Notes from a Comments Watcher January 2012

  Some of the ideas submitted for strategic planning employ the word “value” to describe the positive impact of the ideas. Some suggestions have included the fashionable phrase value added. Value added has its origins in industry where it is used to describe the increased profitability added by a new attribute to a commercial product.  The phrase has successfully infected the national discussion of accountability in higher education, especially in the assessment of student learning.  As a reader of ideas contributing to our strategic planning, I find myself resisting the use of the phrase. For me, value added implies the discredited notion that students are empty buckets to be filled with knowledge.  To adopt such a metaphor as we move into the discussion of the impact of our strategic plan strikes me as misguided, or more precisely, misguiding.  Value added seems most appropriate for the assembly line, where the products are treated in a standard way.  But the Grinnell way has been about diverse, nonstandard educational paths for students, including the absence of a general education program, the option for designing an independent major, the abundance of opportunities for unique independent studies and mentored advanced projects, and so on.  Many of the ideas arriving in the strategic planning inbox, including institutes and centers, alumni-taught courses, and enhanced internships would further diversify and enlarge the number of individual transformative opportunities. As we move forward into the areas of forecasting and assessing the impact of our ideas, perhaps we need to invent a more appropriate metaphor for value than value added.  What phrase might we coin – value presenting? We know that our entering students present credentials regarding their initial value in the form of test scores, high school performance, and promise of contribution.  How about value bearing, a phrase suggested by a colleague to describe the student’s engagement with the work of higher education?  Much of a Grinnell education assumes not the empty bucket but the active person striving to realize their intellectual and idealistic potential, so should we name it value potential?  According to a venerable text, Grinnell College “aims to graduate women and men who can think clearly, who can speak and write persuasively and even eloquently, who can evaluate critically both their own and others’ ideas…”  Much of what the community does to achieve this goal has to do with reducing the barriers, economic, cultural, and personal, which obstruct the student’s realization of her or his full value.  One might say that the outcome of a Grinnell education is value liberated as students harness their singular value by means of our liberal arts to “serve the common good.” As a phrase, value liberated may need some work. Nevertheless, it may be useful as we sort through the hundreds of ideas submitted for our strategic planning effort to ask of each idea, “What is the liberating value of this activity?”           – David Lopatto