We feel the need to get things done, and quickly. Time may not be the enemy, but it is of the essence, and we’re running out.
And yet our working meetings, always launched with the best intentions, keep morphing into strategy sessions required to fend off the latest volley from downtown. Their goal, as always, is to stave off even the smallest accomplishment, so our work gets swallowed up, disappearing down the maw of institutional inertia.
I guess operational momentum requires that kind of constant slippage — the slow slide (drain) from one day into the next, never really getting anywhere, but always giving the appearance of making enormous strides.
Hence the need on their end to coordinate lots of EVENTS, RETREATS, DISCUSSIONS, and of course never-ending MEETINGS to keep the slide nice and slippery.
And I can’t help but return always to the language. To an emerging glossary of the critically undead, let’s add:
- educational coherence
- streamlined requirements (and program streams)
- reduced redundancy
- predictable schedules
- smart offerings
Words in bold are the fuel cells for their off-world battlestar.
There’s nothing like a rhetoric of smart coherence to mask the incoherent short-sightedness of a broad-based dumbing down — because ultimately that’s the goal, to make life easier by reducing and narrowing choices, meanwhile marketing the whole thing as a shift toward ever-greater abundance, as a streamlined path to getting exactly what you want, when you want it.
The Walmartification of higher ed, wherein “Save money. Live better” translates to “Save time. Learn better.”
Slip sliding away.
