Chapter 9: Ethical Space, Mortality and the Conduct of Evaluation

CAVEAT: Some may simply want to skip this chapter for the emotional challenge it may pose. It deals with music student interactions as they make a series of visits to a hospice, and we hear much of terminal illness.

[All participant names in the following account, and the identity of the hospice, too, are fictional or concealed. Much time has passed since the events herein described, but privacy rights do not dissolve.]

[Author’s note: I found this a difficult chapter to write, and I find it harder to read after more than 20 years. I thought hard about leaving it out of this revised version of the book – or, at least, the correspondence I reproduce. I now feel profoundly uncomfortable with the way I handled what you will see was a most sensitive and taxing set of circumstances. But I choose to include it since it gives such an acute insight into ethical dilemmas. And this at a time (the year 2025) when evaluation – in the form of programme evaluation, inspection, performance review, audit and so on – is visited upon us as an inherent, taken-for-granted aspect of institutional life. It should not ever be so. Judgements of ‘significance, merit or worth’ can be poisonous when they are imposed by the kind of power and authority we evaluators carry.