Month: May 2010

Kent State, 40 years later

On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen opened fire on a group of anti-war demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University. The guardsmen killed four students and injured nine others.

The iconic image: Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling by the body of a student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, May 4, 1970. (AP photo/John Filo)
The iconic image: Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling by the body of a student lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, May 4, 1970. (AP photo/John Filo)

Forty years later, Kent State is best known in the minds of many for that tragic event. The Kent State Massacre, as it became known, was memorialized in song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and has become practically synonymous with hippie-era campus unrest over the Vietnam War.

Today the university recognizes the 40-year anniversary of those shootings with a new May 4 Walking Tour (dedicated yesterday) and a two-hour Remembrance Day Observation starting at noon Eastern. These and other events occur in the midst of Kent State’s yearlong commemoration of the tragedy. Also today, the national media are shining their spotlight on the university, representing it as an institution that remembers and learns from the lessons of the past.

In some ways, the events of May 4, 1970, seem to have happened eons ago. The United States was a much different country then. There was the draft, which put the war effort at the forefront of many college students, whose academic standing was the only thing that kept some of them from mandatory service. And we had a president — Richard M. Nixon — who was elected two years earlier in part because of his tough law-and-order stance, a stance that was itself a response to anti-war and civil rights protests.

In other ways, though, the world really hasn’t changed much. The United States is again at war (although the draft is no longer a threat to college students) and our nation is just as divided politically as it was during the Kent State era — the days of student protesters and the “Silent Majority.” Perhaps we are even more divided now, even though the protests are not occurring on college campuses as much as they are at Tea Party gatherings.

Many of today’s college students may be only vaguely aware of what happened at Kent State, and a large majority of them — even at Kent State — may “feel a disconnect” with the event and that generation of college students, as this CantonRep.com article about the 40th anniversary points out.

Still, in today’s world and in the midst of our divisive national political arena, there is at least one lesson we can draw from the events of May 4, 1970.

As Carole Barbato, a Kent State student in 1970 who is now a communication studies professor at that university, told CantonRep.com: “We want students today to know the facts that we know, we want them to remember.

“But there are greater lessons here, and that is that the rhetoric that incites violence is never the answer.”

Of purple cows and sacred cows: Yet another response to Seth Godin

(Updated @ 9:35 a.m. CDT May 3, 2010, to include links to a third great post on this topic that I’d somehow overlooked. – AC)

Seth Godin stirred up some pretty good discussion among the higher ed marketing community with his post last week on what he labeled the coming melt-down in higher education.

In his post, Godin addresses several issues confronting higher education that many of us who work in higher ed are pretty familiar with. They include the narrowing gap between the cost of education and the economic payoff; our clumsy, non-differentiated marketing efforts; accreditation issues; efforts to game the U.S. News rankings; etc. From Godin’s perspective, those issues form a sort of perfect storm that could shipwreck the higher ed enterprise as we know it. These are important issues, worth discussing in the higher ed marketing circles, and I’m thankful that such a high-profile blogger as Godin raised them. When Seth blogs, people listen.

(For the record, last October I wrote a somewhat similar post, The fall of U.S. higher education and what to do about it, with a modest four-point prescription. But it didn’t generate quite the same level of buzz as Godin’s more recent blog.)

So there’s been plenty of give and take about Godin’s post among the higher ed marketing folks I follow on Twitter. (That give and take includes that recurring complaint — recurring whenever a Godin post strikes a nerve — about how Godin should allow comments on his blog. But his no-comment rule is a pretty clever strategy on his part, as it leads some of his readers to create our own posts in response, thereby creating links back to his original post, thereby driving even more traffic his way and possibly exposing potential new readers to his books.)

But beyond the twittersphere, two higher ed bloggers took the time to comment on Godin’s post via their own blogs, and if you’re interested in what a couple of the more thoughtful higher ed bloggers are thinking about the issues Godin raises, you’ll want to read both posts. (This just in: I overlooked a third very good post on this subject: Andrea Jarrell‘s response. So add it to your required reading on this topic, too. – AC)

First, check out the lengthy but thoughtful response from Dylan Wilbanks, a web developer and marketer at a major research university on the West Coast. Then read what Bob Sevier, a senior vice president at the higher ed marketing firm Stamats, has to say about Godin’s remarks.

