I don’t know how you spent your weekend, but I spent much of mine on Amtrak, since a blizzard had shut down Newark Airport.

For reasons that are unclear to me, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), one of the higher-ed organizations I most admire, invited me to give a plenary address to conclude a large conference in Boston this weekend on “Integrative Designs for General Education and Assessment.” I have, to be sure, done some writing on general education, but nobody would mistake me for an expert on assessment. But because I wanted to support Carol Geary Schneider and her colleagues at AAC&U, and because I knew I should learn more about the assessment movement, I agreed. I was then confronted with a quick request not just for a title, but for a paragraph describing the approach I would take. Any of you who do a good deal of public lecturing will recognize the problem — titling an address that you have not yet written, even in your head.

That did not stop me. It never does, although I suspect it should, and the title I came up with committed me to little, substantively: “Assessment and General Education: Resisting Reductionism Without Resisting Responsibility.” My descriptive paragraph promised that I would tell the audience “how to respond creatively to these demands for accountability without compromising our larger liberal education objectives.” So then I proceeded to spend quite a lot of time reading the assessment literature, in order to determine what to say.

Everyone who reads The Chronicle will recognize the problem as being how to respond to the demand of the Spellings Commission for institutional accountability. Quite apart from the politics of that commission, however, such a demand has been increasingly heard and debated in the higher-education community. And I took as my point of departure the proposition that while one could debate the question of to whom outside the university accountability was owed, it was at a minimum owed to the institution itself — which means to its students, faculty, staff, and other stakeholders. I argued that it is right to demand that institutions be able to state their educational goals, and to demonstrate (as best they can) the extent to which their students are successful learners.

I am aware that this simple proposition sticks in the craw for many institutions and their leaders. The good reason for this is that it is not so clear that we know how to measure longitudinally (and with precision) student learning outcomes — though there are some promising new approaches. The not so good reason is that too many institutions are so self-satisfied and so little critical that they do not feel the need to make any such demonstration. I pointed out to my audience that we in higher ed have been trying to solve this conundrum for at least a century, and left them with the question of whether there is any reason to think that we are on the brink of achieving a successful resolution.

I am pretty sure I did not tell the audience what I had promised them, but by then the snow had stopped, and I made the six-hour train trip back to Trenton, and home.