What Do Students and Teachers Deserve?

Down the years, and more recently than in my earlier career, I've had the happy experience of being thanked and acknowledged in various ways by the students who I've taught in my classes.  When you consider the alternatives -- and they are most definitely live, often-experienced and -witnessed alternatives, ranging from being entirely ignored until a student wants something (a grade, an explanation, an exception, what's going to be on the exam), through suspicious arms-length-maintenance, or wariness of instructional idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, even malevolence, all the way to the outright contempt displayed in some settings -- the exhibition by students of a grateful and gracious attitude becomes deeply gratifying to any instructor who understands the value and process of education in which they are involved.

I have to admit at times feeling a bit bewildered by my students' responses to and admissions about my teaching and how it affects them -- and that, I suppose, is due to a remnant of the pedant still within me -- the part of myself which far more attentive to all that has been left out by a student's robust but still rudimentary presentation or reflections upon some item or idea of study than gladdened by just how much distance has been traversed, how much potential has been brought to actuality and consolidated within the mind, the soul, the memory, even the heart, of the young man or woman charged to learn with me for the space of a semester.  That competent but sterile, and in some sense dense or tone-deaf, part of myself responds all too easily by raising all sorts of other related matters, at risk of contextualizing away whatever spark of excitement, whatever haven for learning, whatever inertia newly-directed along a path of ongoing reflection that the way I structure and run my classes has afforded my students.

Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

Self-Promotion from a Virtue Ethics Perspective

Over the last several months, I've written a series of posts (part 1, part 2, part 3) on Orexis Dianoētikē motivated originally by a Chronicle of Higher Education post, The Art and Science of Academic Self-Promotion.  The issue originally raised was one which is particularly pressing in contemporary academia, where stiff competition for more and more scarce resources is rapidly becoming the "new normal," relatively new social media open up interesting new opportunities for publicizing or promoting one's legitimate achievements, academia remains beset by the radically uneven lighting of its own self-replicating class and tier system  - and yet many people remain chary of engaging in self-promotion, unsure of themselves, noticeably uneasy with the efforts of less restrained colleagues and coworkers.  Still, as in every time and place, some people definitely do cross the lines.

How should one draw the lines, though -- that's a question not so easily answered.  Egregious violations of good taste, collegiality, reciprocity, those we can all get behind, or rather against, forming some kind of consensus.  Practicing a parsimony of publicity -- meeting only whatever requirements of reporting come down from one's chair, or dean, tenure committee, provost -- entering the data supposedly comprising one's career into whatever digital (or God forbid, still paper!) portfolio one's school demands -- that seems the safe route.  But it is the sagacious course to adopt?  It's hard to say, because there seem to be no real rules, except those of rather ad hoc compilations reminding one more of unintentionally stuffy etiquette lists, or prudential "how to make friends and influence. . . " bulletpoint blocks.

Forbes: Happiest vs. Most Hated Jobs: Is Bureaucracy a Bad Thing?

Teach an Ethics class, and ask students early on what they consider to be major goods in their present or anticipated future life — what will make them happy, what they deeply desire and value —and in addition to family and friends, money, and occasionally education, they will often tell you: career, work, the job for which they are training.  And yet, what makes for the likelihood that one’s profession will realistically render one happy? Jobs are incredibly diverse, and in our present environment, culture, and economy, subject to change.

Steve Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, recently published and discussed lists — emerging from a recent surveys by CarreerBliss and the National Oganization for Research — of the Ten Happiest Jobs and the Ten Most Hated Jobs, pointing out important features common in each list.  First, the jobs perceived as worst:

"Corporate Culture" Top Priority for Ethics and Compliance Leaders

A recent report (full version here) by LRN, a company that aims at “fostering ethical cultures” within business environments interprets results from a survey given to Ethics and Compliance executives, and raises some interesting issues adequately visible, perhaps, only from a Virtue Ethics perspective.

The report suggests that, at least for those tasked with promoting some sort of ethics within companies and corporate culture, there is a vital concern with the sorts of moral issues and problems that arise inevitably within business.

Ethics and compliance leaders who participated in the survey see themselves as the champions for creating ethical, values-based cultures: 58 percent of them agree that the primary mandate of their efforts is to ensure ethical behaviors and alignment with core values. In contrast, only 42 percent believe their core mandate is legal and regulatory compliance. Further, 68 percent indicate that creating long-term value for the business is a principal benefit of promoting an ethical culture

Three things need to be pointed out.