Opinion

I'll probably never have it all; does that make me a failure?

I just wrote a memo to a group of budget people explaining (again) why it takes library staff with good technical skills, time, and lots of patience to make sure that when you click on a button in a library database to find an article, you actually find the article. Since it’s all online, now, it’s much less work, right? Well ... no. And why that's so is one example of the issues John Palfrey and Urs Gasser address in their new book, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems.

The bloggers’ union called and threatened to revoke my card if I didn’t at least try to write something about UVA. If nothing else, I hope the whole episode will help some folks understand the crosscurrents that academic administrators have to navigate.

I'm trying to decide if the mounting evidence of our irrationality, poor decision making, and now even dishonesty is depressing or liberating. Reading Ariely's previous books meant accepting the fact that we will make bad decisions, and what we learn from his latest book is that given half a chance we will also lie about our actions.

When this blog was conceived in the summer of 2010, it's purpose was fairly simple: fill a niche that needs filling. With that premise in mind, I've been blogging away on a variety of topics about innovation, accessibility, social media, video, and strategy. The narrative that I've constructed (something that started with my personal blog) is built upon a foundation of ideas, tool suggestions, and actively building structures that relate to Student Affairs and technology. It is rhetoric that focuses on the analogy of an empty building that is waiting to be populated. In that regard, I've been successful. However, the narrative of technology and Student Affairs is far more nuanced. Historically speaking, technology has always been part of the richness of discourse in Student Affairs. The "building" as it were, is not and has not been empty, it just hasn't been socialized into the core culture of the profession.

Many people are familiar with the race for partner that takes place in many law firms, and with the struggle for tenure that occurs in academia. These two cases are examples of what game theory calls a “tournament,” in which many workers compete for some prize based on their productivity. It is seen as a way to encourage workers to do their best and to act in ways that are in the best interest of their employer. I thought of this concept recently when I spent some time on the campus of my first job out of graduate school, a job that I left only steps ahead of what would almost definitely have been a tenure denial. As I went back there to work on some research, I realized that while the experience had been difficult, I had landed on my feet.

University of Virginia news in the last couple of weeks deserves all of the attention that it is getting, and more. In a previous blog I suggested that these events revealed the criticality of addressing technology at a strategic level for traditional not-for-profit higher education, public and private, large and small institutions.

Curt Rice considers the incongruities of being a professor on a picket line -- but is also glad to have had the experience.