Today's Tomorrow's Professor mailing was Lee Shulman's Carnegie Perspectives essay on accountability and feedback in medical education and practice. He highlights the"Morbidity and Mortality" debriefings and a particularly vigorous response by JHU to a consistently flawed protocol: clear guidelines, clear supervision, and responsible parties were given direct access to report to figures with the authority and will to deal with those who flaunt safety guidelines. I was struck because one of my consistent concerns about academia is that it is very hard to admit to failure, or even partial success, very hard to ask for help without calling ones own competence into question, very rare to establish clear guidelines or to have any kind of authority figure able to impose order.

Now, I'm not giving up on academic freedom, mind you; I really don't want administrators -- or education departments -- dictating pedagogy or content on a regular basis. But there is a fantastic lack, in academia, of useful guidance on methods, of frank discussions of teaching issues, and routine feedback from peers is nonexistent. We've all heard tales of dramatic pedagogical failures, from skipping classes (I'm talking faculty, here) to off-topic blather, about which even top administrators can do very little without significant legal expense. I think we need to be a little less picky about our autonomy and privacy, provided that we can also be a bit more open-minded and less punitive about the experiments -- failed, misguided, or frighteningly successful -- of others.

Our"stock in trade" is our ethical and intellectual work. We need to check each other, to maintain standards, to keep cheating or just mediocrity from being routinely rewarded.

Is it" coming out week" by the way? A major sports star and a major screen talent [hat tip to Anne Zook, who also found this devastating interview recently, which relates to this] both came out of the closet this week, one lesbian, one gay male. Both have long-time partners, and both sound very relieved.

Anne Zook - 10/29/2005

I don't think it was "coming out week" but as I remember it, it was recently (maybe last week?) "Coming Out Day." Maybe that inspired some of this?