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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
About Brainstorm
Brainstorm is The Chronicle Review's team of bloggers on ideas, culture, and the arts.
Gina Barreca
Mark Bauerlein Marc Bousquet Laurie Fendrich Dan Greenberg Stan Katz Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Bob Zemsky Recent PostsCan You Use Orphan Works? | Comment [9] SNAAP Judgments | Comment [6] Thanks, Karen | Comment [5] Symphony Orchestra as a Team Sport | Comment [2] Is the E-Book in Trouble? | Comment [2] Featured Articles By the Author
SNAAP JudgmentsFormer Mayor Ed Koch of New York City used to be fond of asking anyone who would listen, “How am I doing?” There is a growing debate in higher education about how we are doing, but the debate is multifocused and poorly distributed. The code name for the debate is, of course, “accountability,” and the point of reference is all too often the late and sometimes-lamented Spellings Commission. I am convinced that the debate is as consequential for individual institutions as it is for the field of higher education as a whole. The problem is that if it is higher ed as a whole that is being assessed, nobody’s institutional ox is gored. Of course some institutions, especially those that answer closely to legislative oversight, are laser-focused on institution-specific assessment. But private institutions are not immediately answerable to government agencies, even though they are theoretically under the purview of regional accrediting agencies. And many private institutions, especially the most selective and elite, apparently feel that they are so self-evidently successful at promoting student learning that they do not have to institute specialized assessment instruments. I have written elsewhere about the need for longitudinal assessment, but I was again reminded of the problem last week when I received a release on the new SNAAP (sounds like a Dutch beverage, doesn’t it?) instrument. The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project has been developed by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research (George Kuh and the folks who brought us NSSE) in partnership with the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. SNAAP will be a long-term longitudinal survey of arts alumni to show, among other things, “how students in different majors use their arts training in their careers and other aspects of their lives.” My own university, like many others, is investing heavily in both facilities and faculty for undergraduate art-making in the visual and plastic arts, and in performance (dance, music, theater). Many of us feel intuitively that such an investment will pay off in the enrichment of liberal education, just as advocates for arts education in the schools have long claimed (in supposed response to the work of Howard Gardner) that precollegiate student learning capacity will be enhanced by engagement with the arts. But social science research has yet to prove the intuition definitively correct in the schools, and we frankly don’t have a clue how useful an analogous arts approach will prove in colleges. The information garnered from SNAAP will be helpful, but it will not be available for a long time, and it does not appear to address questions about the impact of the arts on undergraduate education. But shouldn’t we care whether arts education, freshman seminars, service learning or any of the other “enhancements” to undergraduate education actually improve student cognition and capacity to achieve? I think so, and I think we need to worry about such new forms of assessment sooner rather than later if we are to be taken seriously with regard to our “product.” It is probably not going to happen, however, if faculty do not wake up to the need. If we care about educational innovation, we should care whether it is consequential. This may be too important a matter to be left to university presidents, at least in the private sector of higher ed. Posted at 02:49:49 PM on May 5, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments |
Research in the arts is simple: why not ask prominent Americans which art form they pursued in high school? I believe the answer will yield far greater results than Bill Clinton playing the sax! Further, ask them if the time investment was worth it! I believe the answer will be a resounding “yes.”
— Blitt · May 5, 07:42 PM · #
While the social science approach to the assessment of the “usefulness” of the arts will likely lead to “concrete” social uses of the arts and art education, how does that actually tell us what we want to know about education in the arts and the development of the mind and human knowledge about humans?
It would thus seem even more important to engage the neuroscientists, the cognitive scientists — the brain scientists, in short — to get a better handle on this question.
While the arts may be “instrumental” they may also be “essential” to the very nature of being human.
And for assessing that we need more than a multiple-choice questionnaire in the search for answers.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 5, 08:26 PM · #
P.S. Yes, I know — S. Pinker doesn’t think much about links between music and the mind and being human.
But he’s not the only “card” in the interdisciplinary cog sci “deck”….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 5, 08:41 PM · #
The penny takes a long time to drop with me. Here I was, having drifted most of the way through yet another of Prof. Katz’s offerings of soporific educratisms (“precollegiate student learning capacity will be enhanced by engagement with the arts”; a capacity is enlarged, not enhanced, and there’s no need for “engagement with” preceding “the arts”), when the copper coin hit me in the noggin:
In the guise of support for arts education, Prof. Katz slips in a backdoor promo for…Spellings-Commission-style Outcomes Assessment! A plain English summary of his post would read, “If you faculty foot-draggers expect any support from the administration for arts facilities and hires, then you better knuckle under to OA.” You can take the boy away from the Spellings Commission, but you can’t take the Spellings Commission away from the boy. “I have written elsewhere about the need for longitudinal assessment” was worth the price of admission, though, along with the dizzying, spelled-out names of SNAAP, IUCPR, and CCAEPP. Who needs Richard Russo?— LuckyJim · May 5, 08:54 PM · #
For fun (“all together now”), here’s a sentence from the Powell’s.com Staff Pick review of Richard Russo’s Straight Man: “The story inspires me to imagine Michael Chabon, Denis Johnson, Francine Prose, and Richard Russo sitting in a chateau one summer in the mid-‘90s, the night sky split with relentless lightning, as they read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.”
http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=0375701907
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · May 5, 10:40 PM · #
Stan Katz has chutzpah commenting on almost anything, given his pathetically modest pubs. in his field of American history. We still await, at least twenty years later, his coauthored book on American philanthropy. He has been so darn fortunate in his career, but never because he did much serious scholarship. He couldn’t get tenure at a first-rate liberal arts college these days, much less at a research-oriented university. He should blog far less often and write history far more often. But as a big-shot Princeton historian he gets opportunities denied genuinely distinguished historians and others at less prestigious schools.
— howard segal · May 6, 07:55 PM · #