People we like

Right at this moment I’m failing to feel sympathetic towards colleagues who’ve made university marketing communications their career.

Please understand, if you’re in marketing, that none of this is personal. As an academic, I know what it’s like to have my professional practice be the topic of everyone else’s reformist idealism. And I do appreciate that my own employment depends on the work you do year round to ensure that there are students for me to teach.  In fact, I’m one of the regulars who shows up for recruitment activities because I honestly believe it’s important that we get our heads out of the sand and take seriously the thoughtful work you do.

But I’m currently suffering from some post-Valentine snarkiness about your enthusiasm for brand personality. I’ve been reading through a wide selection of style guides that have been drawn up to tell university professionals who we are and how we should maintain our distinctive (insert list of upbeat adjectives here) tone of voice in all communications with everyone. I’ve seen too many exclamation marks. And too many broken bits of writing. That are not really sentences.  And the sentimental quotes!  That are not attributed.  Please.  Just put it through Turnitin.

Reading all this, and resisting the urge to get out a red pen, I’m a bit puzzled that it hasn’t occurred to someone to measure the percentage of overall communication with customers, particularly student customers, that is under our control.  I’m sorry, but this really is the elephant in your kitchen: academics are also student communications professionals.  This is what teaching is.  We write copy. We speak. We set up websites by the bucket load. We give feedback. We answer the phone.  We send a billion emails. We handle formal correspondence.

This is why we already understand the importance of tone of voice exceptionally well: our communications are evaluated by the punters far more closely and critically than yours, and this matters in much more direct and personal ways than you can imagine—our careers depend on their satisfaction. And if that isn’t enough, we’re also the topic of quite a bit of their feedback on Facebook.

So I do get that universities need some brand recognition. Logos and taglines make sense to me, although I think everyone should be cautioned by the US study that analysed 1000 college taglines and found significant overuse of the same small number of generic terms. That’s the problem, and thankfully it’s your problem: meaningful, authentic brand differentiation in a sector regulated nationally by standards and globally by ranking instruments is really hard to achieve, especially when the core business of any university is to improve its position in schemes designed to measure the same things everywhere.

This is where brand personality seems to bounce in. It’s crossed over to educational marketing from retail and services marketing and it works well in sectors where the basic product is also somewhat undifferentiated, so at one level it seems like a good tool for the job we’re trying to do.  It’s the superficial differences that matter between one lemonade and another, one bank account and another, one phone plan and another—precisely because people buying these things aren’t fully focused on the task.  They know that real product differentiation is fairly limited; what’s at stake are slender distinctions and price point.

Brand personality actively discourages overthinking; it just wants to seduce distracted buyers in a crowded marketplace. It does this by the straightforward process of classifying stuff according to behavioural traits, in a way that’s strangely reminiscent of astrology. I’ve discovered, for example, a study that proves that fizzy drinks are exciting and mineral waters are sincere. They do have the numbers and the graphs. I’m not here to disrespect the science of any of this, as it happens. I just want to ask what it will take for us to apply it to higher education in a way that is authentic, thoughtful and appropriate to what we actually do.

Until then, a memo to marketing on behalf of Australia’s female university workers, from the professoriate to the cleaners. If you think a higher education institution’s specific brand personality really can be helped along by listing the five famous “people we like”, and not only are they all male, but two of the five are in positions that either never have or could never be held by a woman, then we have an internal communication problem that’s in the realm of the most epic fail.

But maybe you could consider thinking outside the box on this one. Here’s a suggestion for someone we could really like: Magda Szubanski.  Brave, funny, famous, popular with young people and their parents, and really prepared to stand up for something.

Related articles

• Magda Szubanski Makes An Important Valentine’s Day Announcement: I’m Gay! (perezhilton.com)

Hope’s temper

Hope must be tempered by the complex reality of the times and viewed as a project and condition for providing a sense of collective agency, opposition, political imagination, and engaged participation. … Hope expands the space of the possible and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present.

(Henry Giroux, 2004)

The Adjunct Project is one of the most important outcomes of the recent US summit on precarity in higher education. Behind it is an impressively simple plan: invite academics who work without tenure to create a cloudsourced data collection project about their pay and conditions.

