Thursday, August 9, 2007
Meetings
Not much to post about lately. The beginning of school is upon us here and every day is devoted to meetings. We're all wonderful. We're going to have to tighten our belts. The parking situation is a mess. Correcting the parking situation will be a mess. We have to do more with less. Growth. Attrition. Retention. Accountability, accountability, accountability, and more (fake) accountability. The missionstatementization of higher education is rampant and sitting in meetings on metrics and efficiency and infrastructure occur with increasing frequency. It's not that these things are all inherently negative or useless. Some of those things lead to positives: cool new buildings, a giant Starbucks, a bigger bookstore. It's just that what seems to get lost in all this kind of consideration is our students. Our students as individuals. That will, I hope, change Monday. School will start. They'll be looking at me wondering what the hell we're going to do all semester. And that's when it will finally be real again.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
As long as you don't look at them wondering what the hell you're going to do all semester it should be fine.
Marty, where's this giant starbucks? No body told me about a giant starbucks! It isn't the one on st. augustine that you're talking about, is it?
Hi, Marty, one more thing: Too much of education is about infrastructure. At my old school, most of the talk each semester was about how swell the landscaping looked (it was a feast!) and the buildings that were going up or coming down. That's what the higher administration likes to talk about. They want to create great buildings and parking lots because these are the things people see. But they don't want to talk about the experiences are students have in these buildings. They don't want to talk about true learning, or the spirit that drives us to learn and to teach.
It's gonna be in the new Student Union behemoth, with a new bookstore and large meeting areas. I guess you're right, John. You can't rivet a donor's name on someone's education (outside of scholarships), though I do wish more of what we do began with the student's experience. It seems an afterthought now. When I taught at UCSB, administrative noise about the sciences leaving the college of arts and science focused exclusively on financial impacts. Nary a word was written about how it might affect students.
Post a Comment