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About the Author
Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Bob ZemskyRecent Posts
Lessons From the Cost-Quality Curve | Comment [2]
Quality -- Reform's Fourth Horseman | Comment [4]
Access to Success | Comment [2]
Is Access Still the Question? | Comment [3]
Affordability: Devil in the Details | Comment [2]
Featured Articles By the Author
Making Sense of Accountability
Part slogan, part dare, too often employed by policy wonks who would remake higher education in their own image, the call to make colleges and universities more accountable has become a standard item in the reformer’s catalog of how to fix higher education. Before we give away the store, however, we ought to ask “Accountable for what?” and “Accountable to whom?” These are real questions that would-be reformers too often gloss over. Instead, they settled for claiming that higher education is not accountable or that higher education needs to be more accountable.
Here is a stab at making sense of the rhetoric. In the first place, higher education is currently accountable to a market that rewards tradition, prestige, reputation, and, to a certain extent, chutzpah. Whether we like it or not, these are the attributes that sell not only issues of U.S. News, but places in the freshman classes of the country’s priciest institutions. What reformers like Lloyd Thacker and others want is for the market to be shaped by other, decidedly more educational values. And I agree — it would be great if parents and students made how, as well as how much students learn, key market values. But to say that is not the case today is not tantamount to saying higher education is not accountable.
What we need to be able to imagine, then, is an education enterprise that is held accountable in the marketplace to educational values. The means to that end is not greater accountability (what ever that might mean) but an educational reform movement — for the most part centered in the nation’s middle and secondary schools — that inculcates educational values of the kind that Thacker has promoted. Get students and their parents to want something different, and my guess is that institutions will respond precisely because it will be in their interest to do so — and that is tantamount to saying that it is the market for educational services that will hold colleges and universities accountable for supplying the educational products students and parents want and are willing to pay for.
Posted at 07:01:48 AM on March 28, 2008 | All postings by Bob ZemskyComments
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I’ll let policy wonks speak for themselves, but that last phrase hit a nerve. One suggestion — perhaps much of the noise, and no little amount of the heat, comes from tuition increases that have exceeded increases in the cost of living, the consumer price index and the producer price index for the last 10 to 20 years?
— joe · Mar 28, 01:00 PM · #
To follow 1’s lead: The “consumer” is asking for the educational “value-added” for the dollar spent — and not just the value of prestige. Why? Just consult that 2006 Pew-funded literacy (and numeracy) study: the college graduate, deeply in debt, still can’t read!
What I have noted elsewhere on Brainstorm is that the education profession has misunderstood academic freedom to be an unanchored personal freedom.
No, academic freedom is historically (and often legally) anchored in the faculty as a collective, as the determiners of the norms of the disciplines, as a whole. The individual faculty member has freedom because s/he has been “licensed” by the academic profession to teach and research, etc.
(BTW “Licensing” in the other professions is generally subject to some regulation when the peer-review system breaks down, e.g. medicine, etc.)
The “accountability” movement is asking for transparency concerning academic norms (aka “standards”) and for the faculty to police themselves (or else administrations and legislatures will happily oblige) to ensure that standards apply.
What I have not understood is why the professional societies of our disciplines have so rarely gotten involved in “accountability”. There are some (e.g. I understand that the field of chemistry has undergrad accreditations available for programs through the ACS) but this is by no means the rule. (All puns intended.)
Of course, some professional associations have “relative” standards for accreditation, e.g. TEAC for teacher education, ACSB for business programs, etc. (tell us what your goals are and we’ll tell you whether you have achieved them). In such cases, the “consumer” has no idea how to compare institutions holding the accreditation.
If the faculty through their professional associations, for example, would simply just do it, (set objective standards for the disciplines) everything else might fall into place.
The real question is why faculty don’t want to do this. Of course, tenured faculty don’t necessarily like teaching, do they? Evidence: their complicity in the adjunctification of the university — which now has come back to bite them as the sheer number of part-time faculty to be collegially bound to standards has exploded, making the task far more complex than in the more “tenure-stream-lined” past.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Mar 28, 02:01 PM · #
Accountability is always already there—to one’s local dictator, to that portion of the population best able to pay outrageous tuition, to those people whose only hope of progress lies in education, etc. There always was, is, and ever will be accountability. More accountability is a phrase technically misused by the people who bandy it about. They mean—the system as a whole is accountable to people other than me or not like me. What they are asking for is accountability to my type of person (value). We need more of everything to be more like me—since I am the most wonderfulest thing in the whole wide world!!!!! Human narcissism writ normal.
Constituencies wanting “the most more” accountability are those whom education leaves behind in the dust—the ill-read, ill-thought, ill-willed, ill-everything-ed. Dummies of all ilk(s), want education to instill more, well, how shall we say, of their own personal kind of dumbnesses. Right wing republicans, outraged that most professors think their values are stupid, want more market only attitudes festered, I meant fostered, in colleges. Religious nuts, unsure of whether their own god/ways are bestest enough, want professors who make sure everyone recognizes how much better and righter they are than all the rest of us. Leftests want more things in society burned down to demonstrate “true” value commitments and practical de-mystifications achieved. We all want everyone to be clones of wonderful us—what a lousy world that would inevitably be!!! We are all our own worst enemy!!!!
I kind of like, in an Hannah Arendt-ian way, the mess of conflicting ineffectual values we already have. I kind of like the left and the right and the middle being outraged and engaged, pissed off and bigotted. I like the mess. Anything less messy worries me—Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Bush, Limbaugh, Kennedy, Jesus, Buddha—the whole crew of “righter than you” ones in history.
Businesses took seriously being accountable to their customers. Academia screwed this up terribly by leaving out the customers of research, of new knowledge achieved, and concentrating on customers of mere teaching. A total quality approach to satisfying customers of new knowledge has been applied to research processes in industry with great results—so much so that an increasing number of people are finding such research processes in industry out-doing their peers in university labs. We can make research more accountable to all in society who receive/use new knowledge—and doing so makes research stronger and more wonderful. It is just that, in the US in particular, we never did this—we took total quality and applied it to teaching—making the kids satisfied. Kids come to my classes satisfied with lives that a dead worm would shun so I never was all that interested in satisfying any of them. Yet when I imposed on kids IBM’s secret customer sat questionnaire items, I got lots of really powerful ideas that made me a better thinker. So good instruments can get us beyond “make explanations so easy I need do no work to imbibe them and hence I lose all long term retention of them” (Kintsch, van Dijk, and Meyer did the research showing that explanations sufficiently “good”, taken as easy to understand, thereby lost all long term retention capability in the mind!!!!! The fundamental paradox of comprehension, it has been called!!!!!!!
Look as civilizations like the US make greater and greater mistakes out of arrogances built up in their post-war pasts (Thompson, Ellis, Wildavsky Cultural Theory again), money goes away and everyone fights in uglier and uglier ways over the piddling piles of money left to plunder (a song is coming!). The ugliness of our souls when grubbing for money need not besmirch our pristene academes with vulgar bigotries as accountability improvements if we are careful to protect free speech and free research from peole whose idea of accountability is getting other ideas more like my own. The first amendment should help.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Mar 31, 04:30 AM · #