Beyond “Administered Intellectuality”: Accreditation in a New Key

Accreditation is at the very center of American higher education. Ideally, the process empowers organizational, intellectual, and educational excellence. All too often, however, the process sinks to the lowest common bureaucratic denominator of academic life: more committees, more window-dressing, and a whole lot of get-it-over-with. It’s time for accreditation in a new key, one that fosters creativity, innovation, and multi-modality in the very practice of accreditation itself. We have an extraordinary opportunity to walk the walk, to free ourselves from the trap of “administered intellectuality” that characterizes much schooling, and to lead by example as higher education around the world seeks new paradigms for teaching, learning, and scholarship in the context of what Clay Shirky rightly calls “the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”