Accounterability
2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360701264428
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 See Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). My uncertainty is occasioned, more specifically, by the ingenious title, 'Counter-Movements', under which Simon Morgan Wortham convoked the colloquium at which this paper was first presented. It is, nevertheless and despite my discomfiture, without hesitation that I thank Simon for his generous gifts of space and time to think together counterwise. His own work on counter-institutions will have been the provocation to take rigorous account of a countering drive that Derrida's thought engages at every turn. He has thus done the remarkable and difficult thing of counter-signing that oeuvre across the very counter it extends toward a reader capable of a thinking-with that comprehends a thinking-against, that is to say, counter. 2 The latest advocates of this 'movement' – not surprisingly – show a near total lack of awareness of its history, as if it had sprung up like a mushroom. For a concise reconstruction of this history in both the US and British contexts, see Romuald Normand, 'De l'accountability aux standards: la traduction européenne des politiques de la performance' (http://ep.inrp.fr/EP/r_a_venir/r_eval_pol/i18nlayer.2005-09-19.5980046756/fr/document_view). Notice that Normand, writing in French, does not even attempt to translate the term 'accountability' even as he is concerned to trace the effective translation of the 'thing' into the European context. 3 In 'Creating a Higher Education Accountability System: The Texas Experience', which is the text of remarks read before the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education and dated December 2005, the author, Geri H. Malandra, touts repeatedly the inevitable spread of accountability, which she effectively likens to a disease: 'Accountability is catching' (p. 6), 'Accountability is contagious' (p. 7). Malandra is Associate Vice Chancellor for Institutional Planning and Accountability at the University of Texas. See http://www. ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/2nd-meeting/geri-malandra.pdf 4 See Doug Bennett, 'Deaf and Dizzy Lawmakers' (Inside Higher Education, 6 April 2006 [http://www.insidehighereducation.com/views/2006/04/06/bennett]): 'Accountability, not access, has been the central concern of this Congress in its fitful efforts to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. The House of Representatives has especially shown itself deaf to constructive arguments for improving access to higher education for the next generation of young Americans, and dizzy about what sensible accountability measures should look like'. See also the same Web journal, 15 April 2005, 'College Access: Comparing Countries' [http://www.insidehighereducation.com/news/2005/04/15/intl]. On affordability, the US ranks 13 out of 16 industrialized countries; on access it was ranked 4 out of 13, a relatively good showing that is probably accounted for by the inclusion of non-bachelor-degree institutions in the category of US higher education. 5 Although it is certainly not just a question of language, the drive to close the gap between the market and the university also depends on carrying over a vocabulary from the experience of consumerism. Here is Charles Miller, the chair of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, in his Issue Paper titled 'Accountability/Consumer Information': 'Any number of excellent consumer shopping sites could serve as models for the revised college search site. While shopping for a postsecondary institution is not exactly the same as shopping for a car, many on-line shopping sites embody extensive flexibility that allows consumers to specify their needs and interests and to compare products that meet criteria set by the consumer. A system that allows comparison of postsecondary institutions could give consumers the ability to eliminate inappropriate schools . .'. (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports.html). When is the admission of 'not exactly the same' tantamount to enforcing, all the same, a sameness of the compared terms? For a trenchant analysis of such reductive parallels to 'market discipline', see Mike Sosteric et al., 'The University, Accountability, and Market Discipline in the Late 1990s', in Electronic Journal of Sociology (www.sociology.org) (1998). 6 'A National Dialogue: Commission on the Future of Higher Education', http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2005/09/09192005.html 7 'What Does College Teach?', The Atlantic Monthly, November 2005. 8 Jay Mathews, 'Measure by Measure', The Atlantic Monthly, October 2004. 