(In progress)

I am a rotary fan. I’m not talking about the civilian service club, Rotary International, even if one of the best things SMC ever did was have its executive team join (sadly dropped when a new president came in). No, I am talking about those traffic circles popular in England (and now Indiana).

My fandom comes mostly from their use as an analogy. Actual driving on them can be frightening. Hence, their value as an analogy.

One of the last projects I was working on at Southwestern Michigan College before retirement was an analysis of what happens to students who enrolled in "pre-nursing" at SMC. I conceived a roundabout analogy to show how once a student entered that track (the traffic circle), they might exit from one of five or six departure lanes, only one of which was "entrance" into nursing. Not surprisingly, and apropos to the rest of this post, I wrote about this project in setting up my review of Yes' "Roundabout" as part of the Pandemic Panoply song series.

The truth is that most students enter higher education on a roundabout with a faulty GPS system, meaning their exit might not be the one originally intended (another useful figure of speech is the train switching yard). Traffic within the circle can be pretty brutal and cut-throat, so much so that many students are lucky to exit unscathed. 

A further truth is that most administrators, faculty and staff in higher education are on a roundabout, talking ourselves into circles. We are unlikely to exit until thrown from a moving vehicle. As a Provost, I was expected to be an expert in navigating these rotaries, but the traffic made it very difficult. For instance, for years, a general clamor for more dual credit (high school students earning college credit) has pealed around the industry. That sounds like an easy route, right. Provide some college classes to high schools, give them credit, everyone exits the roundabout happy.

However, my community college Ford Fusion is in a lane crowded by the van labeled accreditation honking out expectations about faculty credentials required to award college credit; my car is tail-gated by a jeep full of high school students not necessarily mature enough for the college-level content in these fast-moving lanes; meanwhile, a slow moving Lexus enters in front of me, bumper stickers proclaiming that "my kid is in band, in football, in theater,” obstructions to the nature of speeding up (that kid's college completion); and that finally a traffic cop from the prestigious university up the road has planted a "State U students may not use this exit" at the dual credit off ramp. In addition, my faculty in the back seat scream at me to stay true to our original destination and to not even take the dual credit exit.

Now you know how my mind works. I process problems artistically, relying heavily upon analogy. Thus, when I realized i had to check my cynicism (see A Life in Words Mostly Unread, Part Four) at the door of my office, I found off ramps for the ridiculous in academic news stories via six strategies at this website:

1) Original poetry, easily my preferred way of succinctly getting to a point. One can do worse than reverting to verse.

2) Song parodies. Even before Weird Al made his parodies famous, I goofed around with parodies, often banal ("Breakfast in a Pacer" instead of Supertramp's "Breakfast in America"). I occasionally dipped into song parody to maintain my sanity with my everyday work, as was the case with "Gotta Serve on Committees" instead of Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody."

3) Movie, book or television satires, a chance to expand the scope of which song parodies were limited.

4) Top 10 Lists because where else is it more appropriate to mimic the ridiculous that with David Letterman.

5) Showing obvious trends, because sometimes a story is hardly newsworthy; all that is required is a little good-old academic research to prove it.

6) Academic predictive modeling, which, granted, is a fancy way to say, take the specific newsworthy item and anticipate how it will play out with the rest of the industry.

So, how did this roundabout work for me when I was inspired to get off, for a few moments, from the endless circling?  Given the old saying that there is nothing new under the sun, I needed to try different exit lanes with the same topics, otherwise I’d be a babbling idiot.

For instance, take one of my least favorite academic trends: marketing strategies. In March 2013, Washington State University made news by announcing they were selling WSU-branded beef, as well as, of course, WSU brands. Add these marketing gems to university-branded toilet seats and toilet paper and you cover your alumni from end to end, so to speak. The sad reality is that almost every other university will quickly develop similar product lines.  My response was to turn to original poetry, "The Innocuous Generic College Fight Song," buried within "Choose Your College Like A Cut of Meat": 

Yes, you could go elsewhere

But, why would you risk it?

We can offer healthcare

And this lovely brisket.

Two years later when similarly in 2015, an Oxford University alumni developed a perfume fragrance that smelled of her Alma mater. I raced to predict the campus fragrances quickly rushed to market by a world of higher ed wannabes through my expectation of how this phenomena could turn out ("Eau de Humanities"):

• The smell of burning couches for West Virginia University as well as other major schools who pretend their students don't react similarly after big sports' victories.
• The smell of fertilizer for all the A&M schools across the country.
• The smell of sweaty bicycle seats for Indiana University (especially popular around the Little 500).
• The smell of desperation for the hundreds of small, private, liberal arts colleges fighting to stay alive during declining enrollment.