Data is the central nervous system of higher education. Without it, there are no key performance indicators, no reporting, no ranking schemes, nothing for auditors to audit. If the tenured to non-tenured ratio is reaching a tipping point in the US, as Vanessa Vaile of the New Faculty Majority suggests, then this tipping point is quantitative, not impressionistic. Colleagues without tenure have two choices: rely on their employers or their labour unions to collect the data on how close we all are to the lip of the waterfall—or collect it themselves.

So I really love this pragmatic exercise of hope. Every time I drop in to have a look, there are others exploring the spreadsheet at the same time as me. It may not be viral in the sense that the magnificently nutty double rainbow video went viral, but I feel that Lee Bessette is right when she says that it’s “as viral as you can go in academic circles“.

The reason higher education has a low bar for viral is interesting. It isn’t because we lack the capacity for sudden fannish enthusiasms, or that we’re missing the infrastructure and connectivity to pass these around our networks.  It isn’t that we’re a small global workforce either.  The easy explanation is that we’re each too busy buffing up our personal resumes to achieve collective impact on anything. But that’s not especially true either: levels of collegiality and trust among peers are still very high even in demoralised workplaces. We know how to work together.

But Lee has touched on something else about higher education workers that’s relevant to the future of The Adjunct Project: we’re parochial. Despite the global intellectual horizons of our disciplines, when it comes to the meat and potato stuff of how our institutions are run, and on what terms, we don’t typically look beyond our local situations to appreciate how much we have in common with others working in higher education around the world.

When I wrote about hourly-paid academic work last week, for example, I was asked why I had used the American term “adjunct” instead of a dinky-di (look it up) Australian one. In Australia, as it happens, we typically describe short-term stop-gap hiring either as “casual” or “sessional”, and neither “contingent”, “adjunct” or “precarious” are in wide use.  But we’re obviously talking about the same thing: the emergence of a two-tier system on which the whole set-up depends, in which the conditions granted to one group are driven by the need to keep the cost of teaching to a stripped-bare minimum, and the conditions granted to the other are driven by competitive recruitment policies aimed at hiring and hanging on to academics who will drive up the research quantum. It’s not rocket science.

So fair enough, the local terms we use are the dry ground on which we try to achieve the best working conditions that we can, and at one level I’m sympathetic to the idea that professional Strine (look it up) is what we need to tackle our own problems in Australia.

But we all need to be careful in retreating to go-it-alone parochialism on the future of higher education—not just those of us in smaller education markets.  Our expanding ability to work across national borders without leaving home, empowering as this can be for student learning, also significantly increases the capacity of our institutions to source their casual teachers at the best rate they can get on the world market.

This means that we need to think beyond the goal of managing local solidarity between tenured and non-tenured workers. And those of us outside the US also need to understand how to get beyond “playing at being American”, as John Caughie put it in 1990 about the experience of watching US television from somewhere else. Playing at being American is an idea that slides across easily to the practice of joining the global conversation on higher education. We fall for the idea that we’re all included, until those awkward moments when it suddenly becomes clear that the doors have closed, and we’re out in the hallway again. Josh Boldt, for example, who designed the Adjunct Project, calls it “the beginning of a national movement by the people, for the people”—and I think in fairness, this is also the best way to view the New Faculty Majority initiative for now.  But, you know, ouch.

So I’m a huge fan of the Adjunct Project, but I also think that the problems it’s been set up to address are rapidly escaping the scope of any national movement. Next week we’re expecting a different project to collect data on the Australian casual academic experience, and the critical issue is that these initiatives need to be combined.  The financial and ethical challenges facing higher education are already complicated, and now ed tech is accelerating the prospect of “race to the bottom” hiring on a grand scale.  To get ahead of this, and to produce coherent arguments about quality working conditions that don’t fall back on either technophobia or xenophobia, we need to settle quite quickly on some common aims for sharing data, ideas and ideals on the global problem of the academic precariat.

As both Henry Giroux and JFK (yes, the American one) tell us, hope works best when it’s tempered with a realistic sense of what can be achieved. So we need the data on the adjunct/casual experience, and we need to understand university budgets, government funding, and the challenges to long-term sustainability of a traditional industry currently losing control of both its product and its market. This tempering process, tough as it is, is what makes for real, social hope, and not just escapism—wherever we are.

(And all this is a long answer to the Plashing Vole’s recent question about the hope of international worker solidarity in traditional manufacturing industries, for whom international labour supply is a given.  We have significant infrastructural advantages over other workers when it comes to international cooperation. What stops us getting it together?)

