The authors comment on incentive systems that impede serious scholarly work on teaching and learning. The hallmark of academic freedom is the opportunity it affords faculty members to pursue innovative or unconventional scholarship. Over the past decade or so, teaching initiatives in higher education are gaining visibility, innovation is on the…

The author offers thoughts on emerging pictures and consequences if the teacher is considered the primary agent of his or her own accountability. Noting the current wave of calls for educational accountability, Shulman suggests that typical mechanisms for ensuring quality often miss much of what actually goes on in classrooms, and that looking…

The writer looks at the often contradictory ways in which tests are seen and used. We are told by its defenders that the SAT is a superb measure of academic promise, but its detractors insist that it is next to useless in helping colleges and universities select their entering class. Test-driven accountability systems have been criticized as…

The authors discuss the responsibility of colleges and universities to make moral and civic learning an integral part of the undergraduate experience. Citing Judge Learned Hand's 1944 comment that "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of…