There was a consultation on the new Five Year Plan for my university this week. Over 750 people were packed into a large auditorium in the Business School (an opportunity to admire the real wood finish, superb lighting and actual climate control in Business School teaching spaces!) and haranguaged about the importance of everyone owning the plan and the unacceptability of failure. The Chief-Executive-Equivalent used the phrase "Red Queen Effect" incorrectly, and attributed it to Rudyard Kipling. Then the assembled hordes were encouraged to brainstorm the distinctive features of the university (via microphone, to everyone. An interesting pedagogy...), and told to email our further ideas to a special email address.
Which will only accept emails from our university addresses, since we all have to Own Our Vision.
It's going to take a year to write the five year plan. There are special 'seconded personnel' who will do nothing else. And we already know that much of it will be 'to continue the change mandate of the 20-year plan!'
Oh, and we are going to recruit MORE students with BETTER entry qualifications because that is the PATH TO EXCELLENCE.
I was so inspired, I spent half an hour making a graphic of a sorrowful hamster. I wonder if that was their intent??
What you described sounded awfully familiar as it reminded me of when the institution were I used to teach formally adopted the student-as-customer doctrine.
ReplyDeleteThe place was shut down for a day and everyone, except a skeleton crew, gathered in the main gym to hear the palaver about how students were now our "customers" and how we "owned" the processes. Afterward, the assembly broke up into smaller groups to chew over some of the ideas.
I, like many of my colleagues, thought the whole affair was not only a waste of our time, it was a distraction from the work we had to do that day. It may have been after final exams but course outlines didn't revise themselves.
The result was that there were certain people who dove into that stuff wallowed in it. Most of us simply shrugged our shoulders and just went through the motions as the new system required us to do. Within a few years, most of that talk about "customers" and "learning delivery" had faded away, only to be replaced by something equally as inane.
However, there were some people who benefited handsomely from it as it allowed them to advance rather quickly through the pecking order. Loyalty to doctrine and ideology had its rewards.
I really wish I could predict which new shiny lure the adminifish will bite next. I'd be so fucking rich.
DeleteMy university routinely has these kinds of meetings. Everyone is directed to go off in groups and talk about whatever is deemed important - usually the school's mission statement, which consists of a few sentences that appears in the school bulletin. And yes, lots of admonishments about students as our focus... all 60 or so of my advisees need individual, hand-holding help. At a moment's notice (often well after the advising/registration window has closed). Do we have any concerns? Anything I've ever brought up is shrugged off. So the meetings are little more than some kind of backwards validation of whatever statements the dean wants to make official. With the illusion of some kind of democratic process.
ReplyDeleteThe Chief Executive Equivalent ascribed the Red Queen to Rudyard Kipling?!?
ReplyDeleteOff with his head!
(Perhaps you caught another misattribution there.)
DeleteOK, so, the Red Queen espoused running more swiftly just to stay in one place, but the Queen of Hearts was into decapitation.
DeleteWe do stuff like this at my joint, too: "town hall" meetings wherein a strategic plan is presented and "input" is solicited from grunts in the trenches who wouldn't have had time to contemplate how to add to it even if it were available in advance. Then, when the beatings continue and the cries start to be heard again, the Powers That Be can respond, "But this is what you asked for; you all were part of this plan from the beginning!"
ReplyDeleteAbout a decade ago, we went through "rebranding." This is a process in which consultants relieve the pressure exerted by excess funds in the endowment while holding focus groups in which faculty and other employees discuss what they think of the institution, after which a report is written to summarize what we all already knew, followed by a ceremony at which amid great fanfair there is finally unveiled: a new logo.
I am very much in favour of branding & rebranding.
DeleteI just need my university president and some very hot metal.
Oh. Oh. That is Good. Still playing with that "upholstered in leather" imagery, I see ;-)
DeleteI'll let you in on something, in the hope that it doesn't spoil it in the explanation. After I wrote that stanza, I realized it scanned at least two ways:
1. Drive off like a movie star in your car that is upholstered in leather.
2. Drive off in your car, and in the manner of a Hollywood celebrity your skin is tanned and burnished like leather uphostery; maybe you've even "had some work done" around the face and neck.
I thought both fit the description of the chief executive equivalent at a large number of institutions, and that kind of tickled me.
It's posts and comments like these that make me less likely to look for a job elsewhere. My school, and it pains me to say this, is not this dumb. God, this all sounds awful.
ReplyDeleteOur university did stuff like this. Just this past year, the president who pushes for stuff like this was fired...er..."encouraged to retire".
ReplyDeleteThis all sounds sadly familiar -- perhaps especially the idea that somewhere there is a magical pool of students who will happily pay a great deal and demand little of the institution and burnish its image/bolster its budget through their presence. I'll freely admit that the most prestigious institutions in the U.S. maintain their reputations in large part through being able to be extremely selective in both admissions and hiring (endowments help, too, of course, as does the general phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy), but that's not, for better or for worse (mostly for better, I'd say), a strategy that scales. Most of us have to actually serve/teach the students we have (or can get).
ReplyDeleteP.S. I am charmed by the soggy/sorrowful hamster, so at least the meeting has had one (unintended, very minor) positive effect.
P.P.S. It is, indeed, interesting to see other department's spaces. I spent a bit of time in a space that belongs to one of the better-endowed (and more closely aligned with our strategic plan than my own) schools this week, and began to realize why some students refer to the building which houses my office as "scary." It doesn't quite merit that adjective, in my opinion, but, in an age devoted to "updating" stuff (unless said stuff is mid-century modern, which this building isn't), it's definitely dilapidated, dingy, dark in many places, and (hence) depressing. Apparently we're due to get a new building, which will most likely be ready in 2020? 2025? Well before I'll be able to retire, in any case, but still quite some time from the present.
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