Precarious

Truth is forever twinned as having an incidence and carrying an import.  Even sciences like medicine and chemistry so physically concrete carry significance for the soul. … Microscopes become tragic in what they may reveal.

(Kenneth Cragg, The Order of the Wounded Hands, 2006)

Well, here’s something concrete that has import for the soul.  Higher education systems around the world have become dependent on the availability of a large pool of cheap labour who are prepared to teach students for a fraction of the cost of salaried and tenured employees.

The recent report by the Grattan Institute on the state of things in Australian higher education, for example, suggests that “Half or more of the academics students encounter may not have permanent academic jobs”—although it does then conclude a bit tactlessly that “Australia does not have a crisis in higher education.”

But the details of this not-crisis are now demanding to be seen. The bitterness, defensiveness and scorn, for example, in the showdown between tenured and untenured academics in the comments to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on tenure-related depression are really startling.  A gulf is opening up between those who accept that there’s an unfixable structural dependency that’s closely tied to the other problems facing higher education in relation to tuition fees, infrastructure costs, toxic student debt, and the serious risk of declining demand for college level education—and those who don’t.

There are tenured and adjunct academics on both sides of this divide. There are those with tenure who are turning two blind eyes to the fact that we work in institutions that wouldn’t be open for business at all if our adjunct colleagues didn’t show up.  It’s hourly-paid labour that holds open the door to our salaried careers; we really didn’t get here all by ourselves, even if it was hard to get here.

One of this reasons why the fantasy of deserving status can be sustained is that managers are often secretive about their budgets; and in return, many of their top-tier employees can trundle along in a state of ignorance about how the whole thing is financed, at least until they take on an administrative and staff hiring role.  (The other reason is role vanity, and we should just give that up.)

But this innocence is the same reason why people can lobby seriously for tenure track opportunities for all adjuncts. It’s an important goal, just an impossible one.  The tough fact is that we can’t afford the staff that we need to teach the students we just recruited. How we got here is anyone’s guess, but here is where we are.

Then there are those who believe the problem is very serious, but know it can’t readily be fixed without taking the whole system offline and trying to come up with a better one. Many scholars in positions of responsibility are now campaigning to fix the most damaging elements of the situation. Michael Berube, for example, is the current president of the MLA, and attended the recent summit on adjunct issues held by the New Faculty Majority in Washington (if you missed this really inspiring event, it was covered by an excellent social media team, and #newfac12 will take you to links).*

Like other high profile bloggers, he has written up the event; he also has a position of significance in the academy, and his support is important. Here’s his summary of the American version of the problem, the scale of which is really sobering:

Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities. Many of them are working at or under the poverty line, without health insurance; they have no academic freedom worthy of the name, because they can be fired at will; and, when fired, many remain ineligible for unemployment benefits …

The problem that realists face is this: to try to ameliorate this bad situation can look like a half-measure at best, and collusion at worst. Can any version of the adjunct career can be reconstructed as a professionally rewarding path, and one that is not sealed off from the tenure track? Trying to improve the status of work that has no prospects, no rank, and no resources is a really tough call, and it’s made worse by the fact that the existence of this second-tier of employment is actively covered up in university marketing.

Compare this to edtech, another polarising feature of the higher education landscape. You can at least find people who will put a positive spin on edtech, and on the ways in which it offers transformative learning experiences that are Open, Free, Easy and Amazing (what happened to OpenClass, by the way?). So even if you suspect that your institution is interested in an LMS with all the user-friendliness of an aircraft carrier because somewhere down the line it will save them from the cost of a new building, at least edtech has its advocates, and there’s something to debate. And there’s sure to be a photo of a student with a laptop in your marketing literature.

By contrast, there is nothing whatsoever said in public about the merits of adjunctification. It doesn’t feature in university marketing at all.  And as universities are currently prepared to promote the way the grass grows on their campuses, you can be sure that this silence from marketing is pretty significant. There is no good news story here.

So it’s about time each of us with tenure stops avoiding what the microscope will reveal. We should know the details that marketing prefers not to promote: the tenure-to-adjunct ratio in our own Faculties, schools and departments, or the calculations used to pay our colleagues. How long is an adjunct hour? (Most will tell you that in Australia it’s currently three times as long as the normal ticking-clock hour, because of the other elements bundled in with the contact hours, including preparation and consultation, and some marking). What kind of resources are available, including professional development? Are our hourly paid colleagues fairly represented and respected in all the committee and decision-making processes that affect their working lives? And what support can we offer, in practical ways, to create better professional opportunities if this is what they’re seeking?

