Way back on March 10th, which now seems like long ago, the The Atlantic ran an article called “There are no Libertarians in a Pandemic.” It was pretty lazy in that it treated CPAC and the Trump White House as libertarian. It prompted several interesting responses from Reason, which is the most prominent libertarian journal.
For our purposes, which is of course, examining the harms that accreditors and assessment do to higher education, the most interesting part of the debate concerns the extent to which over-regulation has hindered the response to COVID-19. The best example of this occurred in Washington, where it appears that the spread of the virus was detected by researchers doing a study on the flu, but IRB rules made it impossible for them act on that knowledge. When they decided to breach IRB rules and inform the public health authorities of what they found, they were ordered to stop testing their samples for coronavirus. In a crisis, the authorities chose to hew blindly to what the New York Times (not exactly a libertarian-minded publication) described as “red tape.” The result was a missed opportunity to slow the spread of the virus.
Since then regulations that hinder or slow the processes of finding new ways to make and distribute protective equipment and to test and develop drugs have been rolled back to aid the public health response. So it seems that, at least on this front, the libertarians have the stronger argument.
What about in higher education? How are the accreditors and the assessment establishment reacting? Are we slashing through the red tape and over regulation to facilitate flexible and creative responses to the situation? Not really.
HLC says this:
Institutions may find that they need to adjust normal operations to protect the health and safety of their campus communities, while providing alternative methods of instructional activity. HLC will be as flexible as possible within the U.S. Department of Education’s expectations. If an institution needs to adjust its business operations in substantial ways (for example, reducing or suspending face-to-face class sessions), an institution should notify HLC of the adjustment, including the steps it takes to ensure quality and continuity in its instructional activity.
It looks like they want to be flexible, but they still want institutions to document and report the standard pseudo-evidence of student learning. So no red tape removal there.
Judging from the conversations on the Assess list serve, the assessment world seems more concerned with continuing the assessment project than getting out of the way and letting faculty do their best in a trying situation.
If any schools delayed moving to online or remote instruction because they feared the accreditors’ and assessors’ reactions, that would be criminal.
At my own institution a debate is taking place about grading and whether we should continue to use letter grades or move to a pass/fail model. I am agnostic in this debate, but it’s interesting to me that much of the objection to changing to the pass/fail option comes from concerns about the importance of GPAs in the more heavily accredited and regulated disciplines. Education, business and nursing majors all have to meet certain GPA requirements, either for their undergraduate programs or licensure or to be admitted into accredited graduate programs. So, the regulation of higher education by disciplinary accreditors is limiting our ability to respond to a complex situation.
My guess as to what will happen? Accreditors will demand lots of documentation. Assessors will produce it. Faculty will do what they think is best and work around the red tape where they can. On that issue see this blog post by John Warner of IHE. It’s more anarchist than libertarian but it makes a good point.
Now, go wash your hands.