My next postcard will be from somewhere warm, heading out of Dodge on annual leave very shortly. Winter’s been brutal and it will be nice to be away from, among other things, tedious daily missives, signals and dire warnings about impending budget cuts. It’s hard not to be suspicious of all the government posturing around the economy. We are a have province, boom is apparent, the forecast is cheery, but yet we are being braced for an asteroid of a budget. This kind of disparity makes the citizenry cynical.

As a student and scholar of media and popular culture, I am especially interested in how carefully stage managed these things are. The Finance Minister is rolling out “consultations’ with community groups but one has to question the impact these conversations will have, if any, on what the government has long intended to do. We all now know just how images, attitudes and impressions need to be manufactured for the public. Celebrity culture has taught us that, even while we participate in it voluntarily. I am a devout follower of a massively popular web site, www.laineygossip.com, where Vancouver-based blogger Lainey tracks the way celebrities are both victims and fully complicit participants in the machine that shapes their images. If I were teaching a communications course these days I would have her on my syllabus. She satisfies two cravings: a desire for news about famous people and a desire for news about how these people are contrived for our desire. It’s more than clever—it’s ingenious. Some journalists do the same thing when they cover politics but that’s a dangerous game. You are supposed to be ‘”objective” and not comment on the backstory, even if the viewing or reading public is constantly suspicious of the news itself.

Anyhow, this digression comes from a desire to see someone do a Lainey Gossip kind of blog on how messages are constructed for public consumption. Obviously, as with celebrities, some parties, politicians, or public figures do it much better than others. The trick is to sound as sincere as possible, to cut through all the noise and hype and communicate convincingly, credibly, honestly about whatever you are selling—or at least appear that way.

I will be scanning the usual newsfeeds daily while out of the country, curious about what is happening here at home and in the world at large, and I know I will be utterly dependent on what the handlers and hackers want me to see and hear. I’ll try to filter all that through the hot haze of some equatorial sun. Sorry, but someone has to do it!

Much ado about reforming PhD programs right now. Check out the graph above. This is the most up-to-date data we have in this country. According to an article in this month’s University Affairs, “the proportion of PhD students who successfully complete their degrees within nine years has risen across all disciplines, but completion times remain long and in some fields have even increased.” That’s alarming, and has given rise to some serious refocusing on the value of graduate programs everywhere. There are lots of reasons for the slower completion rates, not the least of which is that there may be nowhere to go in the academy once you actually finish your degree. Concordia University is now rewarding timely doctoral graduates with bonuses; UBC is reviewing its entire program menu to see how best to encourage more timely completion rates; and some universities are considering limiting their PhD intake altogether.

I agree we need to examine how to encourage our students to progress more evenly, quickly, and productively through their programs, but how could I be anything but self-interested when I say I worry about limiting PhD admissions? I just believe that a society with more PhDs is better off. And I fully believe Canada, always the world underachiever, could use way more. It’s tempting to apply Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism here:  Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. We are still quoting Wilde, who wrote these words over a hundred years ago, because he almost always nailed it. Well, the value of a PhD surely lies in more than what the market dictates. Sometimes it’s hard to keep that in mind.

One commonplace emerging for these discussions about PhD reform is that the PhD dissertation itself needs to change, needs to break away from the confining rigors of the manuscript. The only recent major change to the traditional doctoral dissertation is the shift electronic format. That shift is ever so slowly starting to open up the possibility of embedding new media and other visual and aural components in the foundational document, but the final PhD submission is still meant to be largely text. Is a hefty word-intensive manuscript really the best recommendation for employment beyond the academy? I suspect we will be trying to answer that question sooner than later.

And speaking of years, just how does one change institutional practice? Mountains of material are dedicated to this subject, as are consultants and management gurus. Thing is, change will come from graduate students themselves who have already pushed us to think much more broadly about our programs and promises. Students are much more in tune with the zeitgeist anyway.