And if we’re told that it’s not our business, then we should ask again.  Because we’re not in this anywhere near equitably, but we are in it together–even in Australia, where there is no crisis, if they don’t show up, we can’t manage on our own.

*If you’re an hourly paid academic and want to contribute to a crowdsourced document on working conditions in Australia, a model is Josh Boldt’s blog post and associated Google doc where US adjuncts are collecting data on their pay and conditions. It’s truly astonishing how little is known about this.

Turtles hatching

Amid all the excitement about whether or not Apple have revolutionized textbooks, or reformed the whole planetary education system, or are just pressuring schools and families to buy iPads,* my colleagues are planning to launch three hundred first year university students into public blogging. Might as well do this while everyone’s busy looking the other way.

It’s a complicated decision in terms of future digital waste.  And then there’s social risk. There are people who don’t want to be identified in the public domain, for reasons of their own, but assessment does require us to know who they are. Despite the impression given in university marketing, people come to university study from a wide variety of social backgrounds, including our international students, and their confidence in being able to express and think about their own values without offending others is important to us. Then there are those who will find writing in public to be discouraging or uncomfortable, at a vulnerable time. University isn’t compulsory; and any compulsory activity can have the effect of making the whole thing seem worth leaving.

So we need be very clear about why we think this is a useful challenge to take on: why learning how to produce public writing that others want to read is a legitimate university-level activity. Critics of college blogging as an alternative to formal term papers have some stern things to say, as reported this week in the New York Times: “We don’t pay taxes so kids can talk about themselves and their home lives.” Ouch. We need to have an answer to this criticism. (In a very fired up response to Matt Richtel on her blog, Cathy Davidson explains with conviction and evidence why students benefit from learning to write in modes other than formal academic writing, just as we do.)

But still there’s the obvious risk of some kind of dint in the university’s public reputation if the blogging focus turns out to be on what students find lame, confusing or disappointing about their university experience. There are certainly conversations that happen in first year class discussions (as there are on Facebook) that wouldn’t be any university’s preferred mode of self-presentation—but really, these are also signs that things are working as they should.

In the privacy of the classroom, we offer a frontline opportunity for new students to reflect and to rehearse the expression of grievance in a way that achieves change. This is a professional skill that’s valuable in most situations. So much of the trench humour in our conversations is about the recognition that grievances are part of professional life, and we should all expect to need the resilience to deal with frustration. Let’s face it, none of us can find anywhere to park either.

But when writing in public, there’s much more opportunity—and perhaps more incentive—to descend to snark.  Writing alone, it’s easy to forget that the situation that seems deserving of your criticism involves real people, doing the best that they can do, under circumstances that aren’t obviously easier than your own.

The standard institutional response is to produce a list of rules, that are inevitably both patronising and inadequate. In trying to cover all circumstances without prejudice, rules for online conduct treat everyone as equally delinquent. Our view is a bit different: that the risk of public writing is an opportunity to begin a wide conversation about how to sustain high standards of empathy, trust and respect in public life. What does it mean to treat the quality of the online environment as one for which we all have shared responsibility, just as we try to do with our physical environment? What’s the best way to explain that trash talk and roadside trash have some things in common, in terms of their impact on human flourishing?  Can we do this while still supporting cultures of dissent that are inventive, authentic, and to speak their truth to power?

These are big questions, so I’m taking most comfort from the colleague who reminds us gently that we, and they, must be allowed to fail: the risk of setback is no good reason to retreat.

And I’ve been watching videos of turtles hatching.

Freshly hatched turtles are one of the most likeable among natural phenomena. Tourists flock to them. Unlike many animal young who emerge into a nurturing and closely managed environment, turtles go it alone. The first thing they face is threat. What we love about them isn’t their cuteness, but their optimism. On they charge, up and down the sandhills, dodging seagulls, taking three goes to make it through the waves, and having done all that, they still have to deal with sharks.

But as they struggle, turtles are learning something really important about their location that’s critical to their species survival. They each need to make their own way across the sand in order that the successful few know where to return for breeding, so nature makes brutal allowances for the fact that many will fail. It’s confronting to human observers to watch this calculation play out, but it’s exactly how turtles survive.

