Category: ideas

More on Godin’s higher ed melt-down: curated comments from the Chronicle

Seth Godin may not accept comments on his blog, but The Chronicle of Higher Education does. So if you want to re-read Godin’s controversial blog post — “The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)” (discussed here and by a few other higher ed bloggers earlier this week) — and you wish to comment on it, you can do so on The Chronicle‘s virtual op-ed pages, The Chronicle Review. (You must register to comment, however.)

So far, Godin’s post there has garnered 30 responses. Many of the comments consist of little more than the usual academic snark you find on the Chronicle’s blogs — “[W]hy on earth is this in the Chronicle? Editors, please contact me if you are running short on copy, happy to oblige!” — and the counter-snark: “Woooooh! Lots of heads in the sand here. He’s not an academic like us and he doesn’t write like us and he says things we don’t want to hear. So what he says must be worthless.”

But a few of the comments are worth reading. If you prefer not to wade through them, I’ve pulled a few excerpts that I thought readers of this blog might appreciate:

… I think some of you may be missing the point, which is contained in the parenthetical part of the article’s title: This is an analysis of how the situation looks *to a marketer*. That’s a singularly relevant viewpoint in our current marketing-dominated culture. And the fact that Godin’s overall prognosis echoes what a lot of the rest of us are seeing and saying based on other ways of looking adds a valuable element of consensus to the conversation.

***

… I think Seth is spot on — higher education has always moved at a glacial pace in adapting to change, especially at large schools or those that are tradition-bound.

Our society is changing at an incredible pace these days and higher ed is not keeping up very well, especially four year institutions, because we’ve never been well equipped to do so. So marketing has substituted for substantive change in how we operate and educate. Personally, I’d love to see the money spent on those glossy mailers put into my departmental budget instead, but I’m certain that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

… I am incredibly frustrated with the idea that more expensive = better education. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation. Half the battle for students being successful is finding the institution with the right fit for their needs, whether that’s an expensive Ivy or a inexpensive community college.

***

The access to information afforded by the digital age has probably increased the importance of college education. Increased access to information has also increased access to misinfomation [sic]. The staggering increase in the amount information readily available to large numbers of people does not speak to the increase in the potency of the information. It says nothing about the increase in validated knowledge. More information is not better information. The critical function of college education is to help students build a solid foundation of validated knowledge and to develop critical and analytical skills to identify the solid knowledge in the unevaluated mass of information that threatens to overwhelm us.

***

I believe his message boils down simply to this; “market forces are increasingly coming to the world of higher education and non-selective schools better have a strong value proposition and differentiators in order to remain successful”. Those who believe that the already-broke government (federal and state in most of the USA) will continue providing huge subsidies are in for a rude awakening.

***

… [O]ur arrogance combined with our colossal ignorance provides an impenetrable wall around our campus cabbage patch and their marketing, advertising and PR dullards continue to tweet each other from across the room about fantastic ideas that have just popped into their moussed heads, that is when they aren’t scheduling their next tanning and teeth-whitening appointments.

And we wonder why the rest of world goes on without us? American navel-gazing has reached epidemic proportions and the creaking of our cultural Titanic CAN be heard across our campuses, but only if you are listening and I’m sorry to report that the Ipod earplugs will have to come out first.

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.”