Bureaucracy and the University

I am not a big fan of bureaucracy.  I understand the point of it, and probably tend toward the bureaucratic in organizing my own life and time.  I am opposed to it when it is imposed upon me. This aversion to bureaucracy is probably a function of my own experiences with it.  It was one of the reasons that a long-term career in the military ceased to be appealing to me after awhile. The daily tasks of my job were fine, and in the context of my own small unit, things made sense.

For the same reason I see the virtue of setting standards and having rules for the academic department where I am currently chair. Our goal is to turn out well-rounded political science undergraduates and MA students. To do that we need to have some organization, and there have to be rules to organize that.  Beyond establishing basic frameworks and minimum standards, however, I am loathe to start to dictate what is happening in an individual course - let alone in individual lessons.

One of the most useful aspects of a liberal arts education is an exposure to the unevenness of life. Students can learn a lot about life by dealing with different types of professors with different types of classes and different types of personalities. The skills that we are teaching: critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, writing, and a broader exposure to problems and opportunities in the world are by their nature difficult to impart.

A graduate with a BA in political science can do a lot of things - but there is no nationwide professional test that needs to certify skills and knowledge like there is for engineering [in the US context], for example. We tell our students that the main object of their education is to learn to evaluate sources of information, identify what is important, and to be able to make their own arguments about what is important and why. There is not one single path or set of learning outcomes, activities, or objectives that will instill those skills into all of our graduates in the same way. 

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This is why this article from Inside Higher Ed really has me thinking about the current push in my own university to adopt more and more bureaucratic top-down procedures for designing, tracking, and reporting the work that is taking place in the classroom.

In this case a professor refused to put learning outcomes on his syllabus and has been relieved of teaching duties. He is suing the university over this.

Dillon’s complaint alleges defamation and violations of due process and his First Amendment rights. It’s heavily concerned with academic freedom, and it certainly has all the hallmarks of that kind of fight. The American Association of University Professors, for example, has appealed to the college on Dillon’s behalf. Its statement on assessment says that faculty members maintain “primary responsibility for establishing the criteria for assessment and the methods for implementing it.” 

But Dillon’s lawsuit also centers on the role of the accreditor in assessment. Hinting that the college may have used its upcoming accreditation review as an excuse to swat a known gadfly, the complaint says that a “single paragraph in a professor’s syllabus cannot possibly jeopardize any college’s reaccreditation.” 

Is that true? Dillon notes, correctly, that SACSCOC's Principles of Accreditation do not address syllabus content. Yet student learning outcomes -- a growing focus for regional accreditors -- loom large in those standards. SACSCOC’s principles on institutional effectiveness, for example, say that the college or university “identifies expected outcomes, assesses the extent to which it achieves these outcomes and provides evidence of improvement based on analysis of the results” in several areas. Those include “educational programs, to include student learning outcomes.”

For me this reveals many of the underlying tensions between professors and administration. The most important audience for the administration is whoever is signing the check, and whoever is signing the checks.  

The rules that trickle down to syllabi from school and department are a symptom of the need for administrators to "understand" what is happening. James Scott, in "Seeing like a State", describes the lengths that states go to change the landscape in order to make it readable for the tax collector and regulator.  

I wonder about issues of trust between faculty and administrator.  The rise of the professional administrator and tracks to administration that don't organically arise out of long years in the classroom and lab will likely increase this distrust.  Faculty resistance to these downward demands are often treated as simple pettiness or a desire to ditch accountability.  The idea that professors may have principled reasons for resisting the bureaucratic encroachment into their territory - to be treated as simple interchangeable cogs of information-dispensing diminishes the role and potential of professionals.  

Ironically, it is the skills that are most difficult to measure - the ones that get past the banal list of bullet-pointed outcomes - which are the real value added of a university education. Simple information consumption and fact-gathering can be "scaled" in ways that analysis and critical thinking cannot.