Time to Assess Assessment

To the Editor:

There’s no very civil way to say, “I told you so,” but then human beings seem gifted at ignoring what they have been told. Erik Gilbert, in his recent essay, “An Insider’s Take on Assessment: It May Be Worse Than You Thought” (The Chronicle, January 12), summarizes and recommends David Eubanks’ piece from the current issue of Intersection, a journal on assessment; the piece summarizes, among other things, what assessment has not done and does not do — and perhaps cannot ever do. Together with the extensive and negative comments section, it is an important and thoughtful audit of what is looking more and more like the leftover fragments of the assessment and accountability fads that have wasted so much of higher ed’s energy for the last thirty years.

Robert Birnbaum’s 2000 book, Management Fads in Higher Education, could also help us understand the sterility of these issues. And there is still no analysis of how assessment (and accountability more generally) depends on the wisdom of the assessors and so depends on philosophically alert cross-examination. Way back when the AAUP started its Journal of Academic Freedom, I wrote a piece on conceptual problems with assessment. Friends told me that I was too late, the train had already left the station. Now we are all having our noses rubbed in the remnants of dumb accountabilities, but perhaps we will be more careful next time and will listen to more thoughtful cross-examination. It is time for us to assess what our assessment work has accomplished. We can do better now if we will only stop.

John W. Powell
Professor of Philosophy
Humboldt State University
Arcata, Calif.