This piece is so badly written, it's an example of what upsets so many regular folks whose tax dollars go to subsidize universities. Can't the basic point be put into plain, unpompous English, without all the soaring stuff about 'social constructs' and 'narratives' and 'triumphant global capitalism'?

We are killing ourselves with this kind of self-presentation.

For instance, what does this sentence actually mean?

"This instance would seem to suggest that the accountability initiative may arise from a misconstruing of the specific challenge that universal commodification is thrusting on the university in general and on undergraduate and graduate education in particular."

I agree with some of this article, but there's another unavoidable and potentially hypocritical fact that is not mentioned: if you look at faculty hiring, even the university isn't buying its own product, or if it is, it demands it at vastly discounted prices in the form of contingent labor.

"universal consensus" seems repetitiously redundant.

Huh!

"There is no particular location inhabited by graduate education, because commodification now extends its reach into every aspect of our social reality."

And then there is the internet. In education, spaces outside of commoodification are usually tagged with the word "open." For some examples, explore Open Univesity in UK, WikiEducator, or P2PU.

If you want to look by subjects, you will find literally hundreds of such open communities. For example, consider the recent Global Education conference: http://www.globaleducationconference.com Or the math researcher community: http://mathoverflow.net/ Or Science Bloggers network: http://scienceblogs.com/

There are also open channels for peer-reviewed publications, such as Project Euclid or arXiv - huge projects with hundreds of thousands of articles.

The heavy lingo of the dean's comments illustrates why higher education in the humanities is not held in high esteem outside of the various academic guilds. "Commodification" is not a good description of the problem. The problem is an absence of pragmatism and connection between these faculty guilds and the common life and intellectual needs of our nation. All this lingo mainly serves to create a job-protecting pseudo-professionalism, analogous to physicians using Latin to create an air of mystery about their expertise. I hope the jig is almost up for these guys and gals.

Professor Alonso's remarks are perfectly clear. blackswan555's ad hominem attack is specious, as are all such attacks. "Commodification" is a very precise description of the "problem" and Professor Alonso historicizes its emerging dominance insightfully.

And when was this Golden Age when the humanities were held in high esteem in the modern age? The humanities have always been construed by the majority of people--on the right and left--as elitist and/or superfluous when compared with the "real work" done by scientists or even social "scientists". The humanities have thus been constituted as the diacritical other of real knowledges and social practicality. blackswan555 is simply one voice in a long line of resentful voices. It's very easy to name that particular tune.
Barry Sarchett

I've noticed a few trends in these articles that suggest that higher ed is now under attack. Or in this case, being commodified.

1-they always posit a "golden age" in higher ed, a supposed time when people didn't pursue education for material wealth, better jobs, etc.
2-academics never bear responsibility for their lack of respect in the public eye. As this author puts it, social delegitimization is the cause--whatever that means.
3-in the end it's always global capitalism to blame for (fill in blank here)
4-they never admit the fact that the real thing being commodified these days are graduate students. Commenter #3 put it well.

.....another marxist's frankfooter lament.

Despite being a supporter of accountability in all domains, even the area of education, I still have an erie sense of deja-vu when I begin to compare our current thinking about higher education to the debacle that was no child left behind and other attempts to create accountability in k-12 education. As a child of that era in education I have to wonder at the cost of these kinds of interventions. What kind of mindset do we create when we tell individuals that their education is a "commodity"? How does this affect their motivation to learn or their perception of their educational experience? As individuals, do we expect that we must participate in the process of that commodity, or do we passively sit back expecting that commodity to be delivered to us? If so, perhaps this explains why our students are so passive in their classes rather than engaging.

I take it that Alonso's point is that talk of "accountability" is about a relation. To say that graduate programs need to be accountable means that "X needs to be accountable to Y." So the question then becomes what measure are we using for Y and why is this appropriate? To merely talk about the need for accountability is not yet to address the deeper question here: What is it that Universities and Departments should be accountable for? The market says "well-paying jobs" or some such, but this begs the question.

ALONSO QUOTE
"But what if the market has already devalued from the start the knowledge on which the entire operation of outcomes and accountability is based, as well as the institution where it is produced?" Everybody here is represented, let's see what people are saying.

