Karin Brown, a philosopher at San Jose State University, has just published an excellent piece in the AAUP journal Academe. In it she argues that bureaucratically mandated assessment is fundamentally anti-intellectual.
Sample quotation:
The consequence of this bureaucracy means that I am forced to put SLOs on my syllabus that I did not write and that I find neither meaningful nor helpful. To make matters worse, I am then forced to write a report proving that I met these goals. In other words, I am forced to adopt a pedagogy that I consider anti-intellectual and fill out a report on it explaining how this anti-intellectual assessment requirement helped me to improve my course. Could this really be happening in a university?
She is also the author of an early critique of assessment that had not previously come to my attention.