Senator Rubio is quoted as saying, “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.”  Maybe, but wouldn’t it be nice to have around some people who can teach grammar?

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People, particularly business people, talk about higher education in ways that would have been inconceivable not so long ago.  So what? Well, for one thing, we know that discourse shapes practice. So what kind of practice is likely to follow assertions such as this from Chris Kershner, a member of the Dayton (Ohio) Area Chamber of Commerce: “The business community is the consumer of the educational product. Students are the educational product. They are going through the education system so that they can be an attractive product for business to consume and hire as a work force in the future.”(I am quoting from  Johann N. Neem “The Common Core and Democratic Education”  in the  Hedgehog Review, 17,2 Summer 2015. )
If students are products for business to consume, then practices that work in business should  be applied in higher education, too. Right?  That’s exactly what we read in Stephanie Saul’s report in the New York Times for November 16, 2015: “The nation’s second-largest for-profit college operator, Education Management Corporation, is expected to agree to pay nearly $90 million to settle a case accusing it of compensating employees based on how many students they enrolled, encouraging hyperaggressive boiler room tactics to increase revenue. “
 
Regulators may not like it, but why not, after all, “incentivize” recruiters? And, one step more, why not compensate faculty based on the number of students enrolled in their courses?  
 
The Education Management Corporation does not stand alone.   Ms. Saul reports, “ … one of the largest for-profit providers, the University of Phoenix, announced in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was under federal investigation for deceptive and unfair practices. The company is owned by the Apollo Education Group. “
 
Incidentally, the newly named president of the University of North Carolina , Margaret Spellings, served on Apollo’s board in 2012 and 2013 , according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps Apollo’s oracle a Delphi advised her to get off the board while the getting was still good.
 

  
 
Accountability is a slippery term, with a range from the bland to the condemnatory.   It can sound like a call for a straightforward account of what someone is trying to achieve, or it can be a demand to make numbers tell the whole story. Accountants then will be in the driver’s seat. But nowadays it’s more often a demand that those responsible for serious wrong doing be brought to justice.  That’s the way that “Marie,” a rape victim in New Orleans used it; she had to wait 18 years for a proper investigation before she could see any justice. “What I’d really like so see now is some form of accountability,” the AP reported she said.  That’s a powerful and appropriate use of the word.

The nice things about the term for a politician is that it is so easy to slip from one sense to another.  That is especially the case when the word jumps out of the court room and flops around in higher education. That’s been happening at least since the 1980s but its big moment on the higher education stage came in 2006 when Mrs. Margaret Spellings, then Secretary of Education in George W. Bush’s administration, released the report of the commission that bears her name but is properly called The Commission on the Future of Higher Education. A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of US. Higher Education had dozens of passages where “accountability” was the dominant word, and it had a whole section devoted to how to achieve it.  The report often sounded as if it were calling a notorious criminal, alias higher education, before a kangaroo court.

The  Report's criterion for judgment seemed to be quantitative measures of job readiness. Workforce readiness is the goal. Consider, for example, the wording“ … to create an efficient, transparent and cost-effective system needed to enhance student mobility and meet U.S. workforce needs.” (p.25). As Johann Neem pointed out in “Margaret Spellings’ Vision for Higher Education,”  an incisive essay in Inside Higher Ed, words such as liberal education, or liberal arts never appear in the body of the report. 
 
The Spellings commission was one big shoe dropping. Here in North Carolina where Mrs. Spellings has just been named president of the state’s university system, we are waiting for the other shoe to drop. She has not publicly set forth her agenda, but the obvious move for her is to put into practice across the 16 public institutions of higher education in the state the recommendations, and the tone, of her Commission’s report, along with quantifiable measures of accountability, with resources allocated to put teeth in the accountability system.
 
WHOA! Wait a minute!  Isn’t she accountable, too? Should she not be judged by her ability to articulate a vision for the university that reaches beyond workforce readiness, that reaffirms the core values of these institutions and that provides the leadership and musters the resources to help each institution realize that vision?  Should there not be a system-wide faculty committee, self-appointed if necessary, to hold the system presidential accountable to the highest standards of educational excellence?  Maybe that’s the other shoe that needs to be dropped.