The turtles don’t remind me of our new students, as it happens—for the simple reason that most of them will make it, with plenty of help available. The stubborn optimism of the turtle is actually a vision for the long-term horizon for education innovation. Hundreds of academics have made it through the experience of introducing students to public writing online (and if you want to see a really bold project for even younger students, check out David Mitchell’s fantastic QuadBlogging extravaganza).

So as we take our turn at trying something that we haven’t exactly done before, without much institutional help, our job is to make like turtles: to keep going when it’s difficult, trusting in our instinct that the timing for our run is right, and success is somewhere out there in front of us.

"Almost there", by jimmyweee, flickr (CC)

* Note to Apple marketing: if you want to persuade parents that your vision of educational transformation is authentic, those iPads you show in the hands of excited children in your imaginary classroom need to have more peanut butter on them, and a few should have either cracked glass, or marker pen on the cover, or stickers, or all three.  At least one should be shown left on the floor where someone is about to step on it. Just a tip.

Step right up

I’ve been asked why I’m so bothered by the invitation to sit in a dunk tank as part of our orientation activities for new students. Surely dunk tanks fall into the category of harmless fun? Don’t they?

OK, here are a few reasons, without even beginning to think about their resonance among students who’ve had enough of high school because of the bullying and are hoping for something better from higher education.

First, this is how they’re promoted:

Does Dunking Your Teacher or Boss in a Dunk Tank Make You Feel Like You Got Revenge?

Most events with a dunk tank rental involve either a boss or teacher stepping up to the tank. This is when you can normally judge their popularity by how long the line gets. So does this let you get revenge on them for the hard times they put you through?

You can’t fault the candour; I’m just not sure it’s the best way to start our relationship with new university students. What message are we sending them when we do this, especially our international students?  Dunk us now, because you’ll be mad at us later?

Secondly, I don’t buy the Bakhtinian bonhomie of the whole thing. The dunk tank says “Working in universities doesn’t make us dull or formal, and once you’ve dunked us you’ll have a pretty fair idea of what we look like without our clothes on, so that’s sure to have some kind of benefit in the long run.”  But I don’t think we have the first idea what we’re pitching for here, unless it’s the traditionally overplayed Australian value of egalitarianism—in which case it’s a pretty unconvincing attempt to pass off our power as the exception to the rule of our everyday cameraderie. If we really want to get serious about undermining rank and privilege in universities, this is a long road, not a carnivalesque sideshow.

And the sideshow element is the source of my third objection to this rubbish.  The problem with history is that if you know nothing about it, and care even less, it has a way of showing up at awkward moments. (Another example that has come up recently is a university branding strategy that mentions winning “hearts and minds” without a trace of irony.)

So where did dunk tanks come from? How long have they been around? And is there a reason why the mesmerising YouTube genre of dunk tank videos starts to seem a little samey after a while?  Sure, I was expecting that it would mostly be women being hurled into the tank, and I wasn’t at all surprised to read that (brace yourself) sometimes men even pay money for women to go into the tank wearing bikinis! Well, gosh.

But there’s something else.

Far from representing a longstanding tradition of allowing the uppity worker to take aim at the boss, dunk tanks have a really ugly racial history. Denis Mercier’s essay on 19th and 20th century fairground attractions that used African Americans as the source of sport for white folks gives a very different view of the relationship of power and humiliation to money-making:

The target games found in traveling carnival shows, seashore resorts and fairgrounds throughout the nation were among the most racially aggressive of all popular games. One popular carnival game which featured names like “Dump the Nigger,” “African Dip,” or “Coon Dip” did not require directly hitting a Black person, but hitting the target device attached to a delicately balanced plank upon which a Black person sat. The target, if hit squarely, caused the sitter to be dumped into the tank below.

In several accounts of amusement park history, the sitter’s role is spelled out more clearly. African American men and boys were hired to spend the day on the platform revving up the crowd of (white) patrons with insults, just enough that their eventual dunking seemed reasonable revenge for the taunting—in segregated venues that wouldn’t admit them or their families as paying customers. So the dunk tank recruited those who were most likely to experience racial violence from crowds into a bitter simulation of asking for it. If you know even one thing about lynching history you’ll see why this is a ruse of staggering cruelty.

