I read the hot-off-the-presses annual report of a public university system’s Executive Leadership Institute (ELI) so you don’t have to!

Don’t worry: I won’t bore you with the boring idea of a great education, b/c that idea appears nowhere in the report. Nor does the idea of education as a public good, at least not as such. Actually, there's nothing here you haven't heard before. That's the point of this THREAD.

ELI wants to help a certain public university system “overcome obstacles to progress” by addressing “enterprise-level challenges in higher education.” Rest assured, ELI will utilize “evidence-based practices” to determine solutions to “wicked problems.”

What are “wicked problems”? They are “big picture problems” that “occur in a social context that aggravates competing results & disagreement among stakeholders because they cross boundaries.”

Sounds bad ... I think.

But naturally, agility – “a meta-competency” according to …. somebody? -- is a watchword of ELI’s plan for solving wicked problems. So is nimbleness. And innovation. Value-creation. Value-production. Strategic alignment. Etc.

None of these terms is ever defined. Their sense, or what we might call "sensiness," is treated as self-evident. Nor is any argument made concerning the relative validity or persuasiveness of the varying forms of evidence the report uses.

The jargon *is* truth.

Anyway, one thing we’ll have to accept about today's higher ed, apparently, is that "Technology, social change, efficiency, & the battle for customers (i.e., students) have forced ... higher education institutions to be nimble.”

"Nimble" in what ways, you may ask?

Well, let’s look at the “wicked problem” of student (sorry, I meant customer) retention. “Predictive analytics,” “early warning systems,” and “care teams” are examples of strategies “agile leadership” has found useful in retaining customers.

Failing all of that, easy-to-read “executive dashboards” can thankfully allow “leading indicators of success metrics” to be tracked.

[Sidebar: how do you call students “customers” and then also traffic in the language of care and vulnerability, etc.? Agile leaders do not see a contradiction.]

One thing is for sure, according to ELI. “As we move forward in higher education, we need to … accept a change from the traditional paradigm of hiring leaders based primarily on their academic successes.” (I mean, obvs. Academics notoriously suffer from agility issues.)

Data collection is another wicked problem. “Universities have hundreds of millions of individual bits of data about their key constituents [customers], but it’s of little use if we can’t translate it into actionable intelligence.”

I’ll just leave that one riiiiiight there.

Here’s a bigger tell: in a survey of 200 higher ed managers, 58% said that “institutional analytics that enhance operational efficiency are of greater value than learning analytics that enhance academic performance."

“Greater value” here seems to mean: getting students a better education is not the goal. Retaining customers is.

Student debt is another wicked problem. Should universities -- faculties & administrations working together -- do the hard political work necessary to urge states to reinvest in some of their greatest resources, their public universities?

Come ON. Such non-agile thinking! No, instead we should solve the wicked problem of student debt by creating ... wait for it ... “an Office of Financial Wellness and Education to educate … students about … sound financial skills and debt awareness.”

Of course, as we all know, “with any bottom-line discussion, it drills down to the money. It’s all about the money.” You already know what comes next:

“International tuition is more profitable for the university.”

Never fear, though, if that doesn’t work, higher ed still has “opportunities,” but only if we can stop being so much like Blockbuster, and instead “become nimbler and more collaborative” like BestBuy or the apparently even nimbler AutoZone. (Folks, I am just a reporter.)

It would certainly help if the “culture of the university” were more “ready & willing to make changes to ineffective & outdated processes." Unfortunately, change in higher ed “has historically happened on evolutionary time scales & not revolutionary time scales.”

Come on, MARGE

Like I said, there's nothing new here. That's the point. The jargon is the solution, the jargon is the truth. It's a huge problem for higher ed, but it's worse than that. It's a society-wide problem: hollow sounds masquerading as fact. Because real solutions take hard work.