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Given the
rage for “accountability” that has driven public K-12
education through ever-increasing hoops of regulation, I’m
always looking over my shoulder for the assessment police, especially
since Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has made reform
of higher education (read increased testing and measurement) a
high priority. Of course, colleges and universities also conduct
assessments, usually in the form of periodic reviews of all departments
and programs, many of them in conjunction with one or another
national accrediting agency (engineering, for example, has a very
exacting accrediting board that issues guidelines). Within the
humanities, writing programs often stand out during such reviews,
since the field of rhetoric and composition has been a leader
in developing reflective practices and forms of assessment that
recognize the complexity of writing and the difficulty of measuring
it—or its teaching—in any strictly quantitative ways.
At Stanford, departments and programs all undergo periodic review,
and next year (the 2007-08 academic year) will mark the first
full review of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric since the Faculty
Senate approved the newly-revised program in 2001. Like others
I have been associated with, that review—conducted by a
committee comprising Stanford faculty as well as two or three
outside consultants, will rest on a self-study the Provost has
charged us with conducting this year (see the end of this article
for a list of questions we will address).
Thus we have
an opportunity, through the self-study, to shape the terms of
the review and its consequences. We also have the opportunity
to use this period of purposeful reflection to step back and take
a good long look at the work we have done in the last six years,
to take stock of our accomplishments and identify areas for improvement,
and to plan for the future development of PWR. Toward that end,
we have convened a Program Review Committee made up of one member
from each of our standing committees and chaired by Alyssa O’Brien—so
that all wings of our Program will participate in the extensive
data-gathering and analysis necessary for the self-study.
(continued...)
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