Also in 2015, Times Higher Education covered a blog by an Australian academic who lamented his university's latest slogan. For this specific case of college branding, I got off the roundabout the most traffic-friendly way, with no parody, satire or prediction of the future. Instead, all I did in "The Brand. The Bland" was show a boring trend by highlighting the lack of originality among dozens of university and college slogans:

The results of combining these trite slogans could be the most banal marketing copy ever:

We are UNC (1), making our mark on the world (2), redefining the classroom (3), learning to a greater degree (4), fulfilling the promise (5), preserving the extraordinary(6), far above (7) where knowledge and character meet (8).  We, the optimists (9), dare to be first (10), powering silicone valley (11), potential realized (12), the foundation for the Gator nation (13). Unstoppable (14), great journeys begin here (15), the friendliest campus in the south (16), now & forever (17). 

(Please see the original post to find the college or university corresponding to the number. Ultimately, it is a pointless game, kind of like "Chutes and Ladders.")

Other themes within Higher Education evolved with similar formidable roundabouts. Government interference shows up daily. I always reminded faculty that negativity about higher education was one of the few issues crossing party lines, even if the outrage was focused on different elements within academia. As a result, even the core unit of the academic experience at colleges and universities, the credit hour, gets muddied by government interference. The Department of Education in 2011 issued one of their infamous "Dear Colleague" letters, attempting to clarify the department's stance on the credit hour. Any 15-page letter of mostly gobbledegook should never be labeled "Dear Colleague." My gut reaction when getting on such a dull, but still very dangerous rotary, was to turn to song parody, in this case with "The Freewheelin' Credit Hour" and the apt "Blowin' In The Spin": 

"How many hours must a man take on before you grant him credit?
Yes, and how many tests must a teacher give before the students get it?
And how many times must the government intrude before they finally forget it?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the spin."

The ridiculously redundant "Dear Colleague" letters come fairly regularly, all of them as dreary as the credit hour one. In 2021, some states requested the Department of Education waive funding tied to "maintenance of effort," a phrase guaranteed to send me into orbit. Such annoyance through language inevitably led me to seek the poetry (both classic and original) exit lane. With "Dear Dante," I took solace in, of all places, Dante's "Inferno," a place certainly a step up from the American educational system. The plaintive opening says it all:

Tell me, dear Dante,

What circle have I fallen in?

My brain's beaten down

By the brutal mutilation

Of the tongue through the dung

Of professional ministrations.

"Gainful Employment," the catch phrase used by the government to justify federal aids for programs that lead to good jobs (despite the subjectivity of that statement), by 2017 had listed 800 (yes, you read that number right) programs that had failed their basic standard to meet "Gainful Employment." Since around this time the original GE (General Electric) had been taking its share of pot shots from David Letterman, I merged into all the traffic to present a Top 10 list in "We Bring Interesting Things To Light," providing The Top 10 Advertising Slogans For Today's GE."

8) Ten out of ten doctors have nothing to worry about.

Not a single doctorate program is listed in the gainful employment failures.  I don't know enough about the methodology to know if they are consciously not included, but it doesn't take long to wonder why not, given the glut of graduate programs and the dearth of positions specifically tied to that degree (especially in the world of academia). 

or

6) What happens here. . . can't even get you anywhere.

USC's "failed program" is in musical technician, a grad certificate. Man, if you can't find a decent-paying job in Southern California after taking that program, then none of us should think about offering that program.  What hopes would a Arkansas college have in offering that certificate?

I would be remiss to miss highlighting arrogance as a recurring theme, both from administration and faculty. Often I am struck by an exit from a roundabout that I had no intention to get on. Sometimes this happened when I was quietly trying to watch a movie to forget my day. That isn't always easy. Back in 2011, I watched 12 Angry Men realizing that Sidney Lumet offered a parable for the academic system. With a little bit of contextualization, I had 12 Angry Profs, the story of 12 members of a tenure-decision committee holding the academic life of a colleague in their hands. For the life of me, I am not sure why I made the hero, Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) into a mathematics professor. I must have had a soft spot for mathematics faculty that day. 

I am also less sure why the anti-hero, if we can call Lee J. Cobb's character that, is an older history professor, but his anger about Ne 'er-do-wells in academia sounds familiar:

Everything . . . every single thing that it is in this review portfolio, but I mean everything . . . says she's unworthy. What do you think? I'm an idiot or something? Why don't you take that stuff about the dean; the dean who supervised her and heard everything? Or this business about the diversity committee! What, 'cause we found one exactly like it? The Dean SAW her. Right there in the Commons. What's the difference how many pages it was? Every single thing. The diversity committee ending as soon as she joined . . .you can't PROVE she didn't get to the President! Sure, you can take all the time comparing student evaluations, but you can't PROVE it! And what about this business with the student? And the articles! There's a phony deal if I ever heard one. I betcha five thousand dollars I'd remember the journals that turned down all my articles. I'm telling you: everything that's gone on has been twisted . . . and turned. This business with the peer reviews. How do you know she didn't plagiarize? This man's statement is on the books! And what about hearing her yell . . . huh? I'm telling you, I've got all the facts here . . .

