Politics and quality in administrator evaluation

The evaluation of administrators is still in a primitive stage, despite the fact that many recent publications have addressed the topic. Two aspects of the evaluation process—internal institutional politics and quality, not quantity, as a dimension of both the evaluation process itself and the performance of administrators—have not received the attention they must if administrator evaluation is to be effective. A case study of administrator evaluation at The University of Toledo, a process grounded in an awareness of internal political realities and an understanding of the need to incorporate qualitative dimensions, has important implications for practitioners and theoreticians.Presented at the Twenty-First Annual Forum of The Association for Institutional Research, Minneapolis, May 1981.