From 1936 advertisement for African Dip

And before we’re too quick to dispatch all this to the remote past, here’s a quietly horrifying photograph from 1965:

"Boy Working Dunk Tank", Dallas, 1965

Are we having fun yet?

So what I’ve learned from all this (apart from the fact that there’s a limit to the number of dunk tank videos you can watch without becoming slightly depressed) is that dunk tanks don’t bother me because I think we should be above this kind of thing, or because it’s undignified, or because it’s not what universities are supposed to be about.

And I don’t even think this excursion into historical poor taste reveals some secret truth about campus racism, or racism at corporate parties and the other fun events where dunk tanks might show up—any more than I think Prince Harry (or whichever one it was) is secretly a Nazi sympathiser because he thought that was a fun way to dress for a party with his mates. The fact that someone in marketing doesn’t know where dunk tanks came from isn’t a gotcha moment—a week ago, neither did I.

Nope. It bothers me because it feels as though we’re signing up for the sitter’s role out of a sense of helplessness as we lurch into the uncertain future of demand-driven funding.  We read every day that higher education is in crisis, that we’re out of touch, that big publishing can deliver educational content more impressively than us, and that even the final thankless vestige of our professionalism—academic judgment—can be exercised more efficiently by automated grading bots. To this we’ve now added a generalised fear of underprepared students as flighty customers, who will vote with their feet unless we can catch and keep their attention.

So instead of welcoming our students calmly and warmly, and letting them know that we have what it takes to support them in changing the world they will enter when they graduate, universities are turning to bad taste party stunts, and we’re making ourselves look desperate as we do — desperate for their approval, and in a strange way, desperate for their protection.

This isn’t what they want from us, and it really isn’t the best that we can do.

… and the ugly

What to make of this morning’s news that a senior academic in an administrative position breached anti-solicitation guidelines at the University of Sydney?

Well, first of all, it’s not as colourful as it sounds. Noirish images come to mind, but the reality is more pedestrian. Faced with the need to boost enrolments, a department with an elite reputation based on a restrictive entry requirement made the decision to fish outside their exclusion zone. More than 100 students who had made other choices involving other institutions, who didn’t quite meet the department’s published requirements for entry—the basis of its reputation—found themselves holding a letter offering a guaranteed way in.

If this attempt to change an informed choice made in good faith and accepted by another party had come to us from the world of real estate, say, we’d rightly call it a grubby tactic. It’s a kind of reverse gazumping, designed to exploit the cooling-off period between the decision and the contract. So this fishing expedition disguised as flattery is particularly shabby because it preys on vulnerable and inexperienced consumers for whom everything about universities is new, unfamiliar and often intimidating.

Why wouldn’t you turn in your guaranteed place at the institution you’d planned to attend, for an offer that looks more illustrious at another? Especially if it’s addressed to you by name, personally Montblanc-ed by someone with a title and a senior position, who seems to know something about the application choices you made?  It’s not exactly a 419 scam, is it?  Is it?

Well, partly it is. It’s from someone who doesn’t know you, but is pretending that they do. It’s based on a bogus interest in your welfare, and it promises to enhance your situation in the near future by giving you access to a rare opportunity.  You didn’t ask for it—somehow, your correspondent found you. It’s a mailshot trying to look like a one-off personal correspondence, and it’s effective more often than you would think.

So probably the main difference is in the spelling. (At least, you’d hope so, given the business.)

What makes solicitation like this so painful for potential students, and their families, is that the whole decision to attend university is already fraught with uncertainty. Solicitation converts celebration into indecision, and it seems to require very little ethical care. Institutions spruiking their product because they’re trying to meet sales targets of their own can justify what they do on the basis of a competitive market. They have no responsibility to the customer to explain the true cost—including the cost of a last-minute change of plan. And they’re clearly playing around with privacy when it comes to student data.

When this happens, a university degree becomes just another product that can be sold on the simple risk of ending up without one, urged onto the customer on the same basis as other industries sell life insurance and funeral plans: through an undefined fear that you’ll need one later on. But at least other kinds of businesses who are debt-generators are required by various industry codes of conduct to speak carefully and clearly with borrowers about their ability to repay. Universities aren’t required to counsel about debt at all, nor are they required to consider the emotional impact of their solicitation practices.

But they should be.

