A Hidden Part of Professing: Assessing

 I was talking to someone recently, and I said something about the quality of someone else's argument, I guess, and this person joked that I was being snobby, that I was judging someone else's ideas.  And it made me realize, as much as our job of professing is to generate ideas and share them far and wide, a huge hunk of what we do is judging the ideas and arguments of others.  

It starts with, alas, yes, the literature review.  In damn near every academic publication, after we get through the intro, we start by evaluating the state of the field--what the relevant ideas and arguments are, where they fall short, so that we can show where our contribution is supposed to fit in.  Indeed, I used to joke that grad students are first trained in how to destroy and that the hard part of creating awaits them after comprehensive exams where again much of the effort is in criticizing.

Once we finish our phd and get a job, we are asked to assess and assess and assess:

• Grading: in ye olde days, I don't think we called the assignments assessments or assessment opportunities, but we evaluate whether the students understand the material, can apply it, have applied it, have done the research, and put together cogent, well-evidenced arguments.  Or whatever the assignment is, we assess it.
• Teaching: not only are we grading, but we are assessing the field's arguments so that we can present the material to the students.  We don't assign them craptastic reading unless we do so to make a point (Clash of Civilizations? Yuck but yeah).   When we present the stuff in our classes, we often assess it along the way or we encourage the students to assess it or both. 
• Reviewing: so much of what we do is reviewing.  
• We review manuscripts submitted to journals and presses--are the arguments original, is the research design appropriate and well executed, are the findings interpreted well, are the implications reasonable. 
• We review job candidate files--is the work interesting and well executed, does the person have potential for more good work, will they be a decent colleague, can they teach,etc.
• We review promotion/tenure files: has this person done enough research to make a contribution?  Do they have a good trajectory? 
• Discussant/Moderator/Commentator:  when we are on panels at conferences, our job is to assess the paper and the presentation, giving our take on the ideas and how they are executed.  
• Media: For those of us who engage traditional media, we are often asked to provide factual answers but much of the time we are asked to weigh in on competing claims, evaluating the competing ideas and those advocating them.

People often talk about the marketplace of ideas.  That analogy has all kinds of problems, but in any market, you have experts evaluating products (markets of stuff create markets of assessors?) which then may affect the demand for and consumption of some ideas.  In the marketplace of ideas, there are those who have much invested in the ideas they are espousing, including jobs, power, income, etc, and those who have much less at stake. We call the latter academics.  Sure, academics can get money through their advocacy of ideas and even power, but most are just doing their usual assessing and not getting much in the way of money or pay for it.  Over my career, I have made very little money doing media stuff--some here and there but not enough to buy me or even rent me--and no, it has not led to power, at least, again, not that much.  I absolutely believe it is important to have disinterested or less biased folks in any marketplace of ideas assessing what is bs, what is based on good science, and so forth.  We may not be listened to as bad ideas often have a greater elective affinity than good ideas.  But we try.  

In all of this, yes, professors are constantly assessing and judging.  It may appear that we are arrogant--that we think we are better than other people.  And certainly that applies, but it is not that we all think we are smarter than other people.  It is that we think we have been trained to make assessments, that we are professional assessors.  We should stick to our lanes of expertise, but, well, some of us (me) tend to drive outside our lanes quite a bit.   

This post is just a rumination of a different way of looking at my job and what I do.  That it is not just about creating knowledge (which always sounded a bit high falutin' to me) but judging ideas and arguments.