By Professor Doom
There’s a big
divide between the administrative and faculty caste on campus nowadays. Your
typical faculty will interact with admin1 on only a few occasions:
hiring, firing, and when a student complains. The gentle reader will note that
all three situations involve money: when you’re taking money out of admin
pockets, when you’ll stop doing that, and when you’re threating the possibility
of more money going into admin pockets.
The guys at the
top live in their own little bubble, and, besides money, not much can penetrate
it. They’ve given themselves splendiferous titles, huge salaries, and the
trappings of intellectualism, of academia…but they generally don’t have
anything like the latter two in reality. They also grant themselves awards for
their “bold leadership,” and give themselves many an uproarious round of
applause for Vision for
Excellence plans.
I suspect the
gentle reader doesn’t know about “Vision for Excellence,” so a quick overview.
Basically, these are incredibly self-aggrandizing plans for “excellence,” which ultimately is just growth for the institution. These plans can run hundreds of pages
long, and are completely rewritten every few years, with the previous plan, no
matter how magnificent they declare it to be, utterly abandoned. All this
plan-making takes up huge amounts of time, but that’s not a problem as our
schools are hugely overstaffed with administrators desperate to find a way to
spend all that student loan money the faculty help bring in.
Vision for
Excellence isn’t the only way admin waste their time on campus, of course.
There are grandiose new “student as customer” initiatives to follow,
pretentious “industrial partnerization” presentations, and let’s not forget the
pompous Diversity Enhancement programs as well. I must confess: I consulted a
thesaurus for the previous sentence, faking a level of diction I do not truly
possess.
I make this
admission because it relates to the latest craze our leaders have begun in
higher ed: “Design Thinking.” Even my own little fake community college, some 6
years ago, had the deanlings dress up in “agents of change” outfits for
photo-ops because of this fad.
What, pray tell
is Design Thinking and who are agents of change? The title of a recent article
describes it well enough:
Ok, perhaps a one
word definition of “boondoggle” is weak, but it’s clear this “new idea” is just
another way to soak up money:
Stanford
University’s design school (or "d.school" — their asinine
punctuation, not mine) that has become most associated with design thinking.
IDEO will charge you $399 for a self-paced, video-based design-thinking
course, "Insights
for Innovation." Stanford
will charge you $12,600
for a four-day "Design Thinking Bootcamp" called, likewise, "From
Insights to Innovation."
The student loan scam,
where schools can charge infinitely large amounts of money for infinitesimally
little education, has clearly warped the minds of our leaders in higher ed…$12,600
for a four day “bootcamp”? This could only happen after years of our leaders noticing
that it doesn’t matter what crap is in the classes, they can charge whatever
they want. So now they’re charging yearly tuition-level prices for less than a
week of “education.”
What exactly is
Design Thinking supposed to do?
It "fosters creative confidence and pushes
students beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines." It
equips students "with a methodology for producing reliably innovative
results in any field." It’s the general system for change-agent genius we’ve
all been waiting for.
It’s been a long
time since I’ve mentioned the special language (“edu-babble”) that our leaders
devolve into when discussing their latest crap innovative idea.
Basically, they use this language whenever they’re pushing something into higher
education ultimately to put more money in their pockets. The uninitiated hear
all the long words and figure they’re listening to someone smarter than
themselves but, having taken the time to parse the language, I assure you: it’s
a laughable method of covering up how they’ve got nothing to say.
So, how does this
magical Design Thinking process work?
"It’s an approach to problem-solving based on a few
easy-to-grasp principles that sound obvious: ‘Show Don’t Tell,’ ‘Focus on Human
Values,’ ‘Craft Clarity,’ ‘Embrace Experimentation,’ ‘Mindful of Process,’
‘Bias Toward Action,’ and ‘Radical Collaboration.’" He explains further
that these seven points can be reduced to what are known as the five
"modes": "Empathize," "Define,"
"Ideate," "Prototype," and "Test."
So, are there 7
principles, or 5? Because you’re simply making stuff up here, it doesn’t
matter, of course. The important thing is to declare how brilliant you are at
it, and admin have that part down.
Just because you’ve
broken something up into arbitrary categories doesn’t mean you’ve discovered
great wisdom. The other wondrous example of this in Education is Bloom’s Taxonomy, a
completely evidence-free approach to education which has done nothing for
education despite it being used for over 50 years now.
Hey, remember a
few paragraphs ago where I created the illusion of greater literacy than I have
by simply changing some words around? It’s the same idea here:
Here are the
design-thinking "modes" juxtaposed with some rules I was taught in a
freshman writing class in 1998:
Empathize Mode:
Consider Your Audience
Define Mode: Pick a
Clearly-Defined Topic, Neither Too Broad, Nor Too Narrow
Ideate Mode: Think
Prototype Mode:
Write Your Thoughts Down
Test Mode: Give What You’ve Written to Someone You
Trust to Read It and Tell You if It Sucks
Bottom line,
Design Thinking is just the same stuff we’ve already been doing, but we use
different words to describe the stuff.
And charge
$12,600 for a four day workshop covering the material on one page of a freshman
English textbook you can buy used for $10. Brilliant!
In the
end, design thinking is not about design. It’s not about the liberal arts. It’s
not about innovation in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not about
"social innovation" if that means significant social change. It’s
about commercialization. It’s about
making education a superficial form of business training.
It’s also about
setting up new fiefdoms on campus, filled with “Agents of Change” promising
more visions for excellence…just as long as the new Design Thinking Institute
on campus has at least half a dozen new Vice Presidents of Design Thinking,
each paid at least six figures. And what do these VPs do for the campus?
“…change
agents do on their campuses, beyond recruiting other people to "the
movement." A blog post titled "Only
Students Could Have This Kind of Impact" describes how in 2012 the TEDx student representatives
at Wake Forest University had done such a good job assembling an audience for
their event that it was hard to see how others would match it the next year.
But, good news, the 2013 students were "killing it!" "*THIS* is
Why We Believe Students Can Change the World," the blog announced…”
They give talks
and then announce how amazingly successful the talks were…since they live in a
bubble, there’s nobody to tell them how their activities are utterly irrelevant
and insipid. This stuff has been going on in higher education for close to a
decade now. I bet not one person in the country can identify a single new idea,
new change, brought about by Design Thinking.
And yet we’ll
keep pouring more money into this abysmal concept, even though there’s nothing
here that we didn’t already learn our first week in a basic writing course.
The article spends a
long time taking down this new fad in higher ed, but bottom line, it’s
just another boondoggle, paid for by the student loan scam. End that scam, and
we can fix this problem, like so many others in higher ed, quickly.
1. There are
also mandatory meetings where faculty and admin are in the same room, but this
does not count as “interaction” as faculty are understood to simply nod and
applaud whatever admin wants to force down faculty throats.
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