Personally, I find it really exciting to be a grad dean when there’s so much talk about what the value of a PhD is, whether we should be recruiting or not, and where this is all heading. It makes strategic planning all the more important. Our application rate at Memorial is up again this year by a healthy percentage and so there is still every indication that many people around the globe want to get a PhD in something or another. Go on, UBC, shut your programs down if you want. We’re open wide for business, as usual –although maybe not as usual if we really rethink the PhD for the 21^st century.

You couldn’t make this up. This story hit the fan this week:

North Carolina governor proposes funding PSE based on students’ ability to get jobs: North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory told a national radio audience Tuesday that state community colleges and universities should be funded based on how well they do at placing students in the labour market. McCrory said he has instructed his staff to draft legislation “in which we change the basic formula and how education money is given out to our universities and our community colleges, not based on how many butts in seats but how many of those butts can get jobs.” University of North Carolina president Tom Ross says the 16-campus system is already revising its funding formula to include measures relating to student achievement and academic and operational efficiencies. Still, he has reservations about gauging university success solely based on students’ and graduates’ employment rate.

Further to this, the NC Governor dumped on the “educational elite” on —what else?—open line radio for offering courses in subjects such as gender studies that don’t lead students onto clear career paths. Who needs the liberal arts, he asked. We need engineers and mechanics.

Not surprisingly, reaction from faculty, and the UNC president was swift, strong, and strident. McCrory himself earned a BA in political science and education from an expensive southern college, and so one wonders whether he thinks it was all a waste of time. I’d be checking those college credentials, for sure. What is it with these people who turn on their own degrees? Wonder if he donates to their advancement fund.

I can’t imagine anywhere in the world where these sorts of statements would be uttered in public by an elected official. Can you imagine anyone saying this in France or Germany? Or Canada? But in the US, polarized as that nation is between Republican governors like McCrory and, say, California Democratic governor Jerry Brown, extreme positions are more common.

Of course, the foundation of a liberal arts program is its critique of society, culture, tradition, and official history. Take away that capacity and you have a nation of narrowly educated morons. I am overstating, but you know what I mean. Do we want our universities to be strictly labour market rigged? Anyhow, how does this McCrory fellow even know where gender studies graduates are working anyway?  Because they are.

This kind of talk-show ranting is worrisome on so many levels, not the least of which is the thinly veiled attack on president Obama who has long been accused of elitism for holding advanced degrees from the Ivy League. As if that were a bad thing…. I have commented on the shame of all that before. It never ceases to amaze me that one of the most advanced countries in the free world should also contain such ignorant, anti-intellectual attitudes about education. That’s why they call it an open society, I guess. It’s a society in which more cartridge ink is spilled on whether Beyoncé lip synched the national anthem during the presidential inauguration than on any post-secondary education debate, ever.

Now, none of this means I am going to miss the Superbowl half-time show…. I might live in the ivory tower but a liberal arts degree also gives me an appreciation of good spectacle.

NG

A short blog—more like a blurb this week. I am about to board for a meeting in Toronto—perishing, Arctic-icy Toronto. Sure, it’s cold here, but it’s practically balmy by comparison. I hate it when Canadians comment on how cold they think it gets here. They don’t know squat about it. We all yak about the weather, complain and get philosophical about it, but it doesn’t mean we know what we are talking about. Now, to our international students who are experiencing winter for the first time my full sympathies. The country in general isn’t fit for human beings, but one can’t tell them that. We spend a lot of energy recruiting them. And it’s hard to tell them this is nothing—try living in Toronto, or Winnipeg!

I showed ANNA KARENINA at MUN Cinema Series this week to a sell-out crowd. What a lusciously rich adaptation it is. Loved it. Everyone wants to see how brilliant playwright Tom Stoppard would transmute one of the most widely read and admired novels of all time for the screen. It struck me that the several hundred who lined up in layered wool and down parkas for the film looked like the peasant extras in the movie. I mean, it’s the nineteenth-century Russia and short of throwing a log on a fire it’s hard to see how anyone kept warm during Tolstoy’s’ time. And then there’s Keira Knightley in the role of Anna. We all know Knightley doesn’t eat. But the camera loves her, as they say, and it’s hard not to covet those fox-lined hats and wraps she tosses around her frail frame every time Count Vronsky throws her a smouldering look. Anyhow, there’s nothing like a steamy two-hour plus movie to keep you warm, even if it’s all about ice-caked trains and frozen ponds.

