US Chamber of Commerce

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) envisions itself as the defender of academic freedom. Its core policy statement argues that “institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole. The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition” (1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure).

Sounds noble, does it not? Imagine if every public entity were to value the “free search for truth.” It’s refreshing, then, that AAUP exists and fights tirelessly for this freedom. Surely, it would have no difficulties in cooperating with attempts to find the truth about higher education itself and would help answer some of the many questions that have lingered for decades. Here are a few of those questions:

• Does tenure have a positive, negative, or neutral relationship to the academic achievement in university students?
• Do effective researchers make effective professors? What is the right balance between a professor’s research obligations and teaching load?
• Does one public institution of higher education do a better job of educating its undergraduates than another? What factors contribute to the differences?
• Is taxpayer and tuition-payer money being properly utilized to ensure the best possible academic outcomes?
• Are students learning anything?
   

To be sure, these questions go on ad nauseum, and sadly, we are no closer to answering any of them than we were a hundred years ago. How can this quest for truth be right under the noses of our researchers and scholars, on the very campuses and in the very buildings they reside, yet it continues to elude them? 

As they well know, the only way to find answers to any such question is to perform controlled experiments. And in education, the closest you can come to performing controlled experiments is to conduct external, common assessments of students. For what it’s worth, AAUP agrees that taxpayers and public stakeholders have a right to find answers. According to its policy statement on mandated assessments, “Public agencies charged with the oversight of higher education, and the larger public and the diverse constituencies that colleges and universities represent, have a legitimate stake in the effectiveness of teaching and learning.”

This seems perfectly consistent with the quest for truth. Unfortunately, the statement does not end there. It continues:

Their insistence that colleges and universities provide documented evidence of effectiveness is appropriate to the extent that such agencies and their constituencies do not: (a) make demands that significantly divert the energies of the faculty, administration, or governing board from the institution’s primary commitment to teaching, research, and public service; or (b) impose additional fiscal and human burdens beyond the capacity of the responding institution to bear.

Let’s think about that statement for a moment. How can you possibly know whether you’re fulfilling your core mission, your raison d’être, without knowing whether students are actually learning in any meaningful way? This would be akin to a financial services company not bothering to find out whether any of its clients increased their assets, and then arguing that doing so would compromise the mission of the company. Implicit in their statements is that pursuing objective measures of academic quality is somehow outside the core mission of an institution of higher education. Quite to the contrary, no “demand” could possibly be more central to it. 

Apparently, for America’s professors, academic freedom is a principle that is not immutable. The creation of knowledge and the pursuit of truth are noble ideas when it means defending tenure and other such policies, yet they suddenly become detrimental when used to provide transparency and public accountability for higher education. We cannot hope to improve the quality and productivity of our public higher education system unless concerned citizens and policymakers have access to information that external assessments, such the Collegiate Learning Assessment, provide. Students cannot make informed decisions as to whether they are better suited to studying at a large research university or a small liberal arts college unless they know which kinds of schools do a better job teaching their students. And the institutions themselves cannot possibly identify the configurations and policies necessary to yield the best outcomes unless it has these data. It’s well past the time that AAUP realizes that the common good requires academic freedom for those who study higher education and not just serve the ivory tower.

This article appears in ICW's January 2012 newsletter.