BY ERIC SCARFFE AND KATHERINE VALDE
After the initial draft of House Bill (HB) 999 began circulating online last year, talk of Florida could be heard in the halls of almost every institution of higher education in the United States. As acting chapter president of the United Faculty of Florida at Florida International University, for one of us, our days became filled with interviews fielding questions about the various bills, amendments, and regulations that systematically undermined tenure, academic freedom, and the DEI initiatives at Florida’s public institutions—initiatives that had been championed by the state university system’s board of governors a mere three years ago in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Of course, it’s easy to see the situation in Florida as something that happened all at once, a series of bills and regulations pushed by Governor DeSantis to provide him with the “anti-woke” credentials he desired for his (now failed) bid for the White House. Unfortunately, as a few fellow Florida professors have recently documented, this interpretation misses the longer walk Florida took to get here. HB 999 wasn’t a one-off event, but the culmination of three years of legislation designed to undermine academic freedom, shared governance, and the university system as we know it in Florida.
We believe it is important for faculty everywhere to heed the lessons from Florida, and hopefully the work such as Stacey Frazer and Elisa Trucco and others (such as Marc Weinstein and Joy Blanchard) have done helps faculty and the general public better recognize and respond to the early warning signs. Unfortunately, we also believe there’s a more insidious issue in higher education and, as we argue in our article “Has Higher Ed Been Seduced by Quantification?” in the latest issue of Academe, we have reason to believe this issue is ubiquitous throughout higher ed.
To put the argument succinctly, we argue that quantified metrics can crowd out, shape, and corrode the very things they purport to be measuring. As Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder remark in their 2016 book on the effects of law school rankings, Engines of Anxiety, although many quantitative measurements have a veneer of objectivity, such measurements “have the tendency to transform the phenomena they are meant only to reflect” by creating “new incentives and power dynamics” within institutions.
Further, the particularly troubling problem is that this does not require colleges, universities, or higher education institutions to be captured by surreptitious actors (or even insidious market forces) for this corrosion to take place. It can take place under good faith attempts by faculty and administrators to measure otherwise innocuous outcomes.
To take but one example, consider philosophy students’ performance on standardized tests such as the LSAT. It’s true, philosophy students tend to perform amongst the best on these tests compared with other majors. However, it doesn’t follow that philosophy is worthwhile because its students do well on the LSAT and, perhaps more controversially, it also doesn’t follow that there is some part of philosophy that makes its students do well on the LSAT. In our article, we explore a variety of reasons and analogies which explains why we believe this to be true, but the long and short of it is this: Not all causes are reducible to the sum of their parts, and quantification has the ugly habit of treating everything as if such a transitive property exists.
The purpose of this post is to highlight a particular poignant example of this generalized problem: Florida’s new post-tenure review regulation. As two tenure-track professors, we acknowledge that, for some, other issues (such as the reliance of higher education on underpaid and vulnerable adjunct instructors) take priority over issues of post-tenure review. However, we want to draw attention to the way this regulation not only requires the rubrics used to evaluate faculty “include quantifiable university, college, and department criteria” for post-tenure review, but how in practice this has (at times) resulted in the inclusion of quantifiable criteria (such as the number of publications during the review period) to the exclusion of qualitative ones (such as an assessment of the quality of the work).
Undoubtedly, quantitative metrics have their merits in assessments. They provide some guardrails to ensure that the evaluator is not basing their evaluation on malice or bias (no doubt a concern for many faculty in Florida). They provide those being evaluated with a relatively clear statement of expectations in advance. And they can, at their best, allow information to be communicated efficiently to those who may lack the requisite expertise to evaluate the quality of a particular work.
Of course, these merits should not be ignored. And our argument should not be misconstrued as calling for the abandonment of quantitative metrics for the purposes of assessment and evaluation in higher education writ large. Our point, rather, is that quantitative metrics also have drawbacks. Quantitative metrics can cover up bias in assessment under a veneer of objectivity. They can obscure and obfuscate reality, and, at times, corrode and change the very thing they sought to measure. For example, if simply the number of publications is what matters on a post-tenure review rubric, then faculty may be incentivized to target lower hanging, short-term targets for publication as opposed to longer term projects. The metric, then, doesn’t merely measure the “productivity” of faculty, but in practice it can fundamentally change the sorts of projects faculty pursue.
To this end, we position this piece as a reminder that the perils higher education faces do not always come in the form of bills such as HB 999 or bad actors hell bent on destroying public education. Sometimes the threats appear more banal. But appearances can be deceiving.
Eric Scarffe is assistant professor of philosophy at Florida International University. His email address is escarffe@fiu.edu. Katherine Valde is assistant professor of philosophy at Wofford College. Her email address is valdekg@wofford.edu.
