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I have been writing Interesting Reads This Week for more than three years, which means I have now exhausted weather, travel, animals, and most of my other reliable opening devices. Fortunately, higher education continues to produce things to write about.

The Office of the Legislative Auditor General of the Utah Legislature released a performance audit of tenured faculty at the 16 public colleges and universities in the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE). There is plenty in the report with which I disagree, including some of its recommendations. But buried in what is ostensibly an audit of faculty accountability is something much more interesting: an unusual window into how universities determine whether teaching is good enough.

And for me this isn’t about Utah. I suspect many of the problems documented here could be found at public and private institutions anywhere. They raise uncomfortable questions about how institutions evaluate teaching, respond when it isn’t working, and, ultimately, improve it.

The part I found fascinating was the qualitative evidence. The auditors examined 666 (yes, really) post-tenure reviews conducted since the new requirements took effect. Of those, 658 rated teaching satisfactory and only eight found it unsatisfactory. But the auditors also identified 40 cases in which faculty had been rated satisfactory despite what the auditors considered “concerning evidence” about their teaching.