It’s spring break week at UW-Parkside, and campus is mostly empty. As usual for a spring break, however, I’m on campus, working. (I can recall only one spring break trip as faculty member [to Costa Rica two years ago] following zero in graduate school, college, high school, and grade school.) I had meetings Monday, Tuesday, and today, but tomorrow and Friday are meeting-free, so I’ll have time to catch up on tasks that got pushed back due to higher-priority fires during the semester. Maybe next year I can take my second-ever spring break trip and go out of town for a few days?
Archive: Mar 2014
UW-Parkside just launched a new website that includes many rewritten pages. My college’s mission and vision statements, for example, are now pretty generic: the vision statement is “an education centered on diversity, social justice and personal fulfillment that gives students the knowledge and skills to address some of the most pressing issues in society today,” and the mission statement is “whether it’s international studies or improving the local community; the University of Wisconsin-Parkside College of Social Sciences & Professional Studies will give you the opportunities to go as far as your ambition will take you. We are the newest college on the Parkside campus, and our programs include International Studies, Teacher Preparation (IPED), Criminal Justice, Philosophy, History, Geography, Political Science, Law, Sociology and Anthropology.” To be honest, I can’t remember what the old statements were…and I have no inkling about the many other vision and statements of units I’ve been in over the last 21 years as a graduate student, professor, and administrator. If anyone can state her/his institution’s current vision or mission statement without looking it up I’ll give you a check for $1000.
So one of my tasks in creating a strategic plan for the college is to come up with more memorable vision and mission statements, but is that really even possible? Perhaps my energy would be better served in creating something else, like a “DNA statement” that succinctly describes the core elements of the college, the essential building blocks that animate everything we do. I know, vision and mission statements are supposed to do that but they are so often uninspiring, and have too many components (like two separate statements!). In a future post I’ll have to post a note about possibilities for something more pithy. If the current vision and mission statements spark any thoughts please share them in order to kick off the brainstorming…
I’m not a big speechifyer, which would seem to disqualify one from becoming a dean. On the contrary, as I dean I’m invited to all sorts of events and I am expected to “say a few words,” but that’s fine as “a few words” means five minutes or less. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was worried about taping a radio interview, but that also turned out to be easier than expected. Today I was asked to give a 20-minute speech at an awards banquet for graduating high school seniors. The pressure will be to come up with some thoughts that celebrate their individual accomplishments in conjunction with reminders about the operation of social structure; too often these celebratory events get boiled down to “you succeeded through hard work and hope,” ignoring the many other elements — visible and invisible — that contribute to individual success. I’ll have to figure out how to say something about the sociological imagination succinctly. Suggestions are welcome!
At the end of January I posted a note about January-term classes. I said that I wanted to be more strategic in scheduling our “Winterim” classes, but didn’t have any specific ideas. Today’s Inside Higher Education, though, has changed that, as the start of the “Questioning Value of ‘Janterm'” article reminded me that January-term classes should “offer time for students to immerse themselves in travel abroad or a single, intensive course they never would take otherwise – because it’s far outside their course of study, or nontraditional, or both.” Our Winterim schedule, on the other hand, is packed with regular courses that are offered during all other terms (for example, CRMJ 101 Introduction to Criminal Justice). I’ll have to encourage faculty to develop truly unique classes for Winterim, such as an experience that would produce a local version of Minneapolis’ Historyapolis project. Hhhmmm…
UW-Parkside just launched a new website that includes many rewritten pages. My college’s mission and vision statements, for example, are now pretty generic: the vision statement is “an education centered on diversity, social justice and personal fulfillment that gives students the knowledge and skills to address some of the most pressing issues in society today,” and the mission statement is “whether it’s international studies or improving the local community; the University of Wisconsin-Parkside College of Social Sciences & Professional Studies will give you the opportunities to go as far as your ambition will take you. We are the newest college on the Parkside campus, and our programs include International Studies, Teacher Preparation (IPED), Criminal Justice, Philosophy, History, Geography, Political Science, Law, Sociology and Anthropology.” To be honest, I can’t remember what the old statements were…and I have no inkling about the many other vision and statements of units I’ve been in over the last 21 years as a graduate student, professor, and administrator. If anyone can state her/his institution’s current vision or mission statement without looking it up I’ll give you a check for $1000.
So one of my tasks in creating a strategic plan for the college is to come up with more memorable vision and mission statements, but is that really even possible? Perhaps my energy would be better served in creating something else, like a “DNA statement” that succinctly describes the core elements of the college, the essential building blocks that animate everything we do. I know, vision and mission statements are supposed to do that but they are so often uninspiring, and have too many components (like two separate statements!). In a future post I’ll have to post a note about possibilities for something more pithy. If the current vision and mission statements spark any thoughts please share them in order to kick off the brainstorming…
I’m not a big speechifyer, which would seem to disqualify one from becoming a dean. On the contrary, as I dean I’m invited to all sorts of events and I am expected to “say a few words,” but that’s fine as “a few words” means five minutes or less. A couple of weeks ago, however, I was worried about taping a radio interview, but that also turned out to be easier than expected. Today I was asked to give a 20-minute speech at an awards banquet for graduating high school seniors. The pressure will be to come up with some thoughts that celebrate their individual accomplishments in conjunction with reminders about the operation of social structure; too often these celebratory events get boiled down to “you succeeded through hard work and hope,” ignoring the many other elements — visible and invisible — that contribute to individual success. I’ll have to figure out how to say something about the sociological imagination succinctly. Suggestions are welcome!
At the end of January I posted a note about January-term classes. I said that I wanted to be more strategic in scheduling our “Winterim” classes, but didn’t have any specific ideas. Today’s Inside Higher Education, though, has changed that, as the start of the “Questioning Value of ‘Janterm'” article reminded me that January-term classes should “offer time for students to immerse themselves in travel abroad or a single, intensive course they never would take otherwise – because it’s far outside their course of study, or nontraditional, or both.” Our Winterim schedule, on the other hand, is packed with regular courses that are offered during all other terms (for example, CRMJ 101 Introduction to Criminal Justice). I’ll have to encourage faculty to develop truly unique classes for Winterim, such as an experience that would produce a local version of Minneapolis’ Historyapolis project. Hhhmmm…