An electronic assessment newsletter
Springfield College in Illinois
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October 2006
Vol. 7 No. 3
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Editor's Note. Until I am able to post to SCI's assessment website again, I am publishing the newsletter by email and archiving it in the interim on my personal weblog at http://www.teachinglogspot.blogspot.com/. -- Pete Ellertsen, assessment chair
Of CATs, Professorenzetteln and assessment
Assessment and government intrusion into the classroom are nothing new. In fact, a recent book by historian William Clark makes a good case they have changed the way we think in Western society over the centuries. The book is “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University,” and it is reviewed in the current issue of The New Yorker.
The review, by Anthony Grafton, makes me want to read the book. It also makes me think his students – and faculty colleagues – at Princteon are a lot like ours at Springfield College and Benedictine.
“Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience,” Grafton begins. He continues by describing the experience:
You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; or running a seminar, hoping to find the question that will make people talk even though it’s spring and no one has done the reading … Suddenly, you find yourself wondering … [w]hy, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring? … These activities seem both bizarre and disconnected, from one another and from modern life, and it’s no wonder that they often provoke irritation, not only in professional pundits but also in parents, potential donors, and academic administrators.
Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve certainly had that experience. And I know what it’s like to try to describe what we do, and why we do it, to outside stakeholders.
Clark’s thesis is that American research universities evolved out academic traditions in 19th-century Germany, and they in turn evolved out of – get this! – bureaucratic policies and procedures in the petty electorates and principalities of the Holy Roman Empire during the 16th and 17th centuries. As Grafton paraphrases him, Clark notes:
Gradually, the bureaucrats devised ways to insure that the academics were fulfilling their obligations. In Vienna, Clark notes, “a 1556 decree provided for paying two individuals to keep daily notes on lecturers and professors”; in Marburg, from 1564 on, the university beadle kept a list of skipped lectures and gave it, quarterly, to the rector, who imposed fines. Others demanded that professors fill in Professorenzetteln, slips of paper that gave a record of their teaching activities. Professorial responses to such bureaucratic intrusions seem to have varied as much then as they do now. Clark reproduces two Professorenzetteln from 1607 side by side. Michael Mästlin, an astronomer and mathematician who taught Kepler and was an early adopter of the Copernican view of the universe, gives an energetic full-page outline of his teaching. Meanwhile, Andreas Osiander, a theologian whose grandfather had been an important ally of Luther, writes one scornful sentence: “In explicating Luke I have reached chapter nine.”
The upshot, according to Clark, was universities evolved ways of measuring learning that satisfied the bureaucrats, when they pushed for “results that looked rational: results that they could codify, sort, and explain to their masters.” During the Middle Ages, testing was largely done in debates known as academic disputations. They came to be replaced by printed dissertations and formal examinations, “exercises that were carefully graded and recorded by those who administered them.” In the language of our own historical era, we might say the new exams and dissertations offered greater transparency to outside stakeholders.
So when we fill out our Classroom Assessment Technique questionnaires at the end of the semester or ask our SCI sophomores to take a fill-in-the-bubble standardized test in the spring, we’re taking part in a government ritual that goes back to the Professorenzetteln of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
There’s a lot more in Grafton’s article than assessment. For example Mark Twain’s description of the time a thousand students “rose and shouted and stamped and clapped, and banged the beer-mugs” when a historian named Theodor Mommsen walked into a Berlin banquet hall in 1892. Or Clark’s new take on the old story of Abelard and Heloise, and its implications for the way we think today. Or what a doctoral exam was like at the University of Göttingen in 1787. Trivia? Sure. But fascinating trivia. And in the end, it helps us answer Grafton’s question – why do we pontificate in front of classrooms, dress up in caps and gowns and, in general, do the things we do in academic life.
Grafton’s article, headlined “The Nutty Professors,” was in the Oct. 10 issue of The New Yorker. It’s fascinating, and it’s still available on line at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/061023crbo_books
Assessment committee empaneled
Members of this year’s Assessment Committee are Bob Blankenberger, Brian Carrigan, Dave Holland, Barb Tanzyus and Pete Ellertsen (chair). Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling and Academic Affairs Dean John Cicero are ex officio. Standing meeting time has been tentatively set for 2 p.m. the second Tuesday of the month in the Brinkerhoff Conference Room.
No commission left behind?
The Spellings Commission, named for President Bush’s education secretary Margaret Spellings, has issued its final report. Its recommendations were unchanged from earlier drafts issued in the late summer. Spellings outlined the findings of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education at a Sept. 26 luncheon of the National Press Club and called on Congress to act on a higher ed reform package. The Associated Press and a couple of major metro newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor apparently sent reporters, or assigned them to work the phone a minute or two and get a story. Local reaction stories ran in media markets like Austin, Tex., and Roanoke, Va. And several student publications, including The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia and The Daily Star at Northern Illinois University, also ran stories.
But other than that, the commission’s report was greeted by an almost total lack of coverage. It may be significant that during the week of Spellings’ speech a major congressional sex scandal broke out, former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned his office and Congress recessed until after the November elections.
Inside Higher Ed had a good summary of the report Sept. 27, the day after it was issued. On line at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/26/spellings
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