As I head into my last decade or so of work as a professor, there are aspects of academia that I still believe can change for the better without the rest of the world having to change in the same direction. And there are practices I really wish would change that seem to be completely immobile.
I’ve been called for two decades to meetings and workshops and discussions and reviews of the vast array of activities we call “assessment”, I’ve done my requisite amount of assessing myself, and I’ve been an assessor of others. At this stage of my professional life, I’m comfortable saying that a fairly large proportion of what goes on under that umbrella term is not useful. That is not just exasperation with the busy work often involved, and not just an experienced sense that the outputs of many assessment processes don’t matter in relation to the ongoing work of faculty. (Not the least because they often recommend incremental improvements that most faculty do as a matter of course while stubbornly refusing to recognize that fact.) What most aggravates me at times is that in an evidence-based, research-driven professional community, it’s often impossible to challenge assessment procedures by pointing to the weakness of the empirical evidence for their effectiveness or necessity. Their purpose often seems to be the generation of information for a set of external consumers of data that they can turn into other products that demonstrate the legitimacy of those agencies and groups.
Whenever faculty grouse along these lines, the inevitable backlash accuses them of not caring about whether their teaching is effective and their scholarship is impactful. This response also rankles me because if anything I think many faculty are too easily sent into a self-doubting tailspin about both those evaluations. Most academic professionals I know are constantly thinking about whether their teaching is working as it ought to, and whether there’s a different and better “ought” to be sought, and are equally prone to fret about the usefulness and direction of their research.
As a result, I think many of us would welcome genuinely useful instruments and procedures that would track changes in our pedagogy, our curricular designs, our overall engagement with the institution, and our ways of shaping and disseminating scholarly work, particularly instruments that could be nestled easily within our existing workflow rather than a series of ugly scaffolds built outside of it.
Perhaps more soothingly to people involved in assessment, I fully confess that there could be forms of assessment that would survey some of the major blindspots of faculty—or perhaps universities in general.
To name one such possibility, no institution that I know of does anything to track the long-term validity of its tenure decisions. I am not talking here about subsequent promotion processes or other approaches to post-tenure review. I don’t think those procedures generally allow for serious reflection on whether a faculty member is on the track originally foreseen in a positive tenure decision. Sometimes a tenured faculty member isn’t living into the future that was expected in an entirely good way: they’ve developed a new direction, they’ve gotten involved in a research project they didn’t see coming, they’ve turned to working on institutional governance or pedagogy with new dedication. Sometimes things haven’t worked out as planned because of unexpected life events: a long-term illness, a traumatic injury or death in the family, a research site being closed off, a departmental or institutional crisis eating into professional life. Sometimes a person full of energy and ambition loses that for a while; sometimes a cautious plodder lights up. Life happens, and I don’t know what we’d gain by giving everybody the fifth degree over and over again, as long as they’re still doing the basic job in a creditable and productive way.
No, what I’m thinking about is that universities and colleges never seem to have to reckon with being wrong in tenure processes when they deny a candidate, just as scholarly communities rarely get called to account for persistently misjudging the importance and validity of a particular scholar’s line of research. This point is on my mind again recently because of a rare instance where a faculty and an institution have really had people up in their face about a clear error of judgment along these lines, namely, Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize, awarded to her and her collaborator after two decades of her being marginalized and denied tenure by the University of Pennsylvania.
In STEM fields particularly, this feels like a familiar story: a line of inquiry or an important hypothesis derided, with severe professional consequences, that later turns out to be highly productive and valued, often only after the early proponents of that work have retired, been forced by tenure denial to move into other professions, or have had to deal with being frozen out of research support and other institutional resources. Sometimes there’s a sheepish apology or recognition of the mistake near the end of someone’s career. Sometimes nobody is held accountable or has to admit to a serious error in judgment.
It would be hard to fully measure whether tenure denials (or cases where candidates for tenure sagely saw the writing on the wall and left for another institution) were a clear mistake. Sometimes people denied tenure just leave academia entirely and their subsequent careers are so different that you couldn’t really build a metric to demonstrate that the denial had been a mistake. But if you stuck with denials and included sixth-year tenure-track faculty who left for another academic position because they were told that a denial was likely or certain, I feel pretty confident that as a prediction about professional futures, many denials turn out to be simply wrong.
That’s more likely at some institutions—some of the Ivy League is especially known for completely blowing it at both ends (denying people who go on to be hugely accomplished elsewhere, hiring people into senior positions who promptly become inert blocks of stone). It’s easy to think of cases like that in the fields I know really well. Equally, though, when I think about the five or six SLACs I know best, where tenure denials are not very common, I’d say at best the record of accuracy on denials runs about 50-50 in terms of the denied person’s later career as a researcher and/or teacher.
That’s not surprising in a profession that is now so fully marred by the casualization of faculty labor, a much more comprehensive way of wasting or undervaluing human potential. That would be something to assess as well, particularly in terms of the loss of continuity and consistency that happens when a faculty are predominantly short-contract adjuncts.
That’s a complicated challenge to measure clearly—and not so complicated when it comes to figuring out who is to blame for that transformation of higher education. But in a simpler way, it rankles me when nobody is asked to come forward and admit that they completely misunderstood the potential of a scholar, a colleague and a teacher, when Karikós go unaccounted. That would be a kind of assessment I could get behind, particularly if it led to restorative changes of the kind that Professor Karikó herself recommends.
Image credit: By File:Katalin Kariko.jpg: Krdobynsderivative work: Innisfree987 - This file was derived from: Katalin Kariko.jpg:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98114553
This isn't quite the same thing, but whenever we run a job search I try to go back and look at what happened to the finalists we didn't hire in past searches. If nothing else, this is a good exercise in humility: years ago the department unanimously rejected one candidate in large part because of doubts about research, and that person would now be one of our three most successful department members in scholarship if they'd been hired.
That's a great idea. I've never heard anyone propose that before!