Whilst I concur with all the previous posts about disciplinary boundaries and faculty inertia, the problem is compounded, in the UK at least, by the fact that under-graduate courses are market driven. Courses that don't recruit don't run. This means that academics who are re-developing or re-naming courses have to keep in mind whether or not the average teenager will buy into their new offer.
The knowledge and understanding of the young applicant is built upon either their secondary school curriculum, or the the advice of their teachers. Both of these sources are normally hopelessly out of touch with current thinking, in either higher education, or in the design industry. The consequence of this is that courses called 'Graphic Design' or 'Product Design' are much more likely to be given the green light by faculties than courses called 'Visual Communication' or 'Interaction Design', simply because they are more likely to recruit students.
Andrew Jackson
--- On Sat, 12/3/11, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: innovative curriculum design: getting rid of the old vocational silos
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Saturday, 12 March, 2011, 13:43
On Mar 12, 2011, at 5:36 AM, Andy Polaine wrote:
> Gunnar - I don't buy the argument that, "one of the several reasons that a system of silos has evolved is that it is an easier structure for the assurance of quality." My experience has been that this kind of management, especially in large academic institutions, offers an illusion of the assurance of quality, but it's far removed from what happens at the coalface. The process of government QA audits is that the institutions prime their staff, send out forms to fill in to assess the quality of teaching and research. Faculty know what they *should* fill in here (and are sometimes coached in this) rather than what the reality is. This gets fed upwards and filtered and presented to an audit committee who hear exactly what they want to hear. It's the same effect as the old joke that the Queen thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint. All the boxes are ticked and management assume everything is working fine, but it isn't. That's why top-down command
and control of silos is so often a failure in terms of lived experience of faculty and students.
Andy--
Sorry if I seemed to imply that university administrators have a damned thing to do with quality assurance. That certainly doesn't happen in my experience. To whatever extent quality assurance happens in the (US) universities I've seen, it happens at a fairly low level and is then, as you imply, bureaucratically reified by those farther up the food chain.
My point is that when hiring, granting of permanent tenure, promotion, and evaluation are dealt with directly by people from the same "silo," they recognize whether the other grain in the silo is wheat or barley and can make better judgements about quality than those without specialized knowledge. (This does not mean to imply that I think a whole truckload of stupid stuff doesn't come into play in the process.) When people do not understand what others do, their judgements are very different.
None of this is meant to claim that current university structures are sustainable. We agree on that. But when redesigning universities, it would make sense to remember that affiliations based on similar expertise do have real value. That doesn't mean they need to be the center of any organizational scheme but it does mean that dismissing them as merely a remnant of feudal allegiances is a mistake.
Gunnar
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