Notsurprised: 1) highly critical, 2) looking for simplistic answers to complex questions and 3) frustrated by critical theory

Categorical: 1) reminds us of the irony of belief in education

penast: 1) an editor at heart 2) one wonders why penast sees editing as a central issue that can gleaned and shared from Alonso's thoughts.

gplm2000: 1) eyes wide shut 2) derisive 3) ignorance (a great combination to solve problems)

Maria Droujkova: 1) describing the possibilities for alternate graduate locations and resources 2) but not addressing the limits of the internet's recent crises put in play by the market interests (Wikileaks and Net Neutrality) --- making Alonso's point all the more valid.

Blackswan555: 1) overly concerned about the lingo and meaning related to commodification, 2) calling into question the alignment of the guild's self-protection versus production of common life and intellectual needs of a nation 3) a bit of professorial blaming under the guise of utilitarian pragmatism

Bscharett: 1) 'writing' a wrong from blackswan, bravo, 2) humanities 101 contextual clarification, 3) would like to hear more about his/her thoughts on Alonso

Morecowbell: 1) generalizing commodification into points of critique for detractors, 2) 'golden age' criticism scenario really takes Alonso out of context and does not apply, 3) scholar-blaming rhetoric, 4) "whatever that means" is code for I do not read things that I do not already understand, 5) reductionism of global capitalism (phrases like always and never are so precious at the age in an academic's thought process, 6) major error in reading comprehension: all you had to do was read post #6 or you could read the actual article to see your last point refuted. When the author writes 'every aspect of society", I am quite sure they are speaking about students' commodification as well. You win the boobie prize of the posts (which included "huh" as a response).

Maniac: 1) seemingly witty response using an agreed upon capitalist pejorative device used to dismiss the legitimate questions that need to be asked 2) too cool for school

couchmar: 1) helpful mathematical analogy, 2) getting to the krux of it on accountability (nice)...

Not one of you addressed the direct question posed by Alonso (either through predilection to be heard, editing prowess, advocating the internet, preaching, obfuscating, avoiding, & HUH)
Let's try again:

"But what if the market has already devalued from the start the knowledge on which the entire operation of outcomes and accountability is based, as well as the institution where it is produced?"

The author, at very least, deserves your consideration of this question for crafting these issues, developing them and writing about them forcefully. If you do not understand him (legitimation, commodification), that's on you.

couchmar: I added you in later (and you actually do get to the question Alonso asks)! Ma faute!

"the crisis of legitimation of the university is predicated not on a program's inability to show empirically and convincingly that it is delivering what it says it is delivering, but on the market's challenge to the kind of knowledge it is producing."

I don't think that this challenge is all that new. Students have been bearing the costs of more arcane knowledge production to the extent that they continued to enroll in those academic programs on which faculty producing that knowledge have drawn their own financial support. So long as the administration, state governments etc, allowed enrollment (absent outcomes assessment) to be the primary legitimizing factor, this state of affairs largely continued.

Here, faculty BENEFITTED from market forces. They also benefitted from information asymmetries, as when for example, grad students enrolled in their grad programs not knowing how bad the academic job market would be or without knowing there was NO interest in the non-academic job market in their Departments. Which, of course, faculty already knew.

If enrollment patterns are changing now, as in the SUNY example below, it's entirely possible that STUDENTS are effectively electing to no longer support that knowledge production based on their own cost-benefit analysis because they/ their parents are feeling more economically pressured:

"The challenge itself is empirically based on our students' enrollment patterns and preferences.

How would it have profited the undergraduate and graduate faculty in foreign languages at the State University of New York at Albany to be able to demonstrate with the most sophisticated outcomes-assessment instruments that their pedagogical and programmatic goals were being met at the highest levels?"

In other words, perhaps "market forces" are finally trending in your disfavor. This is unfortunate, but I'm not sure why faculty believe that they ALONE amongst education stakeholders should be protected from these market forces--at least not without making the case that they should be protected.

WHO is going to make that case? Up to now, I believe it's been--effectively if not intentionally--your students, who through their enrollment choices basically put themselves and their own financial well being on the line. But they have no obligation to do so, particularly in the manner in which they have. Most of them really can't afford to be engaged in academic charitable giving. Not at this point in their lives. So, with the accountability movement, there may be a little paternalism involved.