The cold air, like the flu and salt-stained boots, shall pass. Stay warm and change your screen saver to a beachscape—or to Keira, if she does it for you.

Last week was quite literally a white-out. The blizzard was forecast well ahead of time and so there were no surprises, only the extent to which most of us would be without power for a day or so. It’s true, but nothing points out our dependency on electricity like an outage. At first it’s a bit of an adventure, but as the house starts to cool off and the light diminishes and one can’t work or type or tweet or text, it all becomes one giant aggravation. Nothing to do but shudder in the dark and wait for that satisfying and audible surge of electrical energy when the power returns. Civilization—where would we be without it?

This week is all about hoaxes so far. It’s hard not to follow the parallel sagas of two major athletes whose stories of (alleged) colossal deception dominate the headlines. One inevitably confessed because his brand demanded it (Lance Armstrong), while the other (Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o) is still scrambling to get his story straight. We may never really know where the truth lies in Te’o’s case. Is it possible to grow so emotionally attached to a woman you’ve never met? (Stupid question, I know.) But to base your own career heroics on a virtual romance fraught with suffering and death? Hell, anything is possible. I half believe Te’o, who as of this blog is claiming he was the victim of an elaborate hoax, set up to fall for an online fake, a good-looking cancer patient with a lot of consonants in her name, Lennay Kekua. May she rest in a piece of cyberspace.

As for Lance, what’s left to say? We are all watching the spectacle of manufactured contrition at the moment. Oprah was pretty easy on him. The whole confession was anticlimactic and, frankly, self-serving. Imagine a more determined and forceful journalist conducting that interview, say, any of the guys on 60 Minutes. Lance might have not looked quite so composed. I want to hear what Sheryl Crowe or all the other girlfriends knew.  Did he lie to them, too? Now there’s a story I need to know.

Here at the School of Graduate Studies we deal with hoaxes of one kind or another all the time. All universities do. Admission is tough and when you are applying from far away, competing with thousands of your peers in India or China or Nigeria, and so on, you reach for desperate measures. We catch fake admission applications all the time, inviting us to consider just how many we don’t or can’t catch. I don’t lie awake thinking about this. Ultimately students have to perform to standards and if they were admitted illegitimately and without credentials then they just won’t last and it will all have been for naught. If they do manage to beat the system they do so by performing well enough, and so all the power to them. I have seen far too many Bond and Bourne films not to appreciate just how handy a fake ID can be for those who really need them.

More intriguing is the psychological piece: what happens to a person who harbours a big dirty secret? In Lance’s case, it appears he has been able to internalize the deception rather well. He might be eating himself inside out, for all we know, but on the surface he seems poised and reconciled to himself. You’d think the sheer fear of being caught would have eroded that strong chin by now, but, instead, and as he says so matter-of-factly, you get naturalized to the machinery of deception. It became part of the ritual of prepping for the races. Watching the spectacle of his story right now you can almost understand what he means. A smart celebrity at the very centre of a glamorous spotlight understands how to stay one step, or pedal, ahead of the game. He played everyone—the media, the public, his peers—brilliantly. Let’s face it, we have all been admiring him for pretending so well until now. I mean, what a terrific actor.

We have seen students react to being caught with forged documents with far less confidence. They melt down pretty quickly. In some cases, the forgeries are explained as necessary acts of survival, extreme measures undertaken to escape an impossible situation in the home country.  And sometimes we have a lot of sympathy, and different judgements are brought to bear on the circumstances. It’s not all black and white or right and wrong.

