Introduction

The Task Force on the Implications of the Evaluation of Faculty Productivity and Teaching Effectiveness originated from concerns about a variety of national trends in higher education. These include efforts to measure faculty productivity and workload, performance-based budgeting, post-tenure review, and outcomes assessment. Some have expressed fears that some or all of these trends represent real threats to traditional faculty roles and to academic freedom. These trends are often seen as representing a collision of interests between faculty, on the one hand, and administrators or corporate interests, on the other. Others argue that at least some of these practices promise to improve faculty performance and enrich the experience of students in higher education (Nedwek and Neal 1994).

Contextual Factors

Several contextual factors help explain the current emphasis on evaluating faculty productivity and assessing teaching outcomes. First, the critique of learning outcomes and curricula provided by the Association of American Colleges (1985) encouraged many schools to revise their general education curricula. Subsequent curricular revisions helped deepen students' experience within majors, extend interdisciplinary approaches, enhance critical thinking, promote greater cross-cultural awareness, and underscore basic competencies. The AAC encouraged schools to develop concrete learning outcomes and measures for assessing them. Other groups subsequently issued critiques of higher education that included calls for more comprehensive outcomes assessment (National Governors' Association 1990; Wingspread Group on Higher Education 1993). The heightened emphasis on the teaching role of faculty members is a second relevant contextual factor. Boyer (1990) took the lead in this movement, arguing that the scholarship of teaching and learning ought to be valued equally with other forms of scholarship: discovery, integration, and application. This attention to teaching paralleled the increased interest in learning, and outcomes assessment in higher education became synonymous with assessing learning and teaching.

Additionally, faculty members have become more cognizant of how outcomes assessment affects student learning (Erwin 1991), a third contextual factor. Many faculty members wish to document that role. Assessment results can help improve teaching and program planning. Barak (1991) argues for the integration of program assessment and institutional planning–a merged response to external and internal forces–and feels that this approach will maximize curriculum change. Similarly, Chalkley, Fournier, and Hill (2000) argue that quality teaching, assessment, and faculty accountability are interrelated and should be pursued within disciplines and departments. But outcomes assessment can also engender resistance among faculty because it conflicts with a long-held academic norm: faculty members alone are responsible for program development and teaching. Because outcomes assessment typically is generated and controlled administratively, it poses a potential threat to the power and autonomy of faculty members.

The changing economic, political and institutional contexts of higher education have also been important factors. There have been important shifts in both the number and kind of students pursuing higher education. A growing percentage of the college-age population now attends post-secondary institutions, and predictions are that this trend will continue (Levy 1998). Universities also face growing competition from other “knowledge” providers. In addition to straining existing university resources, this also creates new challenges, such as the expansion in the numbers of college students with weaker academic backgrounds and growing demands to treat students like “customers” and departments like “profit centers.” These changes are likely to affect faculty roles. Some observers argue that it is also likely to intensify scrutiny of faculty productivity and learning outcomes and the growth of demands that faculty direct more of their efforts to institutional, rather than individual, priorities (Diamond and Wergin 2001).

Accountability demands by legislators and other stakeholders (Burke and Serban 1998) reflect another contextual factor leading to an emphasis on outcomes assessment. The National Governors' Association (1990) called on states to define clearly their educational goals and hold institutions of higher education accountable to those goals. The push for assessment results, in part, from worries that “Johnny can't read” (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983) and from concerns that the focus on student completion of discrete courses militates against the integration of knowledge and skills across the courses in a program (AAC reports on liberal learning). Questions have been raised about whether faculty is really dedicated to teaching rather than research productivity (Sykes 1988), and these concerns are exacerbated by the view that grades have been inflated and do not reflect the quantity of learning. As a result, over two-thirds of the states have mandated assessment processes to document student performance (Ewell 1998). Outcomes assessment became a primary strategy for assessing teaching and learning (Nedwek and Neal 1994), and some schools use outcomes assessment results to attract students (Boyle and Bowden 1997).