If academics want to be judged by some other criteria than the market forces to which their students are still going to be subject--at least for the forseeable future--then they need to articulate those criteria and make their own case.

I find academics nearly incoherent on this issue. Sophomoric whining about the market and maintaining academic exceptionalism is not going to cut it. State schools can throw in with the government and plead for protection from market forces, but the government itself is also undergoing a (not entirely unjustified) crisis in legitimacy, also largely brought on by the tyranny of market forces.

Maybe academics need to get outside themselves a little bit. DO they have any broad value to society? For people with so-called "academic freedom," allegedly in order to press against the powers that be, I have to tell you, it doesn't look too good right now.

Note that faculty are not in a position to expect accountability from administrators or accreditors. See, "AACSB Accreditation: A Reliable Authority on Academic Quality?" at www.usmnews.net.

During preparation for reaccreditation, a colleague noticed that the College Accreditation Committee represented other Colleges' documents as their own. He consulted several faculty. They advised Dean Harold Doty and Committee that the documents were without attribution. Dean Doty and Committee ignored them. Subsequently, Dean Doty submitted the questionable materials to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) during reaccreditation. After internal efforts to discuss the documents failed, concerned faculty informed the AACSB that the documents were copied "without proper citation." The actions of the AACSB inform their constituency and public of a neglected dimension of accreditation: What does the AACSB do when challenged with evidence of alleged violations of its standards? Is the AACSB a reliable authority on academic quality? The evidence in this case study supports that the AACSB did not persuade an accredited member to follow its standards and is not, therefore, a reliable authority on academic quality. The subject of the AACSB's failure was an accredited College of Business at the University of Southern Mississippi that chose to violate its own code of integrity and compounded its failure by punishing the faculty who asked questions. President Martha Saunders implemented the punishment and spent $2.5 million to silence the faculty. The Chairman of the Visitation Committee of the AACSB supported the punishment of the faculty and testified that the AACSB is not a proper subject for study. For details, see www.usmnews.net.

Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA
Professor
School of Accountancy
College of Business
University of Southern Mississippi

I think the author mistakes our product by assuming that "accountability" means measuring "effective transmission of knowledge." Frankly, that's the role of a technical school. Analysis, critical thinking and communication skills are the "real" product here, more than the knowledge of, say the French language and its grammar. It is such skills that earn our graduates respect in the market, as well as in the academy. I do agree, however, that standardized testing is not a good measure of college learning. I also agree that measuring college performance by how much money graduates make is not appropriate. (Did you see the recent article in the Chronicle that suggests such a measure? My jaw dropped.)

I also think it's a mistake to suggest that there should be no rankings of various kinds of learning in the context of different uses. The fact that medical doctors earn more on average than translators is not a flaw in the market. The fact that students aren't generally interested in learning languages doesn't mean that our culture is to blame. We need to make a case for its presence in the academy to our end-users. Frankly, as a convener at my college (roughly the equivalent of "chair"), an important part of my job is to make the case for "Law & Society" to the college and potential students. People can't be expected to have as much enthusiasm for that subject as I do, and if I get mad at people because they don't think it's the center of the academic universe, that's simply self-indulgent.

So by all means, let's not let standardized testing usurp the role of learning measurement. But let's not take umbrage at the fact that some people don't understand the importance of learning Latin, or geometry or music. If it's important, it's up to us faculty to make the case, rather than harboring anger against society-at-large and blaming global capitalism.

trendisnotdestiny,I believe, is correct in his/her categorizing of the responses thus far . . . useful summary. To the point, there is no "education" today that has a widely accepted value. There are "knowledge-skill-sets" relationships directed toward employbility (see Stanley Fish's NY Times piece), but what counted as "knowledge" traditionally really doesn't exist. The process works like this: select a job, reverse engineer the competencies (knowledge and skills)and then "rebuild" them as a curriculum and call it an education. Anything and everything that doesn't fit the "job design" is considered to be "waste." This is the logic of the Browne Report in the UK and the current "accountability" fetish in American high ed. What I would like to know is how do we "revalue" education in the context of the logic of "employability"? Should we revisit the "training" v. "education" debate?

