Rivaling the rhetoric of accountability: dissociation as an advocacy strategy in U.S. higher education policy

Abstract Previous rhetorical scholarship has examined how the rhetoric of accountability has replaced the rhetoric of opportunity for education policy resulting in damaging consequences for public education. Likewise, higher education scholarship has traced the adverse effects of accountability rhetoric to the rise of new assessment metrics and an obsession with quantification in rankings systems that perpetuate inequity in higher education. This article responds to that work by examining a 2006 case when higher education advocates attempted to rival the accountability reforms proposed by the U.S. Department of Education’s Spellings Commission. Offering a rhetorical analysis of more than one hundred responses to the commission, I found that higher education leaders utilized dissociation to offer an “alternative reality” and an alternate set of criteria for evaluating the quality of higher education. The analysis identifies five “dissociative topoi” used to argue that standardized accountability metrics were incompatible with U.S. higher education values. I conclude by suggesting that a dissociation of market accountability from public accountability in education can be a generative heuristic for inventing a rival alternative to current accountability rhetoric.