Expert Rating on Academic Leadership as a Measure of Institutional Quality

Abstract

Research on higher education has increased appreciably the past decade. addition, the sophistication of inquiry has risen correspondingly. Both events are good news. But increased output also means that methodological practices should be monitored. Utilizing outside experts as an independent measure of academic leadership and/or institutional quality is a potentially effective technique. This note reports findings which introduce cautions with regard to such a practice. Institutional quality is an image. As Cartter (1966:4) argues, In an operational sense, quality is someone's subjective assessment, for there is no way of objectively measuring what is in essence an attribute of value. Despite the elusiveness of the notion of institutional quality, many reports of it exist, especially with respect to ratings of graduate departments. Attempts to use expert opinion regarding academic leadership have been less frequent (Hemphill, 1955; Hemphill and Walberg, 1966). Our research examines judged leadership and institutional quality. Gerber (1972) studied academic freedom policies and practices in a sample of 21 private liberal arts colleges in the North Central Associations's jurisdiction. The NCA provides uniformity of accreditation standards, a necessary factor for supporting the paper's inference. (See below.) The colleges span five states, overrepresentative of the country's 800 private liberal arts colleges. Even though this is not a national sample, the academic independence and typical isolation of most of these colleges in small communities make it highly unlikely that judges were influenced by proximity factors and/or spurious reputations resulting from location. The colleges were residential, similar in size (all less than 1500), and members of the Council for the