January 2009 – Andrew Careaga

Friday five: Jessica Krywosa’s lessons from the front

Last Friday, Jessica Krywosa posted her five lessons learned about working in higher education after six months on the job. I thought her six-month evaluation of the higher ed environment would resonate with a lot of you, so I’m sharing snippets of the five lessons here. But I encourage you to read Jessica’s full post and the comments, as she puts it better than I could. Well done.

1. Politics, Politics, Politics: It seems like not much can get done because someone else may be upset.

2. Decentralization: Without one area for messages, branding, and strategies to filter through, how will we know we are successful?

3. Fiefdoms Proliferate: Not sure why someone doesnt want to let you in? Maybe its because they are master of their own kingdom, having been there for 20 years and are afraid you’ll uncover that they do not really have any content knowledge beyond ‘the way its been done’.

4. Old Way (My Way) versus New Way (Your Way): Building on #3, many employees feel threatened, not only by new technology and social media, but by your expertise in an up and coming field.

5. Slow Sallies: Mix 1-4 together and what do we have? A slow operation that gets even slower when educating people on new tactics and strategies becomes central to moving anything forward (which, it should).

Jess concludes that she’s still “up for the challenge” of working in this environment and “optimistic that stars will in fact align.”

“There’s a tide turning here and its exciting to help steer the boat that rides it.”

That’s good to hear. We need more people like Jessica, who truly believe in the enterprise of higher education and are helping to bring about reform and change from within. Who knows, Jess? Maybe in another 17 1/2 years, you’ll be able to post something like this.

USA: [insert tagline here]

Make the Logo Bigger suggests that it may be time the United States gets a tagline, because maybe it would help our global image.

Obama wants to repair the image of America abroad, and well, why not break the mold and go with a tagline to help win hearts and minds. We’d do the same thing with a new ad campaign, which is essentially what this is, no? Besides, if states can have them, why can’t the country as a whole?

MTLB has gotten some good suggestions in the comments. A few of my favorites:

The Empire You Trust

I can’t believe it’s not democracy

Defending World Champs

Home of the bailouts

Ones I might suggest:

Got democracy?

E Stimulus Unum

It tastes like democracy, but it’s not

Home of the fightin’ feds

But as one commenter suggested, “anything we come up with will get killed in focus groups anyway.” Swap “focus groups” for “committees,” and you have higher ed marketing at its finest.

This TV show promises to be a real blast

[blatant PR ploy]

Tonight’s premiere episode of The Detonators, a new Discovery Channel series featuring Missouri S&T’s resident explosives expert and one of his former students (now a prof at the University of Kentucky), promises to be a real blast.

The program begins at 7 p.m. Rolla Standard Time (otherwise known as Central Standard Time) today (Wednesday, Jan. 28) and will air every Wednesday at the same time. This is a big deal for our campus — getting national media exposure for one of our professors, one of our alumni, and our university’s new name, all in one 13-week prime-time cable TV series.

So, record American Idol if you must, but don’t miss this debut of Paul Worsey and Braden Lusk as they burst onto the television scene.

If you can’t wait until the show’s premiere, here’s a little promo to whet your appetite:

Watch The Detonators blow up a car at the S&T Experimental Mine.

Who says engineering is boring? The Detonators are out to blow up that stereotype.

[/batant PR ploy]

Hey, 19

I was shoveling snow from the driveway this morning when I realized that yesterday marked the 18th anniversary of my adventure in higher education. Which means I’m now in my 19th year plying my craft, which has changed immensely over the years.

I came into this field of higher ed marketing — or communications, or marketing communications, or whatever it is we’re doing nowadays — with limited experience in what was then known as true marketing. I had a degree in journalism, had worked for a small daily newspaper, had worked as a “communications and marketing coordinator” for a small non-profit, had written scores of short stories, had published a couple (one for pay), and had started writing four or five novels. On Jan. 27, 1991, I stared working for the news services office of this very university, which has since changed its name.

In 1991, my job was to write news releases about research, events and student activities using a nifty software program called DisplayWrite 3 on an old IBM machine. I used two floppy disks — one that held the DW3 program and the other on which I saved the news releases. Once a news release was edited and approved, I made the corrections, then handed the floppy to a secretary who would log and number it, print it out, and hand it off to a student to make copies for mailing and filing. The student then ran the copies through a folding machine, stuffed the folded copies into labeled envelopes, and took them to the mail room downstairs.

I can’t remember the last time we sent out a news release via U.S. Postal Service.

So much has changed in 18 years.

But some things, while not constant, are cyclical. For instance, scarcely a month after I was hired, the president of the four-campus university system announced a hiring and salary/wage freeze due to budget shortfalls. (Smart career move, Andy.)

Sound familiar?

Today, we’re in the third month of a hiring freeze, and dealing with all sorts of other belt-tightening measures — travel restrictions, cost reductions for non-essentials, etc. Our university weathered the budget storm of 1991, and we’re as solid now as we were then, if not more so.

This economic downturn looks to be more severe, but with the right leadership, a focused mission, a solid, realistic business plan, and talented, dedicated faculty and staff who are committed to the mission, an organization can survive the tumult and come out stronger on the other side.

Today, the challenges ahead are so much more exciting than they were in 1991. I made the career move into higher ed because I love learning, I love writing and I love to do work that is meaningful and fun. I can’t imagine being in any other field.

The Hice man bloggeth

Finally, Joe Hice has joined the ranks of higher ed bloggers.

Joe Hice's blog, Gator Grotto (www.gatorgrotto.com)

Joe is associate vice president of PR and marketing at the University of Florida, and has been instrumental in many of U of F’s successful online marketing efforts, such as Inside Gator Nation. I first met him in 2006, when he presented at a CASE conference I co-chaired (and where he inspired this blog post reference to REM). So I’m glad to see Joe finally joining the ranks of higher ed bloggers. It’s high time. Welcome, Joe.

(Thanks to Karine Joly for sharing the news.)