“May I Contribute Some Data to the Discussion?”: Negotiating Data Politics Through General Education Reform

We present a historical case study of “data-driven” general education policy reform at the City University of New York, where within-system transfer issues prompted the need for curricular reform that was debated and eventually implemented from 2011 to 2017. Through an empirical examination of artifacts such as meeting minutes, internal memoranda, institutional reports, speeches, testimonies and position statements, and recordings of public meetings, we trace the emergence of a policy problem, contests over its framing, and the development of a policy solution for a curricular crisis across competing strands of collaborative governance and conflict over curriculum-making. We illustrate how administrators and their allies engage informatic power to unify the means and ends of curriculum reform- producing curricular policy and new language practices for discussing curriculum that facilitate increased managerialism and the rise of audit culture. When curricular conversation primarily focuses on the use of data, normative questions about the purpose and organization of undergraduate curricula are elided. In this case, policy proponents and opponents focused on a narrow definition of what kind of data “counts” for policy making. We argue that governance actors need to allow for and incorporate an array of data resources into their curricular conversation.