We recognize that we live in an era of accountability, facing continued assessment. It is important that we are responsible for our actions and evaluate ourselves regularly. We need to learn how to use annual reviews and teaching evaluations to set personal objectives and to do it in a way that is transparent to both students ad colleagues.
What we see going on in Texas, assessing the financial worth or impact of faculty, however, is another example of the worse excesses of the notion of the corporate university, where students are just customers and the driving force in everything is the financial bottom-line or the marketplace. It is why the list of books and articles about the corporate university grows daily, recently reflected in the set of articles about this academic model in the October 17th issue of The Chronicle Review.
In an article about what is
happening in Texas, Bill Peacock, vice president at the Texas Public Policy
Foundation, the group that developed the notion of the productivity
spreadsheet, is described as acknowledging that “this approach could mean a
radical reshaping of academia, with far more emphasis on filling students with
practical information and less on intellectual pursuits, especially in the
liberal arts.” At first glance
this could be seen to affirm that the corporate model might be friendly to
professional schools such as ours. But Peacock is also reported as being unconcerned
about this: "Taxpayers of the state of
Texas" should decide whether "they should be spending two years
paying the salary of an English professor so he can write a book of poetry
simply to add to the prestige of the university or the body of literature out
there." The danger is how this thinking will extend to what we teach,
choose to do research about, where and what to publish, and so forth.
Increasingly observers about
such trends are questioning why faculty are not resisting such developments or
at least becoming engaged in them in order to help shape the means by which we
are assessed and to determine just what are the details of our accountability
to the university and society. Perhaps what we should ask is who gets to define
what we mean by accountability? When they come and seek data from you to assess
only the financial bottom-line of your work, will you just comply rather than
try to engage in a reasoned dialogue about the worth of your scholarship,
teaching, and service – the historic components of how we have argued for the
university’s worth in society, namely the creation, dissemination, and
preservation of knowledge.
As for the assessment by Mr.
Peacock – he just makes me want to go write some poetry.