Quality and Accountability in Higher Education: Improving Policy, Enhancing Performance (review)

For those scholars, students, and administrators who have wished for an updated version of the 1992 work, The Evidence for Quality: Strengthening the Tests of Academic and Administrative Effectiveness by E. Grady Bogue and Robert L. Saunders, Quality and Accountability in Higher Education: Improving Policy, Enhancing Performance by Bogue and Kimberely Bingham Hall will be a welcome addition to the literature. The 2003 work certainly merits the appellation "revised edition," but as the senior author of both texts is careful to note in its Preface, he holds the copyright to the earlier book. Thus it is feasible to use a new title with a new publisher.

In a review of the first book that he wrote for Change in 1992, Peter Ewell called The Evidence for Quality "an insider's book, written by a former university president and state official with a retired dean of education" (p. 44). Bogue is now Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee and co-author Kimberely B. Hall is Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs at South College in Knoxville, Tennessee. As academic administrators, the authors of both books have focused above all on leadership as hallmark, arbiter, essential determinant, of quality in higher education. The following quotations from the Preface set the tone for the 2003 edition, "How can we teach our students the role of risk, courage, discipline, and perseverance in learning if we do not model these same values in learning about purpose and performance?" "Failing to acquire and to apply information on quality is to confirm that we lack both caring and daring, a lamentable flaw of character in a community of curiosity" (p. xii). Bogue and Hall use the phrase "caring and daring" in virtually every chapter of Quality and Accountability to describe the kind of leadership they believe is needed to utilize with intelligence and passion the panoply of quality assurance mechanisms they characterize in the volume.

In a list of a dozen or so questions Bogue and Hall (p. x) pose for consideration, three in particular guide their approach throughout the text.

• • Are the premier guarantors of quality in colleges and universities our systems of quality assurance, such as accreditation and assessment, or is there a place for moral and ethical engagement as well?

• • What standard of performance will be deemed acceptable and who will decide?

• • How can the principles of autonomy and accountability be constructively balanced?

All of these questions embody recognition of the tensions that exist between quality assurance activities that are undertaken to meet external demands for accountability and those that are developed internally, guided by institutional mission and values. Bogue and Hall believe that caring and daring leaders will address external influences appropriately but put most emphasis on fostering the kind of self-reflection and data-gathering in the specific context of their institutions that will provide direction and impetus for genuine improvements in programs and services that enhance the overall climate for learning.

Bogue and Hall have adopted a roughly chronological approach in their treatment of quality assurance practices. Accreditation is treated first because the organization that later became the regional accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, was formed in 1895. Ratings of graduate programs appeared in the first decades of the 20^th century, so Chapter 2 addresses college ratings and rankings. Thereafter the chronological listing is not so precise because the historical roots of licensure, the subject of Chapter 5, are older than those reported for follow-up studies of graduates, the subject of Chapter 4. The histories of both academic program reviews and the assessment of college outcomes, the subjects of Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, date to approximately the same year: 1970.

While the titles of Bogue and Hall's Chapters 1 through 7 are almost identical to those of Bogue and Saunders' Chapters 1 through 7, new...