For people in college or university communities, April is the cruelest month. April signals the fast approaching end of the academic year -- papers to complete, exams to take, classroom observations to turn in, evaluations to administer, budgets to compile, proposals to refine and submit. It's a race to the finish line and a time of deep stress.
In the past, university people seemed able to weather cruel April storms. You hunkered down and believed that your considerable efforts would be appreciated. When you huffed and puffed your way across the academic finish line sometime in May, you could look forward to a summer job or to some travel. You might begin a new research project or develop a new course. You might work on an essay or a book. In the fall you'd return energized for the new academic year.
These have long been the rhythms of college life.
Times have changed on our college campuses. There is an increasing lack of respect for the intellectual rhythms of college life. Many elected officials, for example, like to disparage public universities. Narrow-minded governors like Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Perry and North Carolina's Pat McCrory believe that public funds to higher education should go to job-producing technical programs. In other words, they would like to transform public higher education into a set of competitive job-training programs. Such short-sightedness, which grants low-priority to higher education, has resulted in reductions in student support and elimination of academic programs. In public higher education, it has led to an increase in the number of poorly paid -- and poorly treated -- temporary faculty and a concomitant decrease in the population of tenured professors. These trends threaten to transform, if not destroy, a system of higher education that has been the envy of the world.
Although mindless budget cutting, misguided austerity and anti-intellectual political posturing pose serious external threats to the future of college life, there are also internally generated threats. These threats, which may well be partially stimulated by widespread derision of "intellectuals," sometimes emerge from an administrative distrust -- and disrespect -- of faculty competence.
In case there are readers who think I am overstating the case, consider the ever-present issue of outcomes assessment -- measuring student performance. For several years now, college faculty members have been compelled to spend more and more time preparing documents -- mission statements, and assessment measurements -- to determine if students are successfully mastering the course materials in their classes. These tasks, of course, take precious time away from course preparation, research, writing and thinking -- the real substance of life on our campuses.
In a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education on March 11 of this year, Steven Hales, a professor of philosophy, chimed in on outcomes assessment. He wrote:
Outcomes assessment is an epistemological quagmire, a problem unnoticed by many of the practice's strongest advocates. Here's why. Faculty members assign grades to students at the end of every course. Either (1) we know that on the whole those grades accurately measure the degree to which a student has mastered the course material and achieved the objectives of the course, or (2) we do not know. The very idea of outcomes assessment is predicated on Option 2...
According to Professor Hales, then, assessment assessors don't believe that grades sufficiently measure student outcomes, which means that they have put into the practice a convoluted set of instrument designs and procedures to measure "real student success." Grading is certainly not a perfect instrument to measure "outcomes," but to distrust it's validity is rather insulting to those who teach the courses, design the exams, read the research papers, and assign the grades. Do I need an outcomes assessor to tell me that a student who writes a poorly researched essay should or should not get a failing grade? Is that failing grade not an indicator of student mastery of the subject matter?
If you have been a college professor for more than 10, 20 or 30 years, how would you feel if an assessor, who holds the power of "program revision" (potential reduction or elimination for poor outcome measures) over your head, sent you a list of words to use to develop outcomes assessment tools?
Several months ago, I received such a list: "Terms to use to articulate learning outcomes: what students will be able to do or think." Here's a small sample. Under the heading of Remember you are asked to use words like "describe," discuss," "classify," and "recognize." Under the heading of Apply they recommend using words like "change," "construct," "manipulate, and "prepare." Under the heading of Understand they suggest using words like "comprehend," "defend," "explain," and "exemplify."
Such a list reinforces the perception that (1) faculty grades are not good measures of student performance and (2) professors lack the linguistic wherewithal to pick the correct "terms" to measure student performance. What kind of message does this send to those of us who have dedicated our lives to research, writing, thinking and teaching?
Sadly, these external and internal threats to the intellectual climate on our campuses seem to reinforce the destructive idiom: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." If we don't value and support the dedication, competence and expertise of college professors -- tenured and non-tenured, permanent and temporary -- the quality of intellectual life on our campuses will precipitously decline -- a very dear price to pay when our goal is to prepare students, who represent the future, to think in and adapt to a complex and changing world.
April is the cruelest month. The headwinds we face are very stiff. As we move forward to a new academic year, we'll need to be persistent and resilient to slow the erosion of intellectual life on campus.