Michael Scriven

I have become interested in the work on the philosophy of evaluation by Michael Scriven. It began when I saw him speak at the AAPT conference, and he had sensible things to say about evaluating student performance and using student evaluations of teacher performance. Then I encountered an essay he wrote in the Journal of Higher Education on Professorial Ethics, which included this passage:

In state colleges the separation of church and state was, absurdly, invoked to censor the discussion of controversial ethical issues. So ethics joined the niggers of the curriculum, exploited or seduced; and it alone was degraded to this position from a better one

As someone who works in the practical ethics ghetto, and who appreciates anyone who can use the phrase "niggers of the curriculum" in an academic essay, I decided to like Michael Scriven. When I saw how crucial the concept of evaluation was to the things I do: teaching, teaching ethics, teaching critical thinking, I decided I needed to know more of his work.

It turns out his work is hard to track down. He occupies a nebulous realm between psychology, philosophy and management consulting. The organization he helped found, the American Evaluation Association seems to cover any activity in which one makes an evaluative judgment. Many of the pages on its site are weirdly broad, like Find an evaluator, which includes just on the first page a lot of education consulting firms, the AIDS Project Los Angeles, and the inauspiciously named Aporia Consulting Ltd. (A consulting firm that leaves you more confused than when you started? The broad torpedo fish of the boardroom?). Some of this stuff looks like the Saturday Night Live fake commercial for a company called Westline: "Even we don't know what we do."

The one book of Scriven's that I was able to order that seems like it will be useful is

Scriven, Michael, and Alec Fisher. 1997. Critical Thinking: Its Definition and Assessment. Norwich, UK: Center for Research in Critical Thinking.

and even that I had to order from amazon.co.uk. I have ordered

Scriven, Michael. 1991. Evaluation thesaurus. 4th ed. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications.

I also have

Scriven, Michael. 1993. Hard Won Lessons in Program Evaluation. Vol. 58, New Directions for Program Evaluation. Memphis: Jossey-Bass.

although it is less in line with my purposes.

So does anyone stopping by here happen to know anything about Michael Scriven?