Are your students truly engaged in the process of learning? Are they actually learning what they ought to be? How do you know and how do they know? Whom should you be telling about all this, and with what purpose or effects?

These questions are gathering more force; this is disturbing for some and welcome for others. Quality, outcomes, benchmarks, assessment, improvement: such terms are being applied (inappropriately in some cases) to higher education on a global scale, and are the precursors to a real debate on responsibility and being called to account.

To understand the provenance of the accountability discourse, what its current shape might be, and where it could go in future, administrators and faculty need a road map. In this context, Burke and Associates' Achieving Accountability in Higher Education is just such a map, and if read with care it will prove indispensable to academic administrators seeking to balance competing demands and to become part of (or help to forge!) a truly national, comprehensive approach. Its appeal to frontline faculty and faculty developers is less certain, although the overview of the rise of accountability and page 12's chart are wonderfully accessible.

A well-structured and expert commentary on the present situation and the past that got us here, this book sets up a tripartite framework with which to understand a diversity of practices already underway in the United States. Rather idealistically, the framework also supplies a means with which to shape a more comprehensive accountability practice in the future. The three points of Burke's triangle, seductive in its simplicity and adapted from Burton Clark, are "state priorities, academic concerns, and market forces."

Critically-minded academics will note that the formation evades any real analysis of power dynamics, resting as it does on an uncritical sense of the derivation of priorities, concerns, and forces, and ending in the rather slippery notion of serving all but submitting to none. Many of the chapters are quite nuanced and rich, especially Ewell on assessment (Chapter 5), although Chapter Three in particular (Richardson and Smalling on governance) is the least critical of the lot. Burke's triangle is a powerful way to understand the nine middle chapters in the book that describe what otherwise might seem like disconnected systems of accountability. On one hand, the Accountability Triangle helps to firm up what has been thus far vague; on the other, it imparts a potentially false sense of simplicity as one gets the feeling that some of the authors are attempting to shoehorn their experiences and reflections into the model.

William F. Massy, for example, whose academic audit work has (according to a conference keynote in February 2005 by Ron Smith) resulted in positive change in Hong Kong, suggests that an "Ideal Audit" would fit squarely in the centre of the triangle (196). The claim strikes me as somewhat tacked on to an otherwise persuasive story. Similarly, George Kuh, whose commentary on the National Survey of Student Engagement is clear-minded and useful to anyone working at an institution that has undergone it, suggests rather vaguely that "ideally, survey results should move closer to the center of Burke's Accountability Triangle" (171).  I will not fault them for idealism, but at the same time the book ought to have a wider sense of accountability struggles outside the U.S., struggles that might strengthen or challenge the triangular model itself.

A more serious charge against the book for those whose life's work is identified quite rightly by Burke as offering a critique of society " that is, academics themselves " may be evident in a creeping sense that Burke and Associates have, in advocating a committed middle-ground model, effectively abdicated their responsibilities as members of a community that exists precisely to scrutinize such claims. Although Burke's prefatory chapters insist that we move beyond the binary oppositions that have structured all attempts "to account" so far, his concluding chapter seems to have abandoned challenges to the current system in favor of what could be interpreted as the complacent ambivalence of the consummate administrator. Is this due to a focus on academic leaders rather than a true collectivity of faculty, students, community-based organizations, and other stakeholders?

With this caveat and armed with some background reading (such as Delmer Dunn on democracy and accountability or Stephen Ball on the perils of managerialism), I would recommend Burke's book to academic leaders in particular, along with faculty members and educational developers who are being called to account in ways that may seem quite foreign to us.

In sum, Burke and his unquestionably expert Associates deliver a timely message and share accumulated wisdom in a readable and efficient package. A must-have for administrators, one hopes that the book's main goal " achieving, through assessment, a balance between accountability and autonomy -- is borne out in future practice. As to faculty and instructional developers, Achieving Accountability ought to be read because, in the words of  T. Dary Erwin on standardized testing (Chapter Six): "The issue of meaningful and more accurate learning and development information is too important to leave to a few researchers and test companies" (147). The same is true of accountability in higher education, which is too important to leave to a few administrators, policymakers, and so-called "clients."