Dr Renke Sabel has been named inaugural convenor of the Indicator Commons, the School of Continuous Improvement's shared library for the measures the University keeps once adopted.
Dr Renke Sabel takes on the shared indicator library's long tail of measures nobody has been asked to retire
Dr Renke Sabel has built a career asking why an institution’s indicators outlive the questions that justified them, and which ones actually survive contact with a dashboard. This week the School of Continuous Improvement gives that question a mandate: Dr Sabel becomes the inaugural convenor of the Indicator Commons, the shared library where the University keeps every measure it has adopted, however long ago.
The School regards the appointment less as a change of direction than an overdue formality: Dr Sabel’s cataloguing work has shadowed the Commons for years without a title attached to it. His first task under the new mandate is a full stocktake of the library’s holdings, sorted not by what each indicator measures but by how long it has sat unreviewed.
An indicator earns a permanent shelf in the Commons the same way everything else does here — by outlasting the review that was meant to retire it. I would like the stocktake to make that a slightly harder trick.
— Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons
“The Commons has needed someone whose job is to ask what’s still sitting in it, not just what’s been added,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds, welcoming the appointment.
The School counts the convenorship among the roles that keep its evaluation-ecosystem agenda honest about its own instruments, not only everyone else’s. The stocktake is expected to run across the current teaching period, with its findings feeding back into how the Commons is curated from here.