The Trouble with Three-Letter Acronyms

MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat), BDUs (Battle Dress Uniforms), and TDYs (Temporary Duty): Three-letter acronyms (TLAs) describe routine aspects of military life. These catchy labels can also reference broad epistemological contexts. They are quick and convenient, allowing users to purport to understand more than they actually do. Unfortunately, they are often misunderstood and obscure more than they reveal. Unpacking the ideas they contain is useful.

IEA stands for inclusion, engagement, and achievement. It was a touchstone of higher education around the turn of this century. As provost at Berea College, I was a member of a small group of Appalachian College Association administrators who developed and conducted several week-long summer faculty development programs using this framework.

“Inclusion” was a precursor to “diversity”; it reflected how students understood that they were essential to everyone’s learning. While inclusion addressed gender, race, and economic status, it also acknowledged the importance of diverse experiences, perceptions, and ideas. Without a diversity of thought, education becomes indoctrination.

“Engagement,” a crucial component of learning, builds on diversity and requires students’ active participation. The physicist Richard Feynman recalls how his parents encouraged him to engage in his own learning from an early age. Rather than the standard parental interrogatory, “What did you learn today?” Richard’s parents would ask, “What good questions did you ask?” This active involvement is what makes learning a dynamic and enriching process.

Learning does not occur by osmosis. No matter how masterfully curricula or syllabi are developed, there is no guarantee that students will learn what was intended. My American Association for Higher Education colleague, Ted Marchese, often quipped, “Teaching without learning is just talk.”

“Achievement” distinguishes education from mere academic endurance. What do students know that they did not know before, and what can they do that they could not do before? This is the essence of competence, and unless it is assessed regularly and rigorously, even theoretically sound, well-intended programs will flounder. Regular and rigorous assessment is the key to ensuring accountability and continuous improvement in education.

I was fortunate to participate in the U.S. Air Force Academy’s efforts in the 1990s to develop and assess several key learning outcomes, including knowledge, skills, and attitudinal outcomes.

The effects of each of the nearly 40 “core courses” comprising the bulk of the academy’s curriculum were assessed by seven independent faculty assessment teams for two semesters concerning these three outcomes.[1]

I was also privileged to be part of the efforts to establish Western Governors University’s (WGU) competency-based education soon afterward. I was a member of WGU’s assessment and liberal arts faculty committees. The first phase in WGU program development was to identify the degrees to be offered and then assess what those who had earned these degrees knew and could do. The next phase was developing instruments to assess students’ current competencies and then providing them the resources needed to gain the knowledge and skills expected of those with the degree. This approach, integrating assessment with program design, has been quite successful.[2] While acknowledging the importance of achievement, many traditional colleges and universities faculty and administrators balked at assessing student learning and using or sharing their results[3]. Unfortunately, instead of facing challenges head-on, many faculty members—like some of our students—opt to avoid the difficult tasks and hope they go unnoticed.

Thus, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) was adopted as higher education’s “new and improved” TLA. While it is true that DEI elevates diversity by explicitly awarding it one of the three letters, the real difference between the new higher education moniker and IEA is what is omitted—viz., achievement. Each of the three new components requires a closer look; several demons are hiding in the details.

As previously suggested, diversity is essential to higher learning. However, not a diversity of appearance or identity matters most—it is a diversity of opinion and perspective.

I was thrilled that my undergraduate academic performance at the Air Force Academy earned me the opportunity to continue my education for another nine months to receive a master’s degree from the Univerity of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1972. I had never had a course where the professor had written the textbook we’d use in class. Classroom teaching at military academies relied on “inspired amateurs”—military officers with master’s degrees on three-year assignments—rather than accomplished professional educators.

Some members of UCLA’s learned professoriate had written our textbooks. Sadly, I also soon learned they were less welcoming of my divergent perspectives and contrary opinions than the junior faculty members at the Academy had been. While the graduate coursework was required for my MSci in Industrial Relations, I obtained most of the necessary knowledge and skills for the degree in my undergraduate courses at the Air Force Academy.

“Equity” is another interesting example of how language can be distorted in service to other ulterior interests. John Stacey Adams introduced his Equity Theory of workplace motivation in the 1960s through his influential paper “Toward an Understanding of Inequity.” It suggests that workers expect outcomes to be fair but not necessarily equal. In particular, most workers accept that those who put forth more effort by working longer and harder are entitled to better outcomes.[4]

Defining “equity” as equal outcomes without consideration of efforts, contributions, or performance turns Adam’s theory on its head. It may sound good, but it will diminish the motivation of both its beneficiaries and victims.