Both Wilbanks and Sevier are quick to agree with the crux of Godin’s argument. Where they differ from Godin is in their understanding of just what a strange beast higher education is. And that’s something Godin doesn’t quite get.

From Godin’s perspective, marketing is marketing, and the rules and techniques of marketing can be transposed on to any business sector. But higher ed is unlike most other business sectors, for a number of reasons. As Wilbanks points out, higher education marketers who work in the student-recruitment side of things are pitching an experience as well as an outcome. (Higher ed marketers who work in fundraising are pitching a different kind of experience, but Godin doesn’t poke that dog, so we’ll let it sleep.)

But our biggest marketing problem in higher education in the United States is one Godin points to: that higher ed is largely a commodity. If you don’t agree, consider that there are more than 4,800 colleges and universities in the U.S. (thank you, Wikipedia). That works out to about 96 post-secondary institutions per state. Many of these schools offer largely the same degree programs, and many of them are indistinguishable from the others. No wonder Godin makes the point that “most schools aren’t really outliers. They are mass marketers.” It’s true.

In one of his most popular books, Purple Cow, Godin talks about the importance of the remarkable. The idea of a single purple cow that stands out amid a field of brown, black, white or spotted bovines is his point. It’s all about differentiation.

Here, Sevier makes a good point about the state of higher education in the U.S. today:

If colleges largely offer the same programs taught by the same great faculty, then differentiation will always be difficult. Finally, accreditation, under the banner of maintaining quality, actually instills an academic sameness that further clouds the picture.

Of course, we all know there’s no such thing as a purple cow. But in higher education, we do have our sacred cows.

Campuses are afraid to differentiate for fear of losing some tiny sliver of market share, We’re afraid to narrow our focus.

Godin does point out a few outliers. And some of us have the good fortune to work for a university that is fairly distinctive. But for the most part, the distinctive or outlier college or university is the rare exception.

But I’m not ready to write off the U.S. model of higher education yet. It is in need of major overhaul, yes. But here’s where the U.S. model is indeed distinctive. Taken as a whole, the United States’ higher education system, imperfect as it may be, is still the envy of the world. As Jonathan R. Cole points out in his book The Great American University, 17 of the world’s top 20 research universities are located in the United States. Writes Cole: “It is the quality of the research produced, and the system that invests in it and trains young people to be leading scientists and scholars, that distinguishes them and makes them the envy of the world.”

“Higher education is America’s best industry,” writes Fareed Zakaria in his 2008 book, The Post-American World. (Regular readers might recall that I quoted Zakaria in that October post about the fall of U.S. higher education and what to do about it.) Even if our system “is too lax on rigor and memorization — whether in math or poetry — it is much better [than other nations’ systems] at developing the critical faculties of the mind, which is what you need to succeed in life. Other educational systems teach you to take tests; the American system teaches you to think.”

So there’s your Purple Cow for higher ed, from a global perspective: Unlike the universities of other nations, the American system teaches you to think. If that ain’t differentiation, then I don’t know my bovine from a hole in the ground.

Before I end my ramble, let me re-emphasize that things aren’t rosy for U.S. higher education. The economic downturn dealt a devastating blow to campuses, both public and private, over the past couple of years, and technological changes have unleashed information and sources of knowledge so that many enterprising self-learners can get the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree at a fraction of the cost, even free. (More about that soon in a review of Anya Kamenetz’s book DIY U.) Many, many schools are going to have to rethink their business approach if they are to survive the next 5-10 years. Much of it boils down to what Sevier said in his post:

There is a notion among physicians that you never get someone’s attention until they have their first heart attack. Many colleges are having that heart attack right now. Revenue is falling far short of costs and there is no sense that the economic picture will turn around in the near future. As a result, they are forcing themselves to ask and answer tougher questions and to make decisions that should have been made long ago.

Let’s hope that it is not too late.