Very good article, raising important points. That some do not possess the requisite background knowledge and vocabulary to understand the article is of little consequence.

This commodification and application of "market theory" has happened to the public schools over the past 20 - 25 years. And we are all seeing the results in the diminshed background knowledge and skills students carry to university these days. The students are pros at bubbling in answer forms, but are woefully unprepared to write a cogent paper, or even a paragraph in many instances.

Beware - the havoc dealt to the public schools may soon be visited upon the universities of our country.

There's no accounting for the pleasures of counting, or the pleasures in spending one's days getting and spending, or reading, or tilting at windmills, or shocking and awing, or praying, or, or, or. That is, there's no accounting for it, when enjoyed by someone who has been given the benefits of a liberal education. Enjoyed by persons who have not been given the benefit of such an education, then there is much accounting for the various pleasures.

"There was a time when the social understanding of the university and of the work performed therein was defined precisely in opposition to the logic of accountability and instrumentality, but that situation no longer obtains."

I would like the author to tell us when that time was. The earliest universities in Europe were founded for the pragmatic (i.e. marketplace) purposes of training clergy, lawyers, doctors, etc. The first universities in this country (e.g., Harvard) were founded to train ministers. Yale's charter provided for a school where in which "Youth may be instructed in the Arts and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State"(http://www.yale.edu/about/history.html). Thomas Jefferson sought to found the University of Virginia as "a new kind of university, one dedicated to educating leaders in practical affairs and public service rather than for professions in the classroom and pulpit exclusively" (http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/shorthistory/) Many of our great flagship public universities were established as land grant schools specifically to teach agriculture, science and engineering. But my question is honestly meant: if there was such a time as the author suggests, I would genuinely welcome more information about it.

One smaller note: No one claims that simply documenting results is sufficient to insure the continuation of academic programs. Few state legislatures will fund the production of 100 highly competent basket weavers each year. Of course the results have to be results that we as a society care about. But when was this otherwise?

I suggest we consider the case of financial market deregulation (see "13 Bankers") or deregulaton and failure to enforce environmental law (see the BP Oil Spill, our polluted drinking water and global warming science denied by the Chamber of Commerce) in looking at higher education: externalities and market failures abound; the market system is NOT triumphant, the market is "not rational," and yet we seek to apply market based assumptions to higher education? We are digging our own cultural and civilizational grave if he continue down this path. It needs to be stopped.

Maybe it's the early hour I am reading this, but it feels like trying to eat gravel with my morning kerosene. The language is so intentionally opaque that it is clear it was intended for a very narrow audience with a tolerance for such pomposity. I had to check the author's credentials--(as a practicing liberal, I didn't want to be accused of denouncing a person's use of a second [or third] language, or the awkwardness of a translation--after all, the author has a name that suggests he is a native Spanish speaker--or very pretentious. If this guy is a dean--or even acting like one!--then he ought to know that he has used language here (the centerpiece of the humanities after all)--to fail to communicate.
But behind this failure is another thing acting deans and acting deans are so good at: saying the obvious, to much polite applause.

I completely agree with bermane. Some comments above suggest that it is the reader's poor understanding of language or underdeveloped vocabulary that is the problem. This is not the case. The problem is that the essential concepts here could have been written in a concise paragraph. The rest obfuscates rather than clarifies the point.

How is this truly horrible writing the problem of the *readers*?! We are all clever enough to understand the "words" but when a writer's use of "big" words actually obfuscates his meaning, well, isn't that, by definition, bad writing?

Oy.

@ trendisnotdestiny #13:

Here is my summary of trendisnotdestiny's comments:

trendisnotdestiny: 1) has too much time....

"... the crisis of legitimation of the university is predicated not on a program's inability to show empirically and convincingly that it is delivering what it says it is delivering, but on the market's challenge to the kind of knowledge it is producing."

"In other words, the crisis of legitimation we are confronting today is related more to the product that we are selling than to our inability to make that product worth buying."

"But what if the market has already devalued from the start the knowledge on which the entire operation of outcomes and accountability is based, as well as the institution where it is produced?"

To my mind, Alonso's judiciously placed 'what if' represents the crux of the issue. What is left to do- assess until extinction?

But who assesses the assessors?

