The governing boards of America’s colleges and universities have tremendous untapped potential for assuring and furthering academic quality. Board members know and actively exercise their fiduciary responsibility in the realm of finance. But they frequently neglect their role in assuring high levels of achievement in what students have learned.

That is partly because most board members come from outside the academy, so they may feel incapable of examining academic quality. They may also harbor a kind of residual deference to the faculty in these matters. Yet boards have an equally compelling fiduciary responsibility to make sure colleges pay attention to academic quality.

Successful accreditation is as important as a clean financial audit. And assessing students’ academic achievement, as required by accreditors, is as important as an auditor’s parallel requirements in the institution’s legal and financial systems.

Exercising this responsibility properly, of course, involves a delicate balance. Great mischief is possible if boards try to meddle with the substance of the curriculum. As I have written before, assuring the quality of the curriculum is the faculty’s responsibility; the board’s role is to remind them of that responsibility. Boards should ensure that evidence about student learning is examined regularly, and they should ask appropriate questions about it. That way, the institution’s leadership will be unable to let assessment slide into the background between accreditation visits.

When the board dons academic regalia at graduation, the honor is serious. For the purpose of quality assurance, they are academics.

Peter Ewell is vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.