Category: higher education

Friday Five: viral edition

Viral is all the rage, it seems — in video, in marketing, in sickness. Or at least it’s enough of a rage to give me enough Friday Five fodder.

  • Let’s start off with SCADshorts, a viral video campaign developed by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Developed by the Dandy Dwarves, a group of SCAD alumni who put their video production education to work, the campaign consists of a series of oddball videos — one a month — that are part of a puzzle prospective students must solve in order to win an iPod. Morgan Davis of erelevant offers his take on this clever campaign.
  • More about viral video from Karine Joly, who discusses how Vancouver Film School made the most of one graduate’s video, “Piece of Mind” (YouTube link), by creating and releasing on YouTube it’s own “making of” video (YouTube link). “In this 7-minute video,” Karine writes, “VFS manages to let this talented student promotes the Canadian institution, its professors and its offering – all this done by presenting the work that went into ‘Piece of Mind.'”
  • Great writing, unfiltered. Seth Godin extols the benefits of infectious prose that is free from corporate filters, and creates a mini-virus by uncovering some pretty decent, linkable bloggage. “The filter,” Godin writes, “is important, sometimes. It keeps us focused and on time and from veering too far in the wrong direction. But in a Long Tail world, the filter is actually better off gone.”
  • In what we hope will become a viral campaign across campuses, 70 presidents of U.S. colleges and universities have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, a move to make college campuses more sustainable.
  • Virality is not confined to cyberspace. Take the underground press movement. It’s alive and well on a campus where you’d least expect it: right here at UMR, a predominantly engineering- and technology-oriented university. While the official student newspaper (The Missouri Miner) is threatening to sue the university and student council for cutting the paper’s budget, a group of students have created an alternative newspaper called The Mineshaft. (Tag line: “Where the real news is buried.”) This weekly publication sprang up in December. In the fine tradition of Soviet samizdat newspapers, The Mineshaft is printed on 8 1/2-by-11 paper, photocopied and distributed throughout campus. All the writers use pseudonyms, but according to the latest edition, that may change. (Writes Sybil, the editor in chief: “While we initially thought that anonymity would allow for all discussion to be on our content, we have found instead that the issue of who we are has just become even more controversial.”) The writing and reporting isn’t terrific — as I said, most of our students are here to study engineering, and we have no journalism program — but the spirit behind The Mineshaft is right.

The graying of the American college president

An American Council of Education report released earlier this week predicts “a major turnover in the leadership of American colleges and universities in the next five to 10 years” due to coming retirements of many college and university leaders, USA Today reports.

“Nearly half of the 2,148 leaders of public and private institutions who responded to the ACE survey were at least 60 years old,” the newspaper reports. “Only 14% of presidents were over 60 when ACE first surveyed presidents in 1986.”

The ACE report also presents the job of a university president in a less than flattering light. The decline in state funding, increased competition for students and dollars, and other factors make the job less appealing than in years past. The USA Today report quotes Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity University in Washington, D.C., who “said increasing demands of the job raise the question of whether the next generation will want to take the place of retiring presidents.”

“Time was when a college presidency seemed like a pretty nice job. The details were not quite so clear, nor the pressures,” [McGuire] said. “I think by illustrating both the range of tasks and the nature of the pressures, I think it raises some interesting issues about how the next generation would even view these jobs.

“On the one hand, they’re very prestigious. They pay well,” McGuire said. “On the other hand, there’s an enormous amount of stress. And that could be off-putting.”