We all have secrets. It’s the scale of them and their unintended consequences that make for the most robust water cooler chat. Every day the headlines are screaming about somebody who committed one form of fraud or another, from the woman who skimmed about $5000 off the top of her petty cash box to the university administrator who managed an elaborate scheme of redirected payments to cover the cost of his personal building supplies. These are all hoaxes of one form or another. They require a lot of energy and shrewd management to sustain. Just think of the way the mind works to be able to compartmentalize all that. Bernie Madoff is a model of such accomplishment, of course.

Just yesterday I was yet another Twitter victim of that common spam that’s going around—the one where someone you know tweets you to say there are nasty blogs going on about you. So at first you feel like throwing up, then you follow the link in the tweet, your head buzzing,  soon realizing as you are doing so that you’ve fallen for the ruse and are perpetuating the hoax itself in that action. Who or what machine is trolling for victims like me? A random act of anarchy out there, designed to spread paranoia and destabilize the universe, one small hoax at a time?

A happier version of all this, albeit attracting its own backlash, is the viral-traveled YouTube of that eagle snatching a toddler in a park on a nice sunny day—all brilliantly constructed by the magician students at Centre NAD in Montreal. There’s a world of successful counterfeiting in their future.

NG

I welcome the new year with excitement over all the plans we have in the School of Graduate Studies, but also with some trepidation over the latest trend in university planning—or should I say prioritizing? Now there’s a word I’d cheerfully chuck into the dustbin of history.

Like the strain of flu in circulation right now, talk about the cost effectiveness of university programs emanates from southern Ontario–in particular, from the University of Guelph. Known on that campus as the PPP (Program Prioritization Process…would I make that up?), the idea is to review every program on campus, academic and otherwise, to determine which are the “mission-critical” ones—and which are not. Motivation for this approach can be found in phrases like “era of scarce resources and significant financial difficulties.” I don’t doubt that Guelph is facing some serious financial challenges or that the crowded competitive market in Ontario is a particularly vexed environment for university funding, but I do worry about the direction this has all taken. To date, three other universities have taken up the PPP approach, Regina, Laurie and Vancouver Island. That’s only four of 92 Canadian institutions, and so too early to call it a trend, but it definitely has the whiff of one.

Among other objections, a major one at Guelph is aimed at the blending of academic and non-academic programs and services. How does one compare, say, the cost effectiveness of parking to a philosophy program? This sounds extreme but the challenge of comparing cars to books is daunting, or should be. Good luck with that. Another understandable fear is that a cost-benefit analysis will lead to the promotion of popular programs at the expense of those with lower enrolments, and so we are talking about humanities and some social sciences programs, of course. Guelph already axed its Women’s Studies program in 2009 and so it’s not afraid to go where no university has yet gone before.

Memorial, like Guelph, has long been identified as a comprehensive university—one that offers programs across almost the entire disciplinary spectrum. We don’t offer law; they don’t do medicine, and so on, but otherwise our university offerings span the traditional range of arts and sciences and the less traditional offerings of professional programs. All comprehensive Canadian universities have been growing their numbers on professional programs, particularly graduate programs. This is a sign of our market-driven times, to be sure. Today the university feels a strong pressure from society and government to justify its costs—that is, to tie programs to employment prospects and opportunities.

We are a very long way from Cardinal Newman’s 1854 monograph on The Idea of a University. That used to be a bible of humanities discourse. It now reads like a dusty tome on the pleasures of studying as an end in itself. One might assign it a sentimental place on a history of ideas course, a course whose own legitimacy might very well be in question after a thorough PPP review.

Newman was writing at a different time, sure. He could never have imagined today’s public system, nor its attendant commitment to educate more than highly privileged men of means with lots of time to contemplate the universe—for its own sweet sake. But it remains very hard for us to abandon Newman’s essential argument about the value of a well-rounded education. Newman abhorred specialization in narrow fields, believing it led to the generation of even more narrow minds. Who can argue with that?

