I think the one thing that really pushed its way through my head in writing that is that the expert judgment we have embedded in our self-assessment is less about our training or our particular scholarly expertise and more about what my colleagues Ken Sharpe and Barry Schwartz discussed in their book Practical Wisdom: we have the expertise of having done a particular work for a long time and having a professional ethos that drives most of us to want to do it better. It's absolutely right to say that this kind of expertise has some significant limitations--every profession in the world defends itself in these terms when it's criticized (cue the Teddy Roosevelt quote: "It is not the critic who counts" etc.) but there are blindspots in every profession's work routines. (Among them, how the people who receive their services feel about the quality of what they received.) But surely experience should count for something, and yet, a lot of assessment work only brings experientially-based self-assessment by faculty into view in limited ways, and discounts its value for the most part.
I think the one thing that really pushed its way through my head in writing that is that the expert judgment we have embedded in our self-assessment is less about our training or our particular scholarly expertise and more about what my colleagues Ken Sharpe and Barry Schwartz discussed in their book Practical Wisdom: we have the expertise of having done a particular work for a long time and having a professional ethos that drives most of us to want to do it better. It's absolutely right to say that this kind of expertise has some significant limitations--every profession in the world defends itself in these terms when it's criticized (cue the Teddy Roosevelt quote: "It is not the critic who counts" etc.) but there are blindspots in every profession's work routines. (Among them, how the people who receive their services feel about the quality of what they received.) But surely experience should count for something, and yet, a lot of assessment work only brings experientially-based self-assessment by faculty into view in limited ways, and discounts its value for the most part.