@ softshell,

The time it took me to summarize and think through Alonso's points was well worth the time I invested (15min of my life). Seeing that I am invested in dialogues with similar questions as the author and also equally frustated by those who find it easier to critique something they do not understand than actually read about how commodification works in this society, I can see how you could mistake my passion as boredom (NOT).....

However, what truly puzzles me (father time) is why you would invest any amount of time attending to me (other than to gain 1/4 browny point with muted attempts at humor)..... You might try reading a little Henry Giroux or Marc Bousquet, so you too can participate in a dialogue that does not involve WASTED time.

Would someone at Columbia please give Acting Dean Alonso a copy of Strunk and White's ELEMENTS OF STYLE?
Thank you.

I'm skeptical of any article by a white male that posits that in some distant past life was easier because "there was a consensus." There's ALWAYS a consensus about issues if you manage to marginalize and exclude those who hold different views. At one point in America, there was a consensus about the utility and morality of slavery. When only white men were officers in the US military, there was surely a lot more consensus on a lot more issues as well -- but that didn't mean that there was anything admirable about that consensus or about those who contributed to the achievement of that consensus. (Whose academic field DOESN"T feel a little more divisive than it might have felt forty years ago? Don't most of us think of a lack of consensus as a sign of growth and progress? I do.)

I'd like to join swagato and 22072131 in saying that, though dense, Alonso's prose is far from opaque or overly florid. The questions addressed in this article are complex, and deserve the nuanced approach afforded them here.

Nonetheless, while I respect the author's position regarding the encroachment of the market and quantitative metrics on higher education, I can't help but wonder if we might not shift our perspective a bit. Perhaps it is not a space apart that we should be seeking, but a greater relevance - defined according to our own terms - within a broader field of discourse. I can't help but see a parallel between the dwindling number of public intellectuals engaging the world outside the academy and the dwindling interest in, and support for, the activities that take place within it.

The market may not be the problem. The market is mercenary, and therefore predictable. Nor is accountability strictly a matter of accounting. State politicians, for example, have a much easier time cutting funding to humanities departments when the majority of their constituents are unaware of what those programs do, of the ideas they produce, and why the members of their respective faculties have dedicated their lives to their chosen field of study.

If we can agree that greater visibility in - and a greater engagement of - the world outside the academy would benefit the humanities and higher education in general, then we must examine certain practices that seem to penalize exactly that kind of engagement, such as hiring and tenure review. Rarely do either of these processes take into account more 'public' forms of intellectual production, such as the publication of book reviews, translations, editorials, and the like. There is nothing to say that these other forms of writing need be any less intellectually rigorous (quite the opposite, as they force us to write without recourse to a shared corpus); yet, given the scarcity of positions at the moment and the climate of 'publish or perish' that has taken over, these restrictions on what constitutes a 'viable' publication virtually ensure the isolationism for which the academy is so often criticized. When engaging a non-specialist readership and asserting the relevance of our chosen discipline is no longer seen as a professional liability, we may find that more people take an interest in the fate of our field.

leopoldandloeb - If Dr. Alonso wrote nearly as well as you, I am certain more of us would be engaging his ideas. I commend you and ask you to take a shot at publishing an opinion in the Chronicle, possibly, to better engage us with your ideas).
Having said this, I am surprised that you would side with 22072131 ["That some do not possess the requisite background knowledge and vocabulary to understand the article is of little consequence."] That sort of flippant dismissal of those (presumed to be) outside the given field of study seems to be counter to your position that academia should engage the public-at-large. If academics cannot engage across disciplines to other academics without resorting to the condesention littered through these comments, what are the chances we'll have a fair shot at the public?
I fully agree with you conceptually but continue to see so much disdain for the unwashed public (and disagreeing academics) that I fear we are destined to go the way of the Gnostics. In any event, thanks for the thoughts.