“Inclusiveness” is another admirable attribute, at least until one considers the consequences of its ham-handed implementation. Title IX of the Educational Act of 1972 prohibits anyone from creating hostile environments that interfere with the participation of others in work, school, or play based on their protected status—those who violate the antidiscrimination mandate of the 1964 Civil Rights Act are subject to punishments. The perception of what circumstances constitute hostile environments varies greatly within campus communities and is affected by the observer’s gender, sexual orientation, and political beliefs.[5] Despite its good intention, the implementation of such inclusiveness rules has created a culture of victimhood that disempowers students, teachers, and administrators.[6] This, in turn, has impoverished educational environments.[7] Just like starfish, sea otters, and wolves, cantankerous old white guys have important roles to play is sustaining viable education ecosystems.

The current system of higher education is not working. Despite their lofty aspirations, the imposition of DEI programs has led to innumerable injustices and academic atrocities. The case of Richard Bilkszto exposes both the venomous advocacy of Wokism’s true believers and the devastating effects of administrators’ cowardly reluctance to intervene and insist on professional standards or assessments of outcomes.[8]

Might there be lessons from the past successes of IEA relevant to the bleak situation in which we find ourselves? I believe there are:

1. Insist on articulating measurable learning outcomes for every program and policy. As my colleague David Campbell often reminded me, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re likely to end up somewhere else.”
2. Develop a plan for assessing the outcomes and consequences of all policies and programs. As I argued in my paper on academic assessment for the AAUP:

We cannot improve unless we are willing to accept the fact that we are imperfect—and our blots and blemishes are what assessment, when done well, can show us. Used in this way, assessment has power; one might even consider it the ultimate subversive activity. It provides a mechanism through which the authority of the institution might even contribute to the kind of transformation and liberation most valued in the liberal arts tradition.

3. Use assessment results to adjust programs and policies to achieve desired outcomes more consistently, effectively, and honestly.

When I taught Race Relations in the Air Force in the 1970s, we used human histograms to get individuals to express, consider, and reconsider their perception of various scenarios about actual racial incidents. We considered less extreme participant responses to indicate increased awareness and decreased polarization (i.e., the standard deviation of responses on the agree-disagree Likert scale migrated toward the middle of the scale). Ironically, the preliminary results of our 2018 Hostile Environment Survey revealed that the responses of those who had completed the College’s DEI training were actually more polarized (i.e., reflected greater response variance) than community members who had not received the training).

Perhaps this was the reason the survey itself was considered evidence of the “danger” I posed to students and faculty requiring my dismissal.[9]

[1] Porter, David B., and Sandra M. Eisenhut. “An Integrated Approach to Educational Outcomes Assessment.” Journal of Adult Assessment 6, no. 2 (Summer 1996). Reprinted in The Best of Adult Assessment Forum 1991-1997, edited by The Phoenix Institute, 1998. Phoenix, AZ: The Phoenix Institute.

[2] Pulsipher, Scott. “Competency-Based Learning Is the Key to Success: WGU’s Strategic Vision.” The Future of Education, December 18, 2023. https://marketscale.com/industries/education-technology/competency-based-learning-at-wgu/.

[3] Porter, Dave. “Assessment as a Subversive Activity.” Journal of Academic Freedom, 1–28. 2012. Online journal of the American Association of University Professors. http://www.academicfreedomjournal.org/index.html.

[4]Adams, J. Stacy, and Sara Freedman. “Equity Theory Revisited: Comments and Annotated Bibliography.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, edited by Leonard Berkowitz and Elaine Walster, 9:43–90. Academic Press, 1976. https://www.scirp.org/reference/referencespapers?referenceid=2993540.

[5] Porter, David. “The Baffling Bull Behind Title IX.” Minding the Campus: Reforming Our Universities, April 16, 2024. https://mindingthecampus.org/the-baffling-bull-behind-title-ix/.

[6] Clark, Cory. “The Evolutionary Advantages of Playing Victim: Scholars from the Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia Created a Victim-Signaling Scale That Measures How Frequently People Tell Others of the Disadvantages, Challenges, and Misfortunes They Suffer.” Quillette, February 27, 2021. https://quillette.com/2021/02/27/the-evolutionary-advantages-of-playing-victim/.

[7]Porter, Dave. “We Have Met the Enemy, and They Is Us.” Guest post in Krauss, L. M., Critical Mass, October 12, 2023. https://wehavemettheenemyandtheyisus.substack.com.

[8] Kay, Jonathan. “RIP, Richard Bilkszto, a Toronto Educator Who Stood Up to Woke Bullying—and Paid the Price: Two Years After Being Falsely Smeared as a White Supremacist by a Diversity Trainer, a Longtime School Principal Committed Suicide.” Quillette, July 21, 2023. https://quillette.com/2023/07/21/rip-richard-bilkszto/.

[9] Porter, David B. “How Hostile Environment Perceptions Imperil Academic Freedom: The Effects of Identity and Beliefs on Perceptions and Judgments.” Researchers.One, Peerless Review, 2022. https://researchers.one/articles/22.11.00007v1.

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