How can one measure the value of teaching the humanities? The problem of assessment and accountability is prominent today, of course, in secondary and higher education. It is perhaps even more acute for those who teach the humanities in nontraditional settings, such as medical and other professional schools. The public assumes that academes can…

Academic Leadership 2.0 means making an administrative partnership with the faculty the cornerstone of an institution's culture. Administrators have to stop thinking of themselves as operating on a different level from the faculty. The fear many administrators have is that if they demonstrate their willingness to advocate for the faculty, the…

The question, "Who will bankroll poetry?", succinctly embodies what is now a widespread recognition that the humanities may have more to lose in the current budget wars than either the sciences or a number of technical fields. The only budget war that can unite individuals, rather than divide them, is one arguing that too much is being…

An academic plan is a business plan disguised in the regalia donned for significant public ceremonies--black cap and gown, colorful hood, and, of course, gold tassel. Several years ago, the University of Connecticut started to plan for the economic disaster that was at the time so obviously in the future of higher education institutions. A formal…

The experience of professors at community colleges in California shows that a well-organized faculty can advocate for meaningful academic principles--by getting involved in local accreditation, serving on visiting teams, and sitting on the accreditation commission itself. California's community colleges are not in harmonious accord with…

Accreditation is being transformed from a valued private-sector process--over which the federal government historically has exercised limited control--to a process that is subject to more and more federal involvement. The implications of this shift, profound for faculty members, can include the erosion of academic freedom and the loss of…

In responses from higher education to the 2006 report on Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, "A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education," one particular argument is made repeatedly: that educational standardization of the sort implicitly called for in the…

In this article, the author discusses the issues surrounding contingent faculty. Contingent faculty members are central to academe's future because prevailing logics of the market can confuse accountability with accession to any and all "customer" demands; faculty organizations can instead take the opportunity to hold academic managers and…

Why should faculty members support efforts on their campuses to assess student learning outcomes? A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years by a small number of professors and a much larger number of educational administrators arguing for assessment and pleading for greater faculty support of institutional assessment efforts. More…

Since the publication of "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" by the U.S. Department of Education in 1983, American higher education has faced the need to develop its own effective means of learning assessment to forestall the prospect of government-imposed standardized procedures. The latter potential may have moved closed…

Today, Americans face a challenge to the organization of higher education that, however it is resolved, will transform the enterprise. That challenge goes under the name "learning outcomes," or sometimes "accountability." It is a challenge brought largely by those outside higher education and is based on criticisms of the…

Assessment, it seems, is everywhere in higher education these days, as institutions develop assessment plans and accrediting bodies require evidence that students are meeting appropriate educational goals. Defining student learning as the central activity of higher education is not, in itself, controversial. Indeed, the assessment movement…