A leader in the effort to hold colleges accountable for student learning will leave his position to join in the defense of liberal education.
David C. Paris plans to step down as executive director of the New Leadership Alliance for Student Learning and Accountability, which advocates for colleges to collect evidence of and report their progress in improving undergraduate education.
He will assume a newly created position, vice president for integrative liberal learning and the global commons, at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, a membership organization of more than 1,200 colleges that support the goals of liberal education. He will start in January.
His hiring is part of a strategic shift for the association, which is looking to place greater emphasis on the value of disciplinary knowledge than it has in the past.
“We want to double down on the arts-and-sciences dimension of a great liberal education,” said Carol Geary Schneider, the association’s president. “The notion that you can teach job-related subject matter and critical-thinking skills and call it a day is just dangerous to democracy and to our global competence and leadership.”
Mr. Paris described his new job as helping to articulate the value of liberal education at a time when students, policy makers, and other observers question its relevance.
“Those demands have been sharpened recently,” he said, largely because of the rising cost of college and concerns about educational quality. “How can we directly demonstrate, not just by assessment but by substance, that the arts and sciences matter for students?”
Mr. Paris has been a senior fellow at the association in the past. The “integrative liberal learning” part of his job title, he said, means tying together the curriculum so that an education adds up to something coherent instead of being an array of discrete courses. The “global commons” part of the title refers to globalization and the growing focus on interdisciplinary scholarship and learning.
Mr. Paris, a professor of political theory and public policy who has held several administrative positions at Hamilton College, in New York, will move to emeritus status there.
He remains bullish on accountability. “I fervently still believe,” he said, “that colleges and universities need to do a great deal more to ensure that we’re clear about goals and outcomes, and how we measure them and report them out.”
Unclear Future
It is unclear what effect Mr. Paris’s departure will have on the New Leadership Alliance, which has one other paid, full-time employee.
The alliance began operating in 2009 with Mr. Paris at the helm, and was one of several efforts established around that time to focus new attention on ensuring quality in student learning.
One of the alliance’s more-ballyhooed moves was a campaign to collect public pledges from college presidents to commit to gathering evidence about student learning, using that evidence to improve teaching, and sharing that information with the public.
The campaign started two years ago with 71 presidents signing on; the total now stands at 106.
The alliance has also released a set of guidelines that has been endorsed by 40 higher-education associations and accrediting groups. The guidelines stake out four broad principles of assessment and accountability for colleges to follow.
A program to certify institutions for their assessment practices has also been in the works. It would be similar to what buildings get when they are LEED-certified for their environmentally friendly design.
Since its founding, the alliance has relied on grants from three foundations: the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which gave it a two-year grant of $1.3-million in March 2010, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Teagle Foundation, both of which have given smaller awards.
Judith S. Eaton, chair of the alliance’s board and president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, discounted the notion that the alliance’s existence was in doubt.
“The board has to talk about various alternatives,” she said.
Board members will meet next month to decide how the alliance might move forward after Mr. Paris leaves.