In the context of tight state budgets and the perception that higher education costs are growing rapidly, many states have gone beyond mandating outcomes assessment and have called for measures of performance. While it is far from clear that public universities (even major research centers) are inefficient and wasteful (Johnstone 2001), the belief that they are is widespread, leading to the institution of performance-based budgeting in at least 36 states (Layzell 1999; Schmidt 2002). Many states have also attempted, sometimes indirectly sometimes directly, to exert greater control over university budgets (Bardahl and McConnell 1999) [see below for more on performance-based budgeting].

The increasing costs of higher education coupled with tight state budgets have also pressured public university administrators to seek new sources of funding. Monies from external grants and from private fundraising are becoming increasingly important to university's fiscal solvency. Concerns have been raised, consequently, that the private corporate sector will play an increasingly important role in higher education's future. Public/private collaborations may pressure faculty to produce research that is immediately useful to the private sector and may lead to the imposition of a corporate model of control on universities. The corporate model—in opposition to the traditional collegial control model in the hands of faculty—is consistent with the rhetoric of efficiency and accountability and with the standardized collection of quantitative data for decision makers.

The heightened role of accreditation and disciplinary associations reflects a final contextual factor. All six regional accreditation agencies responsible for accrediting college and universities have placed greater emphasis on learning outcomes assessment in their standards, requiring clearly stated objectives for each program as well as specific plans for measuring achievement (McMurtrie 2000). Results are to be used in future self-study reports for accreditation purposes. As an example of the agencies' clout, Peterson and Augustine (2000) found the particular accreditation region to be a primary influence on which of three approaches to student assessment is used: cognitive, affective, or post-college. Similarly, the American Sociological Association (1991) recommended using multiple measures to assess regularly the sociology major. Chalkley, Fournier, and Hill (2000) describe how pressure at the national level in the UK has yielded “benchmarking” documents within disciplines, which will set subject standards and identify the attributes and skills that graduates in each discipline should possess.

Charge of Task Force

The elected ASA Council sought information about these national trends, how aspects of faculty performance were being measured, and the impact and implications of these measures for sociology faculty. To provide this information, Council established the Task Force on the Implications of the Evaluation of Faculty Productivity and Teaching Effectiveness in 1999 with the following charge:

The purpose of this Task Force is to examine the measures used by universities, colleges and various external agencies to assess faculty productivity and to determine if these measures threaten the freedom of faculty teaching and research. Over the past decade, such factors as the application of a corporate model to academia and pressures from external agencies such as state higher education commissions have resulted in increasing demand for faculty to be assessed at even greater levels. Measures such as post-tenure review, outcome assessment, and evaluation of faculty teaching loads are more commonplace and could either provide useful information or could be used to diminish the freedom and flexibility of faculty to be effective scholars and teachers. This Task Force will examine these issues and report to Council, with information on “best practices” and any recommendations appropriate for ASA action.

Given the wide range of practices it was asked to review, and the variety of motivations underlying its creation, the Task Force has made every effort to define its charge broadly. We seek, first, to understand the range of practices in use in academic institutions and to clarify how they relate to one another. Further, we seek to avoid either a witch-hunt or an uncritical celebration of these new trends. Rather, we are trying to identify “best practices” and concerns that have already emerged, so that we can provide information and suggestions to departments confronting one or more of these practices in their institution.

The task force has also been concerned to distinguish among different measures that have different intents and different origins. In particular, it has focused on the distinction between efforts to measure faculty productivity and efforts to assess student outcomes. We discuss them separately in the report, in part because of this concern. At the same time, the task force has noted that, in practice, people sometimes confuse the two and, in reality, the measurement of productivity and outcomes assessment occasionally are linked in practice, something we discuss further below.

The task force met on five occasions to develop this report—at the annual meetings of 1999, 2000, and 2001, 2002 and at a working session in Cleveland during the weekend of April 27-28, 2002. Data to inform discussions resulted from an open call for input from sociologists (published in Footnotes in Fall 1999), from interviews with faculty, chairs and administrators at selected public institutions (chosen to reflect different institutional realities and different political contexts), and from the analysis of questionnaire data gathered during the chairs' conference associated with the ASA annual meetings of 2001. The ASA Office also provided the Task Force with relevant data from research it conducted independently of the Task Force.

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