The State of (Your) Industry
This feels like an apt metaphor for the current state of higher education.
Continuing some thoughts from the last entry, it’s no secret higher education is in flux. People like to think it’s simply a product of changing technology and inflationary cost increases.
Of ideological and cultural realignment.
Of shifting market forces and expectations.
Of the adoption of a customer service model and the decades long effort to defund public education.
Of disconnection from fiscal realities and demographic cliffs.
Maybe it’s all these things. Maybe it’s none.
Maybe it’s the fact that higher ed was never supposed to be job training and simply trying to add being a certification device to its original design has led to its undoing.
Maybe it’s the standard process of moving career educators into administrative roles that require different skills set than they possess.
Maybe it’s the more recent trend of handing those administrative roles to private sector executives with zero understanding regarding the point of education.
Maybe it’s the willingness of people on all sides to make their takes on college education political punchlines and punches thrown.
Maybe the system really must move to embrace a 21st century ethos if it’s going to survive.
Maybe we are on the precipice of losing the very real benefits of humans being educated on how to be better humans by other humans.
The state of the union in higher ed is more shadow than light.
More questions than answers.
More business than usual.
More worry than momentum.
More corporate than collective.
I don’t know the upshot of these musings. All I know is contained in the last line of the meeting informing me that my position was being eliminated.
“You simply don’t fit the direction the school is headed.”
I don’t know what that means, because I don’t know what that future looks like. And I’m don’t believe the people who made that pronouncement know either.