A final new direction we want to mention is accountability itself. Assessment and accountability arrived on campus in the early ‘90s as unwelcome harbingers of hard times, and it has been harder still to divest them of that association. Despite the feeling that assessment leads to program cutting and accountability entails teaching to the test, Cal Poly Pomona faculty and administration have instituted new directions in assessment (Joint Review, SOAP, academic program review, all discussed earlier) and accountability (CSU Accountability Process [Appendix A2], professional accreditations, and the manner in which the WASC self-study is conducted). Part of our interest in this topic is related to research on the distinction between external and internal accountability. We see the latter as indispensable to facilitation and rationalization of the former, and of assessment.

An objective of our current self-study has been to implant self-study into the normal routines of campus culture. Why? We believe it:

• creates community (especially a teaching/learning community),
• enhances sharing of knowledge,
• validates what people are doing well; supports efforts to correct problems,
• puts students in the foreground of the picture,
• produces a situated understanding and beneficial critique arising from careful, dispassionate appraisal of all sorts of evidence, collected systematically.

This is the basis for internal accountability, as defined by Eckel, Hill and Green (1998, 1999), among others. The creation of the budget advisory committees at college, divisional, and university levels is evidence of the university’s desire for such accountability. All forms of assessment and review, from personnel evaluations to accreditation, would be expedited and democratized by stronger internal accountability, fostered by continuous self-study.

A structure for this kind of on-going dialogue and monitoring at Cal Poly Pomona need not involve new administrative formation. [Figure 34] The process need not involve policing, grading, or sanctioning.

Some useful references on accountability are provided in the Works Cited section of this self-study report. Annex E3 offers our recent proposal and presentation outline for the WASC Annual Meeting, on this subject.

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The research on our "new directions" shows us a community with a much bigger sense of itself than we used to have. We have taken on the preparation of undergraduates in the usual basic theoretical and applied fields but with an inter-disciplinary, multicultural, international, and critical perspective. We are expanding our menu of graduate programs. We have upgraded the rigor of the knowledge base for improving our performance. We have accepted the role of global thinkers, local players (and reversed it on occasion). The multitude of linkages with other organizations, cooperative programs, and extensive use of new technology and pedagogy all belie our historic tendencies to conservatism and isolationism. Many of us do maintain that not all change is good, that not all the new directions cited here are good (for students, for the university, in the short- or the long-term). We hope in this review to have opened the public discussion through which the winnowing of the undesirable from the desirable can take place. We think the units under discussion have arrived at assessment methodologies that can provide information adequate to make these judgments and decisions.

The new vision of the university that appears from these ruminations is of the interdependent relationship between the technical schools and the liberal arts and sciences. This vision is not only an embellishment and deepening of our polytechnic character, but opens the door to new directions and new ways of measuring them: does a given project enhance this commensalism? Does it promote inter-weaving of applied and general education? Does it create opportunities for ‘pure’ arts and science professionals and students to work with ‘practical’ personnel? This vision we think connects the thrust of the community building and collaborative management imperatives of Themes One and Two to the planning motive of Theme Three, through the device of continuous self-study.