ABSTRACT
Nancy Coppola and Norbert Elliot (see Chapter 9, this volume) implicitly acknowledge that they are working in a world in which the tapestry of science, very much like Penelope’s tapestry in Homer’s Odyssey, is continually and strategically woven and unwoven from discursive and political threads. Initially seeming to undertake a blandly mainstream program assessment that adheres to a classical empiricist paradigm for statistical reliability, Coppola and Elliot quickly and usefully complicate the task by pointing out that validity requires admitting complexity. The project they set for themselves is ambitious, sophisticated, and takes them well beyond what most of us would consider the program assessment comfort zone—a zone that is, at its best, not a place anyone seeking comfort would retreat to. Program assessment is an institutional necessity, a fact we will probably acknowledge as having value, even though we seldom welcome it because of its unavoidable imposition on faculty and staff, whose commitments already take more time than having a life beyond the office can accommodate. But the assessment process has relatively standard features and methods that are easy enough to understand.
