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(Tenured Radical)

Monday, February 13, 2006

GOING COSMIC

UD began this Inside Higher Ed article, about a meeting of university administrators, feeling encouraged:

Tomás D. Morales, provost of California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, also spoke to his fellow administrators about accountability. He said he understood the concern of many that “testing has been the central conversation” of the Education Department’s commission. But he said that — like it or not — higher education needs to move toward a “culture of evidence” about what students actually learn in college.


But then another administrator shut things down by executing a CLASSIC Going Cosmic maneuver.

Going Cosmic, as UD has explained to you on a number of occasions, is this rhetorical thing academics love to do: When they’re talking about a small pragmatic activity that ought to be done, they immediately shut down any possibility of actually taking up that activity by describing it as so profoundly caught up with larger phenomena that one couldn’t possibly do the small thing before one first accounted for the history of the universe as we know it. Watch and learn:

…Alan Jones, vice president and dean of the faculty at Pitzer College, agreed that demands have grown dramatically over the past five years — both from accreditors and the government — for “objective and demonstrable learning outcomes.”


Jones said that colleges need to respond to those demands, but that they need to do so in ways that preserve their values — something he said that may not always be easy. For instance, with regard to measuring what student learning goes on in college, he cited Heisenberg’s view that the very act of observing and recording can change what is being observed and recorded.


We’d like to give our students exit exams, but those fucking particles keep hopping around...