BY HENNING SCHROEDER
People with visions should see a doctor.—Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of West-Germany (1974-1982)
I love flying Delta. When I moved from Germany to Minneapolis several years ago Lufthansa was no longer an option. It turned out that leaving behind the bare-bones Teutonic version of customer service was a good thing and I never looked back. Looking at Delta’s corporate values the other day when browsing the company’s website, I noticed the usual suspects—honesty, integrity, and respect—along with explanations seemingly targeted at preschoolers: Always tell the truth and don’t hurt anyone. Did that mean that Delta was run by a bunch of toddlers? No. I am told by my daughter, who works in public relations, that emphasizing basic virtues like honesty helps build consumer trust.
These observations bring me to the deplorable efforts of today’s universities to build trust with the public by casting themselves as corporations that have a plan, a strategic plan that is. I wonder if the public is aware of the endless hours faculty spend in committees to come up with vision, mission, value (VMV) statements when this time could instead be spent doing research, which, ironically, is supposed to be objective and value-free—at least according to philosopher and sociologist Max Weber, who was adamant about keeping the realms of “is” and “ought” apart and once had a bigger following in America than in Europe. Weber made it a point to be neutral and dispassionate when he studied the social impact of religion during his travels through the United States in 1904. Otherwise his groundbreaking work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” might have long been forgotten as just another piece of religious advocacy.
Neutrality and objectivity don’t seem to be in fashion anymore. Earlier this year at a National Association of International Educators (NAFSA) conference, I learned that “empathy training” is what gets you prepared for study abroad these days, and yes, you can measure it—there is a standardized test for that, but I doubt that Max Weber would have called it “objective.”
The other thing I learned from my daughter about building consumer trust is that you have to under-promise and over-deliver. Academic institutions do the opposite. They promise the moon knowing they can’t deliver it. Usually towards the end of VMV statements, you’ll find a list of all those positive research impacts that will be showered upon humankind by the university, department, or program depending on whose website you have landed on. Of course, each unit, no matter how small, has to have its own VMV statement. Some are dripping so heavily with righteousness that they sound like church catechisms to me.
And then there is the catchy tagline that tries to sum up the entire institution in a few words. Compared to slogans like “Think Big. We Do” (University of Rhode Island), “Big Thinking, Small Planet” (Concordia University, Montreal), or “The Entrepreneurial University (Technische Universität München), the University of Minnesota’s motto, “Driven to Discover,” sounds refreshingly academic, even modest. Oddly, though, a recent “Driven” fundraising campaign put individual faculty members in front of a microphone and had them solemnly pledge what they would discover and do for humankind. With the camera filming from below, the speaker gazing into the sky, the choir music and Greek columns in the backdrop, the whole affair looked more like a Leni Riefenstahl propaganda movie to me than a scene from a college campus.
But aside from invoking dark memories, the bigger problem with these kinds of ads and promises is that they are not honest (despite the fact that “integrity” and “honesty” are clear front-runners in VMV statements). Where is the university president who has the guts to tell the public that we don’t know where our research takes us or when and how society will benefit from it? The only thing we know for a fact is that curiosity-driven, fundamental research has been responsible for the greatest innovations in human history, not five-year plans. This is what our messaging should be, not tacky, pseudo-corporate slogans. And oh, if you still want to keep your VMV statement, how about making “humility” the highest-ranking value?
Guest blogger Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota. His email address is schro601@umn.edu and his Twitter handle is @HenningSchroed1.
This is perfect, and all true! In our hallways are posters touting teaching excellence, while 80% of the faculty are paid poverty wages and faculty morale is at an all-time low. In our college system, Orwell’s 1984 is not a novel, but a manual.
I love this post! I once served on a VMV committee that wasted countless hours discussing a proposed slogan for the university. I can’t even recall what we eventually came up with, since it’s long since been displaced and forgotten by something even more empty of meaning. But we did spend a lot of time over the proposal that we should be “the best university we can be!” Oh, to have those hours back would be heaven.
