"Higher education does not lack accountability, rather, it lacks enough of the proper kind and is burdened with too much of an unproductive kind," states a report issued at Columbia by three nationally prominent scholars.
The report, in the form of an essay, provides a new framework for understanding how colleges and universities should properly account to themselves and to their many stakeholders--students and parents, governments and taxpayers, donors, private accreditors, and the general public. Critics have challenged the accountability of higher education. Federal and state laws and regulations in this domain are being reconsidered. Public debate on new national forms of governance of private, voluntary accreditation is garnering the attention of educators, government officials and the agencies which accredit colleges and universities.
The essay recommends that colleges and universities strengthen their internal reviews and that outside accrediting agencies, instead of assessing an institution's overall quality, judge how well those internal reviews were done. It states that "the serious and candid internal reviews that we propose simply will not emerge from the current process that asks that an institution show its best face to skeptical outsiders."
The national study, titled Accountability of Colleges and Universities, an Essay, was authored by Patricia Albjerg Graham, president of the Spencer Foundation and the Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education at Harvard; Richard W. Lyman, President Emeritus and J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Stanford, and
Martin Trow, professor of public policy at the UC-Berkeley. It was directed by Gregory Fusco, vice president for government relations and community affairs at Columbia, where the report was prepared and published. It was funded principally by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Spencer Foundation and Columbia.
Teaching and learning must become once again the central focus of institutions of higher education, the scholars state. Most colleges and universities need to pay greater attention to this basic mission, making it the heart of accountability.
New forms of faculty-led internal review are needed, as are institution-wide self-evaluations by presidents, provosts and senior academic leaders.
With these internal reforms, the process of review by external accrediting bodies "would shift from an assessment of the quality of an institution to an audit of internal quality-control mechanisms of the institution," the report states. The focus would then be on how the institution itself identifies weaknesses in teaching and learning and on the effectiveness of actions to address those weaknesses.
Despite criticisms of higher education, public confidence in colleges and universities remains high. The authors named this phenomenon "the paradox of public esteem."
They go on to say:
"In some sense, both the cheers and jeers are justified. Across America, we see a sprawling array of colleges and universities with great merits; we also see serious but curable problems that need attention. We undertook this study to contribute to the public debate about accountability and to urge greater attention to teaching and learning."
Columbia University Record -- October 27, 1995 -- Vol. 21, No. 8