I recently learned of an article by Ryan McIlhenny in Confluence. People who know my work will be aware that I am not much of a theory guy. McIlhenny is and his article uses Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault to attack the current form of assessment in higher education.
There are a couple of things I find interesting about this. He also makes much use of Jerry Muller’s Tyranny of Metrics. Muller strikes me as a right of center sort of person who would probably not make a lot of use of the Frankfort School in his work, but here he is being quoted favorably by a self-described critical theory person.
So, both left of center academics and right of center academics see assessment as a threat to the integrity of higher education. Who does like the current culture of assessment? Often it’s people trained in schools of education.
From the article:
And institutions are seeing an increasing number of holders of non-Ph.D. doctorates (e.g., Ed.D.s) filling administrative slots. Most Ed.D. programs, for instance, writes Dewitt Scott, “focus specially on preparing students to assume formal administrative leadership positions in education institutions.”[11] Further, many individuals with such a degree who then take an administrative position do so with very little experience in administration itself and thus, as if to jump on to a highspeed train, inherit the pressures of demonstrating the successfulness of their institution. Professional doctorates, unlike traditional Ph.D.s, are focused more on deepening the practices within a given field, tending toward an urgency not only to produce innovative practices, while often relegating theory, but also to produce immediate results.
This, the increasing prominence of people from ed schools in assessment and administration, is something I have been thinking about a lot lately and I expect to have article out on the topic soon. But McIlhenny has anticipated some of what I have to say.
It’s a long article and it’s hard to find a single passage that is representative of the larger argument but this one comes close:
So how might we break the obsessive habit of assessment and return to a posture of openness and patience integral to the production of knowledge? One strategy would be to confront the neoliberal ideology that has perverted higher education. Institutional leaders need to gain the courage to break the “foolish consistency”—the metric fixation exacerbated by a consumer culture—that has come to dominate the life of the mind. I’m not sure how to accomplish such a task without some sort of clamorous but unified barrage of criticism. A second more practical solution—one that will return us to a healthier approach to assessment—would be for faculty members to return to the teaching and scholarly outcomes articulated by their own disciplines.[43] Faculty members regularly visit such outcomes as they develop those for their courses and departments. Institutional and department outcomes should be directed from the outcomes specific to an academic discipline. Outcomes should be generated from the bottom, from departments, up. Faculty members must take the lead in articulating institutional outcomes through the use of the outcomes in their respective disciplines.[44 ]In an ideal situation, faculty bodies should have sovereignty over curriculum development, which should include assessment and program review. The sad reality is, however, that administrations have relegated faculty members to advisory positions, which is tantamount to taking away their responsibilities as primary judges of student learning.[45]