Assessing the Assessors: Higher Education in the United States

This work analyzes the rhetoric of the standards documents published on the web by the six regional accrediting Commissions of the United States (2004). Accreditation establishes the legitimacy of the institution being assessed, but in order to be truly effective, the Commissions must be granted legitimacy by those who are expected to accept and implement directives and standards. Therefore, the efficacy of these directives depends upon whether or not stakeholders accept these standards as based on strongly-held epistemological beliefs in regard to the nature of knowledge, how knowledge is acquired, what comprises important or useful knowledge, and how acquisition of knowledge is best assessed. If educators grant pragmatic rather than cognitive legitimacy to the accrediting agency, the result is merely the compliance necessary to retain accreditation rather than effective improvement of teaching and learning. This work analyzes the rhetorical structure of the texts of the six commission documents in order to discover the underlying cultural and/or epistemological beliefs and attitudes of the Commissions who composed the documents.