For when the One Great Scorer comes
to mark against your name,
He writes—not that you won or lost—
but how you played the Game.
This much is certain—early 20th-century writer Grantland Rice was not referring to a college registrar when his “Alumnus Football” poem invoked an ultimate overseer for our competitive ideals. But Stanford registrar Thomas Black, who brings more imagination to his job than seems permissible, thinks about transcripts a bit like Rice thought about athletics.
“I call the present transcript a scorecard of the academic record,” says Black. The problem is, “We know that the record is even broader than that.” And Black feels compelled to improve the situation. “I’m a record keeper,” he explains. “I’m supposed to capture the academic record, your experience at Stanford. That’s my job, to capture the whole breadth of that—not to get it distilled, but to capture it accurately.”
Black’s solution? An interactive digital transcript with hyperlinks that allow authorized online users to click through to an abundance of supplementary information. For instance, the title of a dissertation would be clickable, allowing users to immediately access and read the document. Another example: links to faculty members’ curricula vitae. “You want to get the faculty’s names on there,” says Black, “because that also communicates what kind of education (a student receives). If you’re talking about a Nobel laureate, that’s significant.”
The more Black talks about the concept, the richer it sounds. “You say, well, there are probably some activities that students engage in, particularly honors activities or major service projects, that are not reflected on the transcript but ought to be. . . . So we can be more descriptive about these things and reference them as well.”
Transforming something as stodgy as the traditional hard-copy transcript is not a short-term objective. But in Black’s passion for bringing smart technology to academia, he has found Stanford to be the kind of incubator that could warm the hearts of the most persnickety bookkeepers. He’d love to help remake the image of registrars everywhere.
“Registrars are not known for this,” says Black, who arrived at Stanford in late 2007 after serving in the same capacity at the University of Chicago since 2002. “They are almost the accountants of the institution—the green eyeshades. We have rules, we have to follow the rules and blah, blah, blah. I just don’t believe in that model. I think that we’re educators, too, and we’re trying to do the right thing by our students and our institution.”
At Stanford, says Black, there is a receptiveness that contrasts with his experience in Chicago, where it took hard slogging just to introduce a noninteractive digital transcript that could be securely transmitted electronically. (Stanford recently added the digital transcript to its services.)
“There are a lot of mechanics [for interactivity] that are going to be a challenge,” notes Black. “But this is the place where hard things are thought about and overcome. This is where we do that kind of thing. In Chicago, they really were reluctant to go as far as I was taking them, electronically, because that is not their culture.”
Black’s ideas have similarities with a variety of other notions about synthesizing information digitally, says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, which studies information technology throughout American higher education. In full flourish, says Green, Black’s vision might lead to a transcript that has qualities like “both social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn and Plaxo, coupled with the features of electronic portfolios that are increasingly common at Stanford and other institutions.’’
Black is coordinating his efforts with a wide range of Stanford experts. University librarian Michael Keller, for instance, points out that dissertations currently are held as paper documents, but he’s looking ahead to a policy change that would create an electronic repository (and the links with an interactive transcript). Black muses constantly about other possibilities.