Related articles

• Uni caught out trying to poach students using private database (smh.com.au)

Knockout personality

What a lot of brands are learning is that it’s not always necessary for an app to do something useful all the time. In fact, utilitarian apps are kind of boring. That’s not what consumers want from a brand they engage with.

(“Adding brand personality to a mobile app is important“)

It’s the eerily quiet week of the year for Australian universities. Across our campuses the Christmas decorations are being boxed up. It’s easier to park, and harder to find coffee.

But even though it all looks like a bit of a blank canvas, the customer engagement units are limbering up.  This is the week that potential commencing students (and their families) adjust to the reality of the high school results that were released half-way through December.  It’s a really difficult time for many who thought they were headed in one direction and find themselves spun around and pointing in another. And for the same reason, it’s a tough time for universities who are trying to convert offers into accepted places and work out exactly who’s coming and who’s not.

Most academics stay low and use the offpeak season to catch up on research and writing, but a lucky few are drawn into internal planning for the keynote customer engagement events that will launch the academic year, still a month away.  More and more these show up the flaws in our fragile arrangements for shared governance of university culture, as marketing and recruitment departments, co-opted academics and hired student helpers each try to come to terms with what the others think the university experience ought to look like.

Orientation Week is shaping up to be a particularly awkward moment.  At one level, it’s when new students are walked through practicalities about how to read the timetable, select classes, buy books, and access support.  Boring and utilitarian?  Probably.  But also essential if everyone’s going to get to where they need to go. There’s always a bit too much PowerPoint, but student helpers do a great job in cheering everyone up: they provide exactly the kinds of advice, encouragement and survival tips that new recruits need, and that neither marketers nor academics can credibly provide.

Student orientation has also always had another element, however—a sort of sideshow alley of food, entertainment, clubs to join, with a dash of student politics tossed in. Although the specifics vary from system to system, the role of the midway is to reassure students that it’s not all about classes and cramming for exams; being a college student is also about making friends, joining in, and having fun.

We know these are key dimensions to the student experience, and in general we all think it’s good that students lead whatever balanced lives they can wrestle from the juggle of paid work, commuting, study and family responsibilities.  If they want to meet up with other students who abseil etc., we can help; and in 2012, Australian universities are back in the game of being able to charge a flat fee for campus services and amenities including those that can make a real difference to student welfare — child care, financial advice, food services.

You’d think that as we’ve done all this pretty well up till now, we’d leave it alone. But all of a sudden we’re taking an approach to student-focused events that includes the kinds of hired facilities and activities you might expect to find at children’s parties or, as someone pointed out to me this morning, on cruiseships. Jumping castles. Donut [sic] eating competitions. Dunking machines. (And if you doubt the potential of a dunking machine to represent what university life is all about, this video will set you straight.)

Even though research on student engagement clearly locates this in the classroom (or online) within the practice of actually learning, it’s getting harder in universities to tell the difference between student engagement and more conventional routines and instruments of customer engagement: marketing, loyalty programs, feedback loops.  So perhaps we need to get back to first principles on this engagement business, as this is slippage of real significance.

When we say we engage with students, what we mean at a commonsense level is that we listen to them, and think about them, and get to know them quite well. In terms of more formally understood definitions of learner engagement, we try as hard as university policies and our workloads permit to create opportunities that foster their imagination, develop their resilience and reward their independence. We know that the most engaging experiences are the ones that are genuinely challenging, not just entertaining in the short-term. We really value what Michael Feldstein calls “assisted stretching”, that he places at the heart of his convincing argument that the “zone of proximal curiosity” is where real learning occurs.

So we have a legitimate investment in the tone that universities set for student engagement, and it really would be worth consulting us before going any further down the It’s a Knockout path. We can tell you about the kinds of students who will come away from these managed-fun experiences feeling bored, alienated, nervous or irritable.  And it’s very important to us that the values that are displayed at orientation events are aligned with what and how we teach.

The alternative is that we keep quiet, and tacitly agree that it’s OK to subordinate the whole enterprise of higher learning to a style of customer engagement that underestimates the intelligence and diversity of our students, and makes it look like we found our brand personality* on Wipeout, or perhaps Funniest Home Videos. 

* And if you’re not sure what brand personality is or how far-reaching its aspirations within current marketing practices, here’s the definition from Tourism Australia, who have the breathtaking responsibility of managing the brand personality for the whole country—which is high spirited, down to earth, irreverent, welcoming, since you ask.  No, really.