Have I said yet how glad I am that Gene Roche (“Techfoot”) is blogging again? I really should pony up some tuition dollars–reading his stuff is like being in a great seminar….

Gene’s latest post comments on a very thoughtful and timely article by a former colleague. I’ll direct you to Gene’s post for all the details. Here I simply offer a little comment responding to Gene and to commenter QueenAnne’s point about longitudinal assessment. It’s an obvious point, but one worth making: look what our institutional silos have done to distort the very idea of mission, let alone assessment.

Student experience: that’s the purview of Student Affairs, right? The people who schedule the mixers and dances and res-hall activities? The people who get the pool tables and climbing walls together for student recreation? Yet how many rich, unexplored opportunities are here for creative informal learning encounters, among students and faculty and staff. Instead, we seem to have independent, centrally funded catering operations–credit catering, activity catering, etc. Where’s the academic mission situated within a view of the whole person? A part of me still thinks, stubbornly, that the traditional 18-22 undergraduate experience is best carried out in a true academical village, just as Mr. Jefferson imagined it. And as long as we’re on my stubbornness, I continue to think that information technologies can help knit and strengthen academical villages in the larger sense–but here too, silos often intrude, including the silos that separate students’ gregarious lives online from the way we imagine and foster online learning and interaction at the “enterprise” level.

And what about alumni affairs? We say that part of the core mission of liberal arts undergraduate education is to prepare our students for lifelong learning, as well as give them the tools they need to fulfill their own emerging potentials throughout their career(s). Yet assessment rarely includes any effort to encourage our students to take the measure of their lives after graduation, and reflect on the difference–good or bad–that their time at college has made to their lives. It’s often struck me that there’s a weird, wide divide between some of the work alumni associations do most naturally and the work we say we want to do in outcomes assessment, but fight shy of.

No solutions, here, but some persisting questions.  I wish I heard such questions asked more often and more pervasively throughout the institution. Thanks to Gene and Dan Chambliss for keeping them alive and urgent.