This post is the third in a series of reflections on my recent experience at the annual AAC&U conferences in DC.
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I can think of no metaphor so frequently used to describe the internal workings of universities than the silo. I didn?t keep a tally of the number of times the metaphor was floated at the AAC&U meetings, but I can recall
three presentations whose slides included images of silos, so there?s a hard number. I suppose that, though I?d heard the silo metaphor many times before, I had reason to consider it anew in light of the setting. There, it became visual, embodied, real.
From the silo reference, me/you/we are to understand that institutions of higher ed, in their many-splendored, multiprogrammatic, ?interdisciplinary,? intra-departmental incarnations, are atomistic. And in this silo?d atomism, campus divisions and departments do a poor job of such basic organizational functioning as pooling resources, coordinating efforts, and communicating with one another.
The silo?d campus has an additional meaning. It refers also to the divisions that exist between different campus constituencies?namely, between faculty and administration. Having spent the last year at an intersection of campus roles that has included a position in a
teaching and learning center (which could be understood as quasi-administration), while also teaching classes, I thought I had a sense of this, a view from two camps. But suits, hairstyles, budgets and rigid postures aside, I wouldn?t have drawn a hard line between faculty and administrators. Different? Yes. How? Vague-aries pertaining to generation and investment in bureaucracy.
So it hit me hard on day 2 or 3 of the conference when, sitting on the floor of a packed-out meeting room, one of the presenters made the usual jaunt through the silo metaphor.? Every seat in the room was filled, forcing latecomers onto the floor and up against the walls. Indian-style in business slacks, I wiggled awkwardly to catch a view of the associated farm scene being projected onto the screen, peeking between heads and bodies, occasionally knocking into the loafer to my left.
I mean in the most neutral way possible that the silo reference was not the remarkable thing. It was the contrast.
At that point in the week, most of the luncheons, sessions, and receptions I?d attended had as their primary audience administrators. Sessions were facilitated by current and former presidents, provosts, and higher-ups and addressed to the same. Luncheons with white linened-tables fed a monochromatic sea of administrators twiddling away on smart phones with fixedly dour expressions and some amount of aloofness. Speakers and panelists addressed questions like, ?Should higher ed have a shared degree profile?? and ?Is the quality of a degree defined by norm-reference or criterion-reference?? or ?How does a liberal arts education build civic capital??
In short, these were people apart and above asking the kinds of questions that make sense from the top. I saw them as birds flying over their campuses (and systems of campuses), familiar with the multiple and varied routes from Student Life to The Business School to the American Studies Program to The Honors College. They talked about the meaning of the sum total of the life their universities and the total of those lives and The University. And they did this centrally?in featured program slots and spacious rooms and mostly with each other.
From the floor of Independence BC, the view was quite different. The small room, tucked down a hallway, was at capacity. Faculty in scarves and purples and tweed and chest length beards crowded around doorways, stood against walls, crouched and stretched out on the floor for a session featuring a handful of presentations a la the TED talk. The audience engaged with the speakers, responding audibly with grunts of affirmation and laughter. They nodded, took notes, and otherwise simply focused on the presentations. Session theme: ?Reclaiming a democratic vision for college learning?one student, one classroom, one institution at a time??
< AACU Session View from the Floor >
The contrasts were glaring? tone: reserved/engaged; color: lack/luster, number: attended/overflowing; topic: system-centered/process-centered; view: top-down/bottom-up, and on.
Instructors and administrators seemed not only to be inhabiting silos with separate cultures (language included there) but also different ways of seeing and being in them. I left the session light from laughter and heartened by the existence of interesting people doing interesting things focused on learning, but also pessimistic. For lack of a concrete way to put it, I focused on the symbolism of having a lively session like this?participants, content, and all?marginalized to tiny sideroom.? Was it not obvious to organizers that a session like this would generate widespread interest from faculty? If not, isn?t that itself indicative of a disconnect?
With this mindset, I dutifully proceeded to the Presidents? Luncheon that I was scheduled to attend immediately following the session from the floor. It was, in many ways, a reversion to the afore-implied drowsy atmosphere of sessions for administrators. But different.
The featured speaker, Sister Rosemarie Nassif, was there on behalf of the Department of Education,
discussing President Obama?s address to the U of Michigan from that very morning. In it, he?d hit the predictables on the state of the economy and the loss of manufacturing jobs, the need for greater access to higher education, the burden of student loans, etc.? Nassif?s remarks included lots of lists?first point, second, and third?and a handout comparing US educational attainment with other countries. And somewhere in that mix she said this:
?We become part of new cultures and forget the cultures we came out of that we?re trying to help.?
When she?d concluded her remarks, a series of presidents and provosts stood up with questions and statements of concern on the outline of President Obama?s plan to increase federal student aid. They struggled to understand how overtures related to increasing enrollment and decreasing debt would work out practically. The Administration understood, didn?t they, that whenever the government increased student aid, the states decreased it, resulting in a net gain of zero for the schools and students?
Nassif did what should could?and what could she do, standing there as a representative of a plan that had only been alluded to in a speech that morning??to field their concerns. A former university president herself, she tried <it seemed to me> to remember the culture she?d come out of from the view a few rungs up the ladder.
And in this altogether humanizing way, from their linened-tables, bespectacled and between, the university administrators did the same: expressed genuine concern for the cultures (and the students inhabiting them) that they?d come out of.
I felt an unexpected sympathy. How difficult it is to have agency in a situation like this. How massive the system of int
erconnections of courses and curricula and accreditation and financial aid. How much energy it all takes.
In fact, our silos are connected, and if we fail to see how, perhaps it?s a matter of scale. At any given university, the silos represent different constituencies?staff, faculty, administration?or different departments or divisions or programs, and on. And each of those institutions is a silo unto itself or others like it once you zoom out?community colleges vs. liberal arts vs. R1 universities, public vs. private, commuter vs. residential.? But stepping back all the way to the level of social institutions (i.e. economy, polity, education), the silos are all connected to each other as part of a economic-educational complex.
Nassif?s line about becoming part of a new culture and forgetting your origins is akin to becoming an instructor or an expert and forgetting what it?s like to come to something for the first time, to be a novice, to be unfamiliar with the terminology, the landscape and topography. Forming solutions to the oft-identified ills of higher ed (the ones that we seem to discuss on loop like the student-learner problem, credentialing vs. equipping, access, retention, the arbitrariness of grades and on) requires a systemic view and approach. It also requires those who have developed such a view to remember what it was like to be on the ground, in the trees, rather than flying over the university (or the systems of universities) and seeing it as an interconnected whole. And so it also requires translation of that view across all levels of the strata?how do these structures fit together and what are they for? The challenge is in conveying that aerial view in a message about the interconnections that does more than endorse the status quo. Rather, the explanation of how our silos are connected must also ask, how do these interconnections hinder (or facilitate) the goal of education?how do these connections develop learners?
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Source: http://www.sociologize.net/?p=1098
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