Historical reflections on accountability

Academe, Jan/Feb 2000 by Ohmann, Richard

Fueled by the conservative backlash against the 1960s and the global demands of capitalism, the current demand for accountability masks a broader agenda,

IMAGINE THAT ALMOST ALL OF US, AS ACADEMICS, THINK of ourselves as responsible to others and, if pressed, might even admit to feeling "accountable." Our obligations to our employers are contractual, while the professional ethos urges responsibility to students (our clients), colleagues, and the vague but strong principles of intellectual conduct that obtain in our disciplines. The professional ideal calls for responsibility to society as well: we earn our privileges not just by guarding and augmenting our special bodies of knowledge, but also by undertaking to put knowledge to work for the good of all.

"For the good of all" opens up a vast space for ideological dispute and for the antiprofessional cynicism that, as literary critic Stanley Fish has argued, festers endemically within professional groups, not just among the envious laity. Still, even cynics tend to think they serve the needs of others. And except in times of deep conflict (such as the years around 1970), professionals with different allegiances live comfortably together, under the capacious roof of that "all."

To speak of professors: most believe that open inquiry and free debate advance the interests of a democratic society. For liberals, that may be enough. Conservatives tend to identify the good of all with the good of the sovereign individual, while people of the left inflect it toward the good of those lacking wealth and power. At this level of abstraction, accountability is not especially controversial, nor exacting. Certainly it was not so for this person of the left, who taught at Wesleyan University for thirty-five years. Accountability to my students meant: plan the course, show up in class, keep it moving, comment thoughtfully on papers, mentor when asked, submit grades, write recommendations-the usual packet of services. My obligation to my departmental colleagues: take on my share of core courses and administrative duties. To administrators and trustees: just don't make scenes, I guess; the thought rarely crossed my mind. My responsibility to society as a whole: I cheerfully held myself accountable to the wretched of the earth, the workers, the women, the racially cheated and despised, the queers, the reds, all the disempowered. Aside from earning me the enmity of a few colleagues and students, this noble commitment was virtually risk free at Wesleyan, as were the commitments of faculty conservatives and liberals.

I know that accountability imposes itself more obstinately in the working lives of teachers at less privileged institutions and of teachers without tenure at all institutions. Still, when faculty members have been able to define our own obligations to society, we have charted a high road-the good of all-that practitioners can travel easily together in spite of different values and allegiances, and without much fuss about ways in which our specific work meets those obligations, or doesn't.

Lexicon of Markets

THIS MILD REGIME OF SELF-POLICING HAS BEEN UNDER pressure for some time. It articulated well enough with such concepts as responsibility and obligation. But accountability, the more salient concept in recent decades, is different, and in major ways. First, as its root suggests, accountability means keeping score, being able to show that the efforts of an instructor, department, or institution actually move toward a desired end. Doing that requires framing the goal precisely enough to permit agreement on the state of affairs that would constitute its fulfillment, and on the amount of progress made in its direction at any point. Accountability entails measurement, in short, and that provokes academic resistance. How can the complex things we value most be reduced to numbers? we ask.

Quantification of aims and accomplishments may seem less rebarbative to scientists than to humanists. Everyone in the arts and sciences, however, is likely to be put off by the ideas and language of business that have trailed along with accountability in its migration into the university. A 1994 book titled Measuring Institutional Performance in Higher Education, edited by Joel W. Meyerson and William F. Massy, works in a semantic medium of "client feedback," "stakeholders, "make-or-buy options," "output" (of departments), "use synergy," and the like. The book carefully recommends to educators common business practices such as total quality management, business-practice reengineering, and benchmarking (comparing your performance by quantifiable measures to "best practices" at other institutions).

In October 1999, University Business, a magazine produced by the publishers of Lingua Franca, sponsored a conference called "Market-Driven Higher Education." Speakers there used a lexicon of "markets" (e.g., students), "product," "brand" (your university's name and aura), "value added" (including, I guess, to students as labor power), "marginal cost," "deals," and "resource base" (the faculty, chiefly). They taught participating administrators why to want, and how to get, "customization," "knowledge management," "just-in-time learning," "strategic partners," "faculty management," good "assessment models" (though some said that no good ones exist), and "policy convergence" (which I took to mean consistency and the left hand's awareness of what the right hand is doing).