We have met the enemy and it is NOT powerpoint! (paraphrased NYT 27 Apr 2010)

I had a couple chuckles yesterday while reading the front page article in the Times about the surfeit of Powerpoint presentations and analyses at the command and field headquarters in Afghanistan. The complex analysis of the labyrinth in the war zone looked curiously like the multiplicity of problems that are besetting higher education at present. The power point mantra continued on the Stephen Colbert Report concerning what aliens (via the Stephen Hawking pronoucement) will do when they meet the earthlings. Allegely, what they will find about all of us that we can use Power point, among a couple of other not-that-life sustaining items.

Well, this blog is not about Power point, although I have seen and used my share during the last 20 years in higher education at various venues and confabs. Rather, the spagetti-like concentric circles on the General's graph represented a complex skein of problems that seemed at similar times to be non-connected but yet tightly bundled. I have often felt this way during the last year as I have observed the higher education system at a distance: nothing seems related, yet everything is woven together. Pull one string and a bunch of others become loose and/or tangled. Perhaps the only way to look at this gummed up ball or balls of fish line is to sit by the river's edge and quietly and zen like take time to look at the trees between stints of unraveling the tiny strands.

Last week I mentioned that much of long term maintenance had been put off into a deferred capacity so that colleges could spend funds on a plethora of items that appeared to be more important at the time. These various items could fall into one or more of the following categories: mission creep, profligate spending, and genuine fear of one thing or person or another. During the past ten to fifteen years, I had occasion to stay in residence hall rooms for either college or non profit confences or alumni gatherings. Each hall looked and felt like they had when I was a college student (let's just say that I served that time between the crazy 60s and the go-go 80s). While there was not much need for more than a record player and maybe a mixer in my rooms back then, today's students has a range of every expanding electronic and other equipment and wardrobe acccoutrements that don't fit nicely in the non-upgraded rooms. During an alumni weekend, the hall seemed the same (except men and women shared the same, not very private bathrooms, legally now) as back then. I could fin only one plug for which to plug in my modest electronic supplies of a cell phone and a hair dryer and had to contort myself into a pretzel position on the floor under a desk to plug it in.

Colleges could avoid and decided to forgoe deferred boring maintenance projects like new rugs and double paned windows so that funds could be spent on the areas that were more on display: shiny computer console rooms, well equipeed gyms, boutique style dining halls and shuttle buses to downtown shopping. In a room at a major research university, my middle aged roomate and I (and about 20 similar women) shared a gang bathroom, while the room itself had exactly two outlets, one of which was for a refrigerator that had to sit in front of the double beds with the cords hanging over the covers. But I did see a lovely large football stadium and various recreational areas and courts outside of my windows and the meals were served in a club med style of buffet tables.

Mission creep is another area where colleges and universities have become unfettered. While I am a stalwart supporter of expanding the canon to women, diverse, queer and other writers, it appeared that the academy could not approach the traditional departments regarding the inclucation of those writers within the traditional canon; therefore, additional departments were staffed focusing on those areas. Efforts to integrate the curriculum with more diversity has met with mostly inaction and no administrator worth her salt wants to be the one to try to bring the groups together in one department or to facilitate the move for all those faculty to teach a group of writers or thinkers interchangeably.

The community college, bless them, have become the be all, end all to the areas that they serve. Whether laid off worker, college bound students wanting to save a few bucks, seniors looking to learn Italian or for just a place to hang out, homeless looking for a place to rest, read and eat (one thing about colleges-secret-you can always find some couches, bathrooms, magazines and some free food), and local kids wanting to swim, learn to play the French horn or skateboard the carefully groomed sides of flower beds. Often there are staff and programs, and not just at the community college-the university has a plethora of little closets housing one arcane program or another) that are known only to a few people, if any.

All of these programs take money and it can certainly be said that many colleges are lean and mean and staff serve a variety of functions, especially those young and bright things in student services or in the junior faculty. But large bits of money are used, often to fund items that might not be seen as critical to those outside of the ivy towers, or even those who study the field. The Yale football stadium is giant and once grand, serving the special students and alumni of the 30s and 40's in the so-called Golden era of the college. Now, that stadium is mostly empty and the teams usually laughable, except for (the) important THE Game against Harvard once yearly on alternate years. Yet, Yale doesn't do much to keep up the stadium except to maintain safety and to obviate drunkenness as much as possible. Not so in terms of lavishing on the part of many Division I football and basketball venues today. But, for the most part, no matter how many barely sober and painted and almost naked college fans that you see on the televised games, this once-extracurriculum is now front and center in many University's minds, including the Division II and III johnny come lately wannnabes. The games are not for students; they are for money, from donors, alumni, friends and the nation's fan base. And lavish money is provided for the programs. Now most Athletic Departments would say that their funds come from the Foundation or Alumni Offices, not the general fund. That may be so, but why is it (as one Foundation employees told me at a large Division I school) did the Foundation receive over 90% of its donations for sports (with the accompanying garnishments) than for the other parts of the School. Well the rest frankly is not sexy or fund, unless you give oodles and get your name on a building.

Perhaps the Athletic areas do give the colleges more glitz and glamour, and potential students yearn to attend that of a winner; (however, research does show that a winning season produced a short rise in enrollments but those enrollments go back after a year or so to the mean.)  But what is the main mission of the colleges and universities? Pretty much all of us know, and we do know that the creep and the profligate spending has wreaked havoc on maintaining appropriate buildings and equipment for learning.

We might re mix that General's spagetti Power point bowl into an angry seething ecotplasm pushing out and being pulled into a stretched out piece of silly putty.