When Richard Levin was appointed President of Yale University in 1993 my son was entering his 3d year at the school. I took the opportunity on that occasion, to vent my frustration over the then seemingly endless increases in tuition. I recall asking Mr Levin why tuition rates at Yale and other colleges was rising nearly double that of inflation in the general economy. Could it have something to do with the size of the Course Study Directory which, by rough estimate, was nearly double its size as when I was a student there in the 1950’s. And I offered do we really need all these somewhat esoteric fields of study to produce the well-rounded, and well educated adult able to take his/her leadership role in society? I further suggested that at this rate of increase the school will soon drive most parents to have to go into debt to afford their child’s education, or else cause many more students to have to apply for aid. Mr Levin sent back a thoughtful, two page response in which he agreed the increases were unfortunate but unavoidable. While it was true the Directory of courses was much larger 1993 than 1958 this was a function of expanding knowledge in the world and the role of a top-line educational research institution to lead this expansion. And so we have now courses and in some cases degrees in Women’s studies, African studies, Sexuality studies, American blacks studies, Asian studies and on and on, on and on. Now that we worship at the altar of Diversity and all these new fields of study require their own administrative teams to ensure… well, I guess that each field of study keeps growing, and adding more and more courses within each field. There’s clearly no end to this “knowledge expansion”. We can also expect that there will be endless increases in tuition, and, oh, by the way, perhaps continuing erosion of the value of a degree from any of these leading institutions of higher education. Mr Levin’s vision has come full circle. Are we the better off for it?
I would be interested in seeing Mr. Levin’s written response if you still have it.
Why should “humility” be a “ranked value” at all? The salient feature of most colleges and universities administrations and faculties is HUBRIS, and SELF-DELUSION. And PROPAGANDA. Did I say that? Oh, I’m sorry, I meant “public relations”. Edward Bernays is most commonly regarded as the “Father of Public Relations”. He’s Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Yes, those facts are related. Freud and his work and writings should have been a very short, dead-end twig on the tree of life. Instead, Freud and his poisonous misogyny and cocaine abuse have been elevated in a way that often becomes worshipful. His nephews development of “Public Relations” has indeed resulted in untold many thousands if not millions of positions of gainful employment in business and academe. And infects us all to this day, as Mr. Schroeder here so well relates to specific example. Being a self-described retard and idiot, I call it for what it truly is. BULLSHIT. (BTW, yes, bullshit HAS been studied at college and university level, and published, PhD level books and research.)
This would all be simply harmless “busy work”, and “job creation”, if the consequences weren’t so dire.
I prefer to remain an infectious carrier of hope and optimism, and immune to pessimism and negativity. But when I allow myself to lapse into what some might suggest is a more “realistic” mindset, I find myself almost despairing at the state of the world, America, and Higher education, to say nothing of the dysfunctional, drug-riddled battlefield which public EL-HI education seems to have become. The self-delusion which “public relations” has inculcated and reinforces in society is the largest single driver of the current state of affairs in ALL realms in 2019-2020 America. We have almost literally no TRUE LEADERS remaining, only lower and higher ranks of sheeple. What EVERYBODY who reads these words needs most to do, IMHO, of course, is WAKE UP, and CUT the BULLSHIT. GET REAL, kids. (Obviously, by “WAKE UP”, I do NOT mean “woke”.)
So-called “political correctness”, and it’s noxious allies “diversity”, “inclusiveness”, & etc., are both symptoms of the disease in the bodies Politic and Public, and harmful infectious agents. Most of us will see my words as little more than harmless mental masturbation. Like physical sexual masturbation, it sure feels good to the person doing it, and so is self-reinforcing. But it is NOT productive to the rest of us. So come on, people. WAKE UP. GET REAL. CUT the BULLSHIT. Some wise guy once said, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”, but I can’t remember if that was Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, or some other older source.
I’m still working on my Bachelor’s, so maybe some of you over-educated useful idiot PhD’s can help me out here…. God, I almost wish I was only having fun here….
RSVP?….