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Acceptance of Lazarsfeld Award Michael Scriven
Director Center for Tertiary Education Studies
Dear Colleagues: It was a great thrill to hear about the award of the Lazarsfeld Prize, and I wish that I could be there to stand up and thank you all. Of the services provided by a professional association to its members, the one that is probably greeted with the most heartfelt thanks is evidence of support when one is being pressured to act unprofessionally, but the pleasure engendered by one of these awards must run it very close. Perhaps this is a good occasion for two minutes of reflection on 20 years of publishing in the field of evaluation. The conditions of work in the early years were a little unusual for many of us. For 12 of them I was in the philosophy department at Berkeley, and managed to get out - in the area of evaluation - 3 books and perhaps 20 articles, and created, edited, and typeset 2 periodicals, Evaluation News and Evaluation Notes. But I never bothered to apply for a step increase, normally granted every four years or so, because my department made it clear that none of the work in evaluation would count, since it was not, in their view, part of my duties. I was also publishing in standard philosophy areas; although it was not quite as much, it was probably enough to qualify-but then, who wants to run in races where the judges won't count half the laps? Well , we all have our stories about the bad old days, usually greatly oversimplified, as this one is-and things are better now. Evaluation is now respectable, in informed circles at least, and your support for a professional association is a major factor in maintaining that situation. I do want to add a special word of appreciation to a more limited circle, for this was an award achieved not without some cost to others, often unwillingly conscripted. There are, as you all know, great variations in research style . One has to work out one 's own compromise with the pressures of other duties, writer's cramp, excessive rewriting due to perfectionism, not enough rewriting due to sloppiness, the use of assistants to do all the work, refusal to delegate, and so on . I have always admired the individuals I know who seem able to do all this without exacting any penalty from those with whom they interact. But I have been very conscious of the fact that I can't say the same of
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myself. In the first place, I frequently take a combative and often aggressive approach and, not surprisingly, it upsets some people more than it is intended to. That outcome is something I often think of with regret. In the second place, I have, on more than one occasion, failed to do all the work required to tidy up a project, essentially because it seemed to have reached the point of diminishing intellectual returns and I felt the need to go to something that was more challenging. That's not a commendable characteristic in a contract worker, and both clients and colleagues have suffered at times. Third, I overcommit and miss deadlines, which is unfair to editors, clients, and colleagues. I'd like to dedicate the prize to those who were unwittingly elected to suffer the side-effects of this "research style," a convenient euphemism for bad scholarly manners. It's probably too late for me to reform, but it's not too late to apologize to them, and I do so herewith . And now it's time to go back to work, since I'm overdue on four deadlines. But then, on the other hand, maybe it's time to start work on evaluating hull design in 12-meter yachts; perhaps a little field work down on the Fremantle beach would be in order, since they're racing off the point this afternoon . .. Best wishes to you all!