches, I mean that I’m doing the work and that people are douchebags for not doing their share. And I guess I do believe that tenure means that people *should* be doing that important institutional work – I don’t believe that tenure is a free pass to think deep thoughts or to retreat into the classroom never to think about anything but teaching again. And especially given the fact that the percentage of tenure-track faculty keeps getting smaller and smaller, it means that more and more people with the privilege of tenure-track employment do have to take on these roles. If the percentage of t-t employees were higher, perhaps then fewer t-t people would have to get their hands dirty with this stuff. But that’s just not my institutional reality.
I don’t think that everyone needs to be an activist to be part of a democracy – or in order to have tenure – but I do think that people should respect those who do the dirty work of activism/institutional service as opposed to obstructing their efforts, whether through their refusal to do their share of the work or through their willful ignorance.
(Note: I feel the exact same way about people who don’t fix paper jams in the printers or copiers in our department, or even bother to tell one of our admin assistants when such jams occur. Back in the days when faculty didn’t make their own copies or print, a faculty member would have the luxury not to know how to deal with these things or to know who should be told. But that’s no longer the case, so if a person chooses to ignore that responsibility, he (and it’s almost always a he) is a jerk. I feel like this is a pretty apt analogy for the way people who shirk on assessment/curriculum stuff operate.)
My comment? It was polemical and hyperbolic and it was definitely coming from my own individual institutional context and personal perspective, and so in that regard, I really do think that your criticism was fair. But I also think it’s important to note that my posts are not about me being the voice of all of higher education, and they are about starting a conversation so that we can talk about a range of contexts in which these big issues come up. In that regard, I am not really obligated to deal with every institutional context in the world – only to write something that provokes conversation.
Polemical hyperbole has no place in the blogosphere!!!
Agreed. And I’m sure I was imaging my own academic experience (including a chunk of time at the dysfunctional college I described before) onto your post when I read it, which ain’t all that fair.
Nice post. I have to say that I am in a department where most of the colleagues believe that assessment is a waste of time (more administrivia imposed by accreditation) or a complete snow job (“give them something that looks like what they want, but that cannot be held against us”).
I’ve come around to the idea that assessment is important, especially if we (the Liberal Arts) are going to face down the pressures of ‘vocationalization.’ We need to show that our students are thinking, writing and reading at a higher level. At some point we are all going to have to prove the claims that have been staked on a liberal arts education.
Now, I am a little bitter that the athletic department will never be held to the same standards. But thats a conversation for another day.
I really agree with this post. I am boring because I keep harping on curriculum and teaching goals. But honestly, if nobody looks at these matters, we end up with a curriculum invented in the 1920s that doesn’t fit the current age and that people are so used to, they think it’s a force of nature.
There are so many practical problems one has, dancing around staffing and scheduling issues and so on, that if one sits back and thinks about it can be traced to curricular and outcome related issues. In the R1 I studied at, these problems also existed but were then and are now still smoothed over by a large soft budget for staffing. It doesn’t mean they’re not problems, it just means one doesn’t have to think about them because there are ways to stop the gap. So, coming from that I did not figure out how to analyze the problem for the longest. Had to due to lack of soft budget; result = modernization, not bad at all, especially since dancing around the problem meant draining research time (or sleep time) from ladder faculty; meant people not getting promoted therefore; meant students falling out of the major therefore.
P.S. I do agree with the criticisms of “assessment” made up thread. But in terms of outcomes, at the level of thinking among ourselves about course and program goals, I find it really is helpful to ask, “what do we want students to be able to do?” (as opposed to “know,” which is also important, or “be aware of,” which is important, too).