9 'The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which conviction creates what is obvious'. This is Proust's narrator mulling over the problem of how to know whether or not Albertine is lying to him about the nature of her relations with a lady friend. The phrase translated as 'evidence of the senses' is 'témoignage des sens', the witness or testimony of the senses. For a reading of Proust's analysis of this 'testimony' in its connections to jealousy, see the chapter 'Jealousy Wants Proof', in my Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 10 Hersh repeats the phrase, also in quotation marks, at the end of his essay: 'Nonetheless, value-added assessment offers an excellent place to start, and a chance for higher education to demonstrate that 'faith-based' answers about quality are no longer acceptable'. For a very similar gesture, see Charles Miller and Geri Malandra, 'Issue Paper: Accountability/Assessment' (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/reports/miller-malandra.pdf): 'Today, most people must 'take on faith' what college quality might be because there is a lack of reliable ways of documenting and assessing what students learn, and how their experiences compare among institutions' (p. 4). 11 Bill Berkowitz, 'A quiet fifth anniversary for Bush's faith-based initiative', in Media Transparency, 2 March 2006, http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID = 113 12 See http://www.ed.gov/news/staff/bios/spellings.html?src = gu; the same biography recalls that she has a daughter in university and that she 'is the first mother of school children [sic] to serve as US Secretary of Education'. 13 See again Malandra's report 'Creating A Higher Education Accountability System'. It should also be noted that this Commission's chair, Charles Miller, was previously Chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and was, in Malandra's words, the 'instigator' of 'a system-wide accountability framework'. Spellings' commission is thus quite clearly stacked in favor of the accountabilists. 14 For a recent broadside from this camp, see the 'report' issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organization founded by Lynne Cheney (Dick's wife and former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Bush I regime), which is a self-described defender of 'intellectual diversity [sic] on campus'. Titled 'How Many Ward Churchills?', the document purports to provide evidence of 'liberal bias' in US university curricula. (Ward Churchill was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who published an infamous and deplorable comparison between the victims of the attack on the WTC Twin Towers and the engineers of the Nazi genocide, calling them 'little Eichmanns'. He was recently fired from his tenured position for research misconduct.) For this document, see: http://www.goacta.org/publications/reports.html. As for actions in state legislatures, there have so far been hearings and/or legislation introduced in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and doubtless other state capitals. 15 Derrida, 'Poetics and Politics of Witnessing', in Sovereignties in Question, Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 76–77; trans. modified. 16 Miller and Malandra, for example, assert (that is, perform while appearing merely to refer to) a 'national culture of evidence and assessment' (op. cit., p. 7). 17 On this question of the return of the religious (rather than religion), see Derrida, '"Above All, No Journalists!"'in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds. Religion and Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 61 ff. 18 Miller and Malandra, 'Issue Paper: Accountability/Assessment', p. 3. 19 The reduction of text to test is perhaps one way to measure what is at stake; see Miller and Malandra's paper for a slip from the former to the latter, which at least on one occasion appears to be inadvertent: 'In the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) survey, less than one-third of college graduates could demonstrate an ability to read complex tests [sic] and make complicated inferences' (p. 2). 20 Hersh (op. cit.) writes, for example: 'To date academe has offered little in response, apart from resistance in the name of intellectual freedom and faculty autonomy. These are legitimate professional prerogatives, but unless the academy is willing to assess learning in more rigorous ways, the cry for enforced accountability will become louder, and government intervention will become more likely'. For a quite different assessment of the chances of resistance, see A. Bradney, 'Accountability, the University Law School and the Death of Socrates', Web Journal of Current Legal Issues (2002). 21 Given the experience being testified to here, what would our imaginary test-taker have responded if the test statement had included this other unqualified assertion, found elsewhere in Miller and Malandra's document: 'College courses are not designed to foster critical thinking' (p. 5). By what known measure could that be judged a responsible affirmation? 22 Avital Ronell, in The Test Drive, poses essential questions to and about this testing regime (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For a provocative resistance more specifically aimed at the RAE, see Nicholas Royle, 'Night Writing', in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 112–14; see also, Simon MorganWortham's chapter in Counter-institutions titled 'Auditing Derrida', pp. 85–118.
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