“Do you have time to type something for me today?” I asked the student aide who works several hours a week in our fine-arts-department office.

“Sure, no problem,” she answered. Apollonia is an unusually good-spirited young woman, never complaining about her boring job of typing, working the copy machine and sorting the mail.

“OK, so here’s what you do,” I said, placing my index finger on the notes that I’d laid out in front of her on her desk.

I was asking for Apollonia’s help that day because, as Chair of our department’s Outcomes Assessment Committee, I was the one who had put together a six-column rubric and I needed it typed. That way the fine arts department would have as spiffy a six-step chart as all the other university departments. The mandated column headings were: Step 1, Mission statement; Step 2, Learning goal; Step 3, Map to courses; Step 4, Assessment tools; Step 5, Interpret findings; Step 6, Use results. Under “Learning goal,” we listed the several specific “learning objectives” we’d hashed out in committee. Under “map to courses” we then listed the courses having those objectives. Pretty straightforward stuff, executed in full accordance with standards established by outcomes assessment experts.

“Let’s take this sentence,” I said. “‘Students identify principles of design in a range of visual disciplines.’ Your job is to type it so that it fits into Column 2.”

We both watched the computer screen while she dutifully squeezed the sentence into its narrow column. (With six columns on a page, using 12-point type, each column ends up with a width of about an inch and three quarters.) The words fell into a vertical cascade resembling a William Carlos Williams poem:

“Like this?” Apollonia asked, turning to me with a giggle.

“Yup, that’s right,” I said with a friendly professor’s smile. “Just like that.”

Having never seen English written in such a silly-looking way, Apollonia burst out into uncontrollable laughter—the kind you usually hear only when your middle-school daughter is having a sleepover with six other girls. Mustering as serious a tone as possible, I said, “Look, we’re making a learning chart here, and this is the way it has to look.” Of course, I knew it was silly looking as well, and she knew I knew it. Her laughter was contagious, and pretty soon we were both at it.

Apollonia stopped laughing and gave me a very long, hard look, which I translated as, “OK, if this stupidity is what you want, I’ll do it. But professors don’t have a clue, do they?”

The work was tedious—ranking somewhere between running the copy machine and compiling a list of professors’ office hours—but by the end of the day, Apollonia had finished the report. “It wasn’t so bad,” she told me later, trying to make me feel better about giving her such an odious task. No matter how tedious and time-consuming it might have seemed to her, it was nowhere near as tedious and time-consuming as the long hours of discussion, argument, compromise, motion-tabling, voting, and re-voting that had been done by the committee.

Apollonia’s work on the columns is emblematic of the whole misguided nature of outcomes assessment as it is currently practiced. It was hours of time for a project that has never once been empirically demonstrated to be effective at improving learning. It was, in common-sense parlance, “wasted time.” And to what end? So that some minion somewhere, some assessor of our assessments, can assess our courses. Now anyone can point to our “learning objectives” and then slide a finger across columns and point to how they “map to courses.”

Other than being a waste of time, this kind of outcomes exercise, which is touted by educrats as something that helps faculty focus on whether their students are learning what they say they are learning, in reality smothers the likelihood that discoveries will take place in the classroom. Permit me to use some of those “verbs of action” so beloved in the OA lexicon. “Point” to the study that demonstrates that outcomes assessment works. “Explain” to me why putting English sentences into skinny vertical columns that make them difficult to read is a good idea. “Demonstrate” to me how I can do this so it’s not so unreadable.

For faculty who are already powerful teachers who know how to teach effectively, outcomes assessment eats up the time they would otherwise spend working with students. For faculty striving to improve their teaching, they would be a lot better off observing and emulating good teachers. As for our students, the ones for whose putative benefit the whole OA obstacle course has been constructed? I say that young people struggling to learn something concrete and meaningful during their college years need to be protected from faculty turned into lesson-plan automatons by this stiff and stifling stuff.

I have a feeling that educrats take secret pleasure at the thought of faculty working on a fool’s errand, and, dear colleagues, six-column charts like this are a fool’s errand. When my essay, A Pedagogical Straightjacket, appeared last summer in The Chronicle Review (June 7, 2007), a few letter-writers objected to my snarky tone. My essay prompted the former president of Pace University, in a letter to the editor, to invoke the rather threatening pugilistic cliché that “She can run, but she cannot hide.” My answer to them is (with apologies to Tom Paine) that when the times are such that they try men’s souls, the times demand—at the very least—snarkiness. I’m reminding people, in my own way, that a lot is at stake. It’s not merely that Outcomes Assessment is destroying the little well-written English that’s left in universities. It’s that Outcomes Assessment is destroying the little amount of “higher” that’s left in higher education.