Dear all,

Soldiers in the army use strategies.  Yes, also by corporations, or by football teams that want to beat their opponents.  I dislike when the military or corporative language penetrates the classroom ('teaching strategies" or "management strategies"), and certainly when they penetrate the academia.  Yes, they already penetrated many times.

I love how higher education in the USA attempts to behave like corporations by fostering their discourse and values, treating knowledge as a commodity to be traded and constructing professors as workers who generate added value to the institution's benefit.  The ultimate goal is to serve and justify the institution's existence and create newer goals to further legitimize its functions --ironically under the guise that the university really cares about the students...  Universities are becoming factories of credential production.

This is particularly curious because many universities function with no faculty governance and no authority over the curriculum, which often the faculty gave away by voting in favor of the new rules governing committee work and faculty meetings (similar to corporative rules) --thus in a circular way college faculty have the right to vote on giving up the right to vote and it passes under the guise of expediency and efficiency for committee work. 

At any rate, strategic planning writing is a real exercise in surveillance by asking us, the faculty, to document what are the department's strengths and limitations or weakness and how will "improve" or achieve these goals (and then being accountable to these regardless of the context and politics of academic life).  Not only Foucault would have had fun with this, but also I think that perhaps Kafka or Borges would have had more fun.

In a way, I will give more credit to administrations' clever manipulations and the docilization and domestication of its faculties.  I acknowledge that although I thought Henry Giroux was right, actually he was wrong when he asserted that higher ed leaders, in particular deans, occupy their minds with meaningless thoughts.  University leaders have managed to control the faculties and blame them for constructed failure too, similar to "blaming the victim," or better yet, to the way that the auto industry blames the workers.  In my tradition of provocateur I state that Henry is wrong this time, certainly an exception as I highly respect him and his brilliance, since they are more sophisticated than what we give them credit for because they have managed to control academic work in general and interrupt transgression.  Given our collective stories of marginalization and alienation in the academia, it is worthwhile to keep doing analysis of how power operates in these circumstances.

Do not worry about strategic plans, in the not far future faculty will be asked for lesson plans, instructional objectives, and assessment tools to use in classes in order to attain these objectives, which will have to be coherent with programmatic standards meeting the criteria of highly intellectually grounded accrediting agencies such as NCATE.  As you probably are aware, I detest agencies of control and NCATE is no exception in spite that many colleagues believe it is good and it really represents the quality of the profession...-which is in itself an oppressive and colonizing discourse.

Viva academic freedom!

Out of curiosity:  Do you know if Princeton or Yale do strategic plans and accreditations or is it only a "class" and market issue for state institutions?

So what are the ways in which you have resisted or, even better, transformed these 'trends" as in the case of strategic planning?

I just don't do it, but I know that for the untenured this is almost impossible.  I write in this BLOG and engage in critical scholarship about institutions, human agency, etc., and I certainly speak out in meetings.  I am open to more suggestions.

Jaime