ASSESSMENT, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND HONORS EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

Honors programs thrive in an environment of pedagogic freedom. This freedom extends to our honors students as they explore topics for projects and theses and engage in much more independent research than the average undergraduate. Honors programs should also be havens for faculty to experiment with new ideas for courses and co-curricular activities. Freed from large lecture halls and department politics, faculty who teach in an honors program often find themselves wandering over to the honors facilities to hang out with students or going off on honors-sponsored adventures. Thus academic freedom also often leads to a stronger sense of community. However, as the corporate, managerial model encroaches on the modern university, both academic freedom and the community of scholars are under threat, and honors administrators must find a way to preserve what makes their programs unique. Universities used to generate new ideas and create models that were adopted by those outside the ivory tower, from art and entertainment to industry and politics.

However, the modern university, perhaps lacking its old confidence, turns again and again to the corporate world for many of its practices, including so-called accountability. Politicians, claiming to speak for the “consumers” of higher education who spend ever-increasing sums for college tuition, have in many cases required colleges and universities that receive state and federal funding, which means just about every institution of higher learning, to show “transparency and accountability,” and the schools, urged by accreditation agencies, have decided that “assessment of student learning” is the best response to critics and consumers alike. Through reaccreditation, budgeting decisions, curriculum approval and other means, university administrators have exerted pressure upon deans, department chairs, and individual faculty members to “embrace the culture of assessment.” in our previous article for JNCHC, we questioned the validity of assessment as an accurate measurement of student learning in honors. We will argue in this essay that the “culture” of assessment and accountability is not what honors faculty should choose to embrace.

ASSESSMENT IMPLIES A LACK OF TRUST

At the root of this accountability and assessment movement is a fundamental and pervasive lack of trust. Politicians no longer trust universities to spend their money wisely. Many parents of students may share this feeling. increasingly, university administrators do not trust faculty to go about their business without a regular accounting of their productivity, both in research and in the classroom. As an administrator once told me, “Faculty now have to earn the trust.” What exactly did we do to lose it? JNCHC editor Ada Long introduced a recent issue of the journal with this observation: What seems to have gained momentum in recent years is distrust of higher education and, more specifically, of college and university teachers. The various commentators on higher education–from journalists to parents, legislators to college presidents–seem to agree that teachers need to prove that they are doing their jobs….My question is, what is the basis for this distrust? (Long 11) Of course, the majority of the professoriate has earned trust through the long and rigorous tenure and promotion process, but the distrust has now gone way beyond tenure and promotion reviews since assessment is blind to rank and tenure. All faculty should be involved in course-based assessment, say its proponents. Meanwhile most faculty, who feel that they have been doing assessment of student learning through quizzes, exams, and papers, see this new trend as a bother and an imposition. The truth is that it is even worse. ASSESSMENT IS AN INFRINGEMENT ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM Most of us see academic freedom as the right, earned through the long and rigorous tenure review process, of a professor to present potentially unpopular or controversial material and arguments in our classes and research without censure from university authorities.