Links for 3/10/10

Lloyd Armstrong

Learning outcomes risk changing the rules of the game by actually looking at learning itself, rather than using the surrogates of wealth, history, and research. Since we have considerable data that show that these surrogates do not correlate particularly well with learning outcomes (see e.g. Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges), this is not a rule change that the winners want to see. Since most institutions are ranked below some institutions, but above many others, this means almost everyone can worry that they would be worse off if the rules changed...

the model of the researcher/teacher is very expensive. The market price of such people is defined almost exclusively by their research capabilities… In addition, because the researcher/teachers must spend considerable time doing research, they spend relatively little time teaching, thus running up the cost per student greatly…

Doug Lederman

These have not been times of peace, love and understanding between the federal government and higher education accreditors. For several years now, spanning two presidential administrations, the agencies charged with assuring that colleges meet an acceptable level of quality have felt buffeted by shifting, escalating and, in their view, sometimes inappropriate demands from federal policy makers…

department officials have gotten an earful from accreditors complaining that the 76-page draft "Guide to the Accrediting Agency Recognition Process" that the department published last month was too prescriptive and, in some places, seemed to impose specific requirements on accreditors that go beyond current federal law and regulation. Some accrediting officials said they feared that the department were issuing the guidelines as a backdoor way to avoid Congressional limitations on the government's ability to regulate accreditors…

Henry Adams

When I was a graduate student, I participated in academic fraud. I didn't plagiarize to get an article published or inflate my CV to get a job. I did something worse. I accepted a teaching assistantship as a doctoral student at Elite National University.
By becoming a TA there, I took on a responsibility for which I had no qualifications: teaching first-year composition courses…

What Dr. Cathcart didn't say, but that I realized afterward, was that Elite National U. did not want me to teach first-year students as much as sort them according to the abilities they brought with them to my classroom…

Greg Lukianoff

I believe the most important factor interfering with the success and credibility of higher education is the continuing maintenance of campus speech codes and other policies and practices designed to discourage and even punish free speech and meaningful dissent...