I'd like to post an addendum to clarify that I am by no means advocating academic isolationism. It would be quite futile to persuade a society that they must sustain and nourish a cellular unit in their midst that they cannot engage with, but which (they are told) issues forth pearls of great wisdom. However, I must ask where the line is to be drawn. In other words, how far does this academic non-academic conversation go? Richard Feynman famously demonstrated how very difficult it is to answer the apparently simple question of how magnets work. This was not an example of academic elitism. Rather, as he showed, the more you try to simplify things, the more you 'cheat'. You cheat by eliding issues, you cheat by making drastic generalisations, and generally making the facts more easily digestible. Thus I wonder how far it may be feasible to work in such a fashion. Can the latest on string theory be put forward in a way that your average non-physicist might comprehend the exact nature of what is being discussed?

Swagato,

I seem to recall a certain physicist named Alan Sokal that did publish a parody of the obsurantism style for the journal Social Text. That exercise famously laid bare the fact that the language itself can serve to hide empty content and pass through peer-review just the same.

I am certainly not suggesting that Alonso lacks an interesting point, I'm just asking why hide it? Academics are, for the most part, also teachers. Who is the audience here?

Although Alan Sokal's paper immediately came to mind as I read this, the other thought that came to mind was David Lehman's quote, "Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity -- a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence." In this regard, the use of such language here could be interpreted as brilliant satire or an ironic way to make the point, but I don't think that was what Alonso had in mind.

Richard Feynman (and Hawkings, Darwin, Gould, Dawkins etc.) are well known largely because they are able to translate the language of their disciplines for public consumption.

Al_Wallace, you bring up the obvious point. The funny thing is that people like you and I are attacked as having substandard intelligence for not wanting to spent enormous effort for trying to divine the meaning behind this horrible writing. The fault is ours, and ours alone.

(Oh and shhh... and don't tell my dean, who just tenured me at a fancy ivy league perch. I wouldn't want everyone to find out I'm an idiotic fraud. Mum's the word!)

Wallace,

Yes, the Sokal incident is (inf)famous in academia. I of course admit the unfortunate tendency of many scholars to slip into using overblown phraseology (is it our equivalent of penile size comparison?). I suppose while decrying truly overblown jargon, I simultaneously defend the necessity of using accurate language where required--even if the end result ends up as something difficult to pronounce.

Can that be a reasonable compromise?

I agree with Dr. Alonso that the market has devalued the knowledge or, to be more accurate, the search for knowledge as opposed to unreflective opinion that lies or should lie at the heart of the academic enterprise. I found the writing in this article clear enough, if a bit stale and slavishly conformist to the conventions of the Frankfurt School. The problem, however, is that Dr. Alonso is all but admitting defeat in a battle that we should be joining with as much vigor as we can muster. The market values, above all else, the ability to create wealth. Societies that can create wealth flourish, whereas those that cannot become subject to those that can, are left to their own self-imposed impoverishment, or, if they happen to live in territories rich in necessary commodities, become both enriched and hopelessly corrupted by exporting those commodities to societies that actually produce something. That is how it is, at least since the industrial revolution, and that is how it should be. Let us then reflect on what characteristics we need in order to create wealth. In today's world, one of these is the ability to innovate, as one hears echoed in virtually every advertisement for technology companies and even in the mindless chatter that now passes for political discourse. Good luck continuing to innovate without a strong, meritocratic system of higher education, which takes talented but unformed youth and allows them to gain both skills and the analytical thinking necessary to create whatever new products and services will create wealth in the next year, decade, and, one hopes, century. Another thing necessary for the continuous creation of wealth, not to mention political stability, is a strong middle class. Again, good luck forging a strong middle class in the absence of affordable higher education. Furthermore, successful and growing corporations that produce real things are not interested in hiring employees who cannot write, cannot use logic, and cannot transcend whatever they have memorized by rote in business school. A liberal arts education is without question the best means of acquiring this necessary skill set. Anyone who doubts this should ask themselves why the Chinese government, which is recognizing that rote memorization and robotic preparation for exams can only take the talented members of its population so far, is investing in the promotion of the liberal arts. Complaining in postmodern prose about the commodification of the academy and its imperilment by global capitalism may make us feel better about ourselves, but it will do nothing other than hasten the very transformations to which Dr. Alonso rightfully objects. Instead, some of us must again master the art of speaking to citizens and so-called statesmen possessed by the likes of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who would have considered themselves fortunate beyond their wildest dreams to live in a society that would never try to execute them for engaging in philosophical inquiry, let alone one that grants tenure and a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to at least some of those who do.