COVID-19 was a stress test for academic administration, not to mention academia broadly. I bring up this bogeyman because it was in the thick of the pandemic that I took on my largest administrative role to date: the chair of Oregon Institute of Technology’s Academic Assessment Commission. Prior to the pandemic, I might have written this statement prioritizing efficiency, data management and proper tool use. All of those are important, but the struggle that began in March of 2020 has highlighted the single value that guided my administrative actions: compassion.
Compassion and Efficiency
In the midst of the pandemic, academic assessment did not rise to the top of many individuals’ priority lists. Most of us struggled to teach our classes in entirely new, online environments (or, if we were used to teaching online, we were guiding students new to the situation) while maintaining our health and keeping our families safe. While assessment fell under my purview as the chair of OIT’s Assessment Commission, I felt that a light hand was most appropriate in this situation. Under extreme stress, no one benefits from repeated reminders to complete assessment reports.
Because the pandemic highlighted many structural weak points in our administrative processes surrounding assessment, the Assessment Executive Committee used the opportunity to exercise compassion by ensuring that faculty completed their assessment reports on a timeframe that worked for them (even if it stressed some other timelines as a result). We also used the opportunity to find new places for efficiency: the stressors reported this year were not unique to the pandemic. They were the normal bottlenecks that slowed our assessment process each year, albeit at a less noticeable rate. As an administrative team, we worked to create or improve these processes to reduce stress on those who had to engage with them, whether that was formalizing a mentorship network or working to create new, automated tools to harvest data from existing repositories without requiring faculty to collect it manually.
Rather than treat institutional bureaucracy as a machine that just needs the right levers pulled to get a result, I treat it as a community of interested peers all working towards different goals. It would be great to wrangle everyone to a single goal at a time, but it is far more efficient (and effective) when the work already being done can meet multiple needs at once.
Open Data and the Best Tool for the Job
University bureaucracies generate a lot of data, more than any one person or office can handle. This is especially true in the world of academic assessment, where required reports may need to coordinate student demographic data, course performance, extracurricular activity and more. Thankfully, endless products are marketing to universities, promising to make data collection and analysis easier through a host of built-in, proprietary tools.
Coming from a background in English and writing studies, I do not understand the allure of closed-source tools. Full disclosure: the departments that house writing programs rarely have the funding necessary for spectacular data analysis software, so my undergraduate and graduate careers were full of home-brewed and open-source tools for data analysis. Even my dissertation managed a corpus of over a million words of text using Microsoft Excel and a lot of custom function writing.
As a result, I value data saved in common formats, like a structured database or csv, open for analysis in someone’s tool of choice, rather than data locked within a black box that promises to make some measure of analysis easier.
This is related to my assessment philosophy, which favors ad-hoc analyses. In my limited administrative roles, I have prioritized freedom to act for anyone subordinate to me. I want to see individuals use the tool and procedure that works best for them, rather than something I’ve chosen as the thing I like most. I also research the tools and approaches available, ensuring that I can offer the best support to individuals who have a goal to reach but who are unsure of how to reach it.