One of the reasons I am following astronaut Chris Hadfield on Twitter as he works in the international space station is that he knows how to humanize the whole mechanical adventure. He takes glorious pictures of us from space and beams them right back to us via social media; he plays guitar and writes songs about the stuff he is doing; he decorates his wee corner of the station with whimsy; he has a sense of humour. Unlike so many of those guys, he emerges as a personality, someone with a broader appreciation of the world beyond all the incredibly mechanical stuff he has to know to conduct experiments in a microgravity environment some 300 miles away from earth. I’d love to talk to him about his undergraduate education, and what informed his appreciation of life, science, and music.  Without it he wouldn’t even be visible to us; he’d be just another nerdy astronaut without anything inspired to say.

My analogy is obvious. We want our universities to have souls. The market is an unreliable measure of what university “mission-critical” is. If we, er, prioritize programs for the market we abandon the educational principles of learning and knowledge Cardinal Newman espoused and that, indeed, we still value. We don’t want our universities to be exclusively nerdy sites of mechanical knowledge.

You can bet we’re all watching Guelph and its imitators as it launches its PPP initiative. That’s a rocket that better return safely and whole.

We will return next year in January 2013 with another blog entry for you to enjoy. In the meantime, happy holidays from the Dean’s blog and thank you for your support in 2012!

Thanks to CoffeeGeek for sharing their photo via flickr and creative commons.

I really like visiting Washington. I started this blog last week when I was in DC for the annual conference of the Council of Graduate Schools. But as is often the case on the road, and especially at conferences, I couldn’t quite finish it in time. I took this snap of the White house on a brisk sunny day. The picture always lies, and so it is the case here. Yes, that really is the White House, and, look, there’s the Washington Monument in the background to the left, but what the image doesn’t show is the incredibly cluttered amalgam of tourists and security people just outside the frame.  I had to stick my hands through the fence to take the shot. The grandstand for the January inauguration of Obama is still being erected, just to the right of me, and there were scores of gawkers and school groups staring through the iron fence, eager to catch a glimpse of the President. There was a spirited sense of well-being in the air. I think people in Washington are so relieved to have Obama, and not the Romney clan, in the White house that you could feel the relief. I sure did.

The 700 or so deans who gathered daily in the conference hall were also relieved. At least, they knew they had a president who believed in education and funded research. Obama isn’t perfect but the alternative was unthinkable. Anyhow, as usual with a largely US-based meeting there was a lot of talk about the future of post-secondary ed, and a great deal of debate about the merits of MOOCS–massive open online courses. Canadians coined the term but prestigious American schools are running away with its application. Harvard and M.I.T. have collaborated to get into the game, with Stanford and UCLA and Berkley being early adapters, as well. Hundreds of thousands of students take MOOCs now, although they do not have to be students registered anywhere whatsoever to take the online courses. Most recently the University of Toronto announced its intentions to jump into the field and so they will be the torch bearers of the Canadian public system. Will MOOCs destroy on-campus life? Will they start poaching students away from their less prestigious universities? After all, if you can get a diploma from Harvard why would you bother attending classes at, say, Regina? We talked long and late into the Washington bars about the merits of MOOCs, as well as other topics. Anyone who can predict where all of this is going doesn’t know what s/he is talking about.

Several other themes dominated the meetings. Internationalization was a recurring topic as was career pathways. Today, if a grad dean conference isn’t talking about how best to prepare students for a world beyond academe then it’s just being irresponsible. As always with CGS meetings, the quality of speakers was extremely high, from well-known NY Times journalist David Brooks to Michael Berube, the president of the Modern Language Association who pretty much challenged humanities to shake itself up and reinvent itself as a more progressive and flexible site of learning. Yeah, good luck with that, Michael. And, as always at the D.C. meeting’s, the satiric troupe The Capitol Steps performed their shtick for us all at the opening banquet, exploding the most silly characters and absurdist elements of the presidential election to mock just about everyone and everything. Canadians laughed and even felt a bit smug.

NG