Fine Tuning Higher Education From the Bell Tower
The Lumina Foundation's Tuning USA project may help fix higher education's systems of assessment and accountability, writes Steven Bell.
Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 05/07/2009
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During the Bush administration, two significant and enduring themes emerged for the higher education industry: assessment and accountability. Unfortunately, the message about the need for colleges and universities to achieve both frequently came in the form of adversarial attacks from the Margaret Spellings-era Department of Education. Threats to turn accreditation over to the federal government and plans for a No Child Left Behind-like program for higher education resulted in much conflict but little action.
Put on the defensive, college and university presidents claimed that their institutions, working together, would fix higher education’s system of assessment and achieve greater accountability to its students, their parents, and potential employers. Now those claims may be coming to fruition in the form of a recently announced project from the Lumina Foundation for Education.
Following Europe’s lead
For nearly a decade, higher education in Europe has been systematically restructured under what’s known as the Bologna Process to create greater transparency, coordination, and quality assurance. Based on the goals from that program, The Lumina Foundation’s Tuning USA project,involving universities in Indiana, Minnesota, and Utah, aims to create greater consensus among U.S. institutions about the components of their degree programs and the demonstrated learning outcomes students ought to have when they graduate.
The Lumina selection process began in December 2008, and teams from the three states in March 2009 were each awarded $150,000 for their project costs. Now the state teams will begin meeting and planning the project, funded for one year.
A broken system
What bout American higher education needs fixing? According to Clifford Adelman of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, university catalogs are a jumble of meaningless requirements. In a New York Times article, he explained that “for a particular discipline you take Anthropology 101, then Anthro 207, and then choose between three other Anthro courses and you need 42 credits. That means absolutely nothing.”
Every institution creates its own degree requirements, which only compounds the problem of inconsistency. Through the Tuning USA project, universities would work together so that chemistry graduates, for example, achieve consistent lab skills, theoretical knowledge, and ethics or forensics training. The plan calls for the three states to jointly draft learning outcomes and map them to graduates' employment capabilities in disciplines such as biology, chemistry, education, history and graphic design.
Will it work?
The cooperative European approach to curriculum design may yet encounter some roadblocks in the transfer to our higher education system. The program is described as “faculty-led” and involves “input from students, recent graduates and employers,” but getting all these parties to agree to comparable learning outcomes and competencies will be no easy task.
Taking a more philosophical view, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, in that same New York Times article argues that the content of courses and the structure of the curriculum are central to academic freedom.
Likewise, in a thoughtful reaction, Stan Katz, blogging at the Chronicle of Higher Education, reminds us that American higher education’s primary asset is its diversity. The challenge, he suggests, is to allow for a broad range of outcomes that is simultaneously rigorous and subject to a standard of comparison. But can it be accomplished?
Implications for academic libraries
It’s not clear what role, if any, academic librarians will play at those institutions participating in Tuning USA. I think that the project’s goals are well aligned with the direction academic librarianship is heading, toward greater accountability through standardized learning outcomes and efforts to put assessment into place.
As members of ACRL, academic librarians have already produced standards for information literacy, setting specific goals for the research and information evaluation skills students should have upon graduation. The challenge at many academic libraries is in getting academic departments to incorporate these standards into their curriculums.
Tuning USA, in choosing to incorporate the building of research skills into its set of outcomes, could help academic librarians achieve their goals of integrating information literacy into the curriculum across many disciplines.
Indeed, the project already aims to create lifelong learning skills, align higher education with workforce demands, and make higher education more responsive to how new knowledge and discoveries should be applied in the curriculum. Through their collections, their services, and their commitment to information literacy initiatives, academic librarians could certainly help Tuning USA get off the ground. We need to get involved and make our voices heard.
Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his web site.
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