When over a 10-day span in October 2016, both The Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed featured no fewer than four articles lamenting incivility (or lack of civility) on college campuses (focusing, as they usually do, mostly on faculty), I used the movie parody lane one more time to post "In Kind," with "Close Encounters of Any Kind" (the alien life form being investigated is one of emotional intelligence). Our hero is an adjunct faculty member (talk about academic alienation) who sees the

shape of a of a heart everywhere he looks, in the deformed cushion of his 35-year old desk chair, in the leftover ramen noodles from his daily lunch, in the piles of coins he scatters randomly on his desk after cashing his paycheck ("This means something," he says, "I know it." "It means you don't have enough to buy a cup of coffee," says his weary wife.).

I lamented that Steven Spielberg might have no interest in filming this version, finding academics not even worth saving, which says a lot about the guy who did Schindler's List.

In fact, if I ever broke an academic traffic law, it was cutting through a median to get from the commonality lane to the poetry lane, as a result of managing (poorly, I suppose) my anger about how academics often have poor emotional intelligence. This came out in May 2018, when I started by noting that a USA Today article describing how our brains get tricked by fake news could be seen in the Commencement speech (and fallout) from Sweet Briar College that same month. Reading the trolls' comments to the Inside Higher Ed article about the speech led me to the poem "Confirmation Bias Age":

We're at the age where rite is might,

Where right triggers fight,

And emotions are ripped open

When reason used to rule:

A transformation that our confirmation

Trumps the rational conversation

Of educated minds.

Leadership arrogance might have been my consistently favorite topic to mock. It lent itself so easily to all forms of satire and criticism. The Top 10 List conveniently sufficed when I received a Medallion Catalog in 2016 ("I Give You President Undertaker"), leading me to Top 10 Revealing Things About Being A College President As Indicated by the Medallic Art Company 2016 Academic Catalog. #4 said it all (as with the other 9 entries, the quote comes directly from the catalog): 

4. Clearly there are phallic issues all over the place:  “The ceremonial mace is the symbolic extension of a leader’s authority.”

The busiest of the academic rotaries is the crisis management circle, as aggressive driving comes from all the sectors: the chauffeured limousines of the elite institutions, the Mercedes of the research institutions, the Volkswagen Beetles of the liberal art four-years, the church bus of the faith-based schools, the renovated classic cars of the community colleges, and the horse-and-buggies of the historically black universities. Everyone's looking to cut off their counterpart in route to an exit that can fulfill the strategic travel plan.

The problem is that everything is a crisis in higher education. That stays consistent through the years. If you listen to the naysayers, you'd be convinced, with all apologies to REM, it's "The End of Academe As We Know It". Let's face it, the song parody lane filled itself with ease:

Ninth grade, dual credit, don’t get caught with no vets

Diminished trad population mourned, non-trads, no return

Lock in common app, net price comparison, bloodletting

Affirmative action too late, Obama rankings rate

Light a way, light a path, speed up, speed up

Watch your curricula crush, uh oh

This means no test, remedial, developmental steer clear

Accreditation, accreditation, accreditation of sighs

Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I’m resigned.

The biggest crisis management is always enrollment. Few sane heads are in the room when panic about enrollment kicks in. It didn't take me long to see that enrollment decline is Academia's Great White Shark, captured by Jaws: This Time It's Financial, a comparison that hit me in August 2014, a time when "Jaws" can be seen at least three times a day, and a president can be seen swearing at his Chief Enrollment Officer three times a morning. It goes without saying that the Chief Academic Officer draws the short straw and gets to be Chief Brody in the midst of the bedlam:

Brody: I just want to tell you about the plans to . . .

Staff member:  What about the course cancellations, Chief?  Are you going to cancel classes?

Brody: Well, we're going to put some special waitlists on some courses, and then we're going to try and watch no-pays.

Staff member: Are you going to cancel classes?

Brody:  Uh, yes, we are.  Yes, we are.

President Vaughn:   Not until the end of August, folks.

Brody: (Looking at Vaughn): I didn't agree to that.

The introduction of a higher ed expert doesn't do anything to calm President Vaughn:

Vaughn: I'm only trying to say that Amity is an open-enrollment institution. We need tuition dollars. Now, if the students can't come here, they'll be glad to go to the likes of Kaplan, Ivy Tech or Ashford.

Brody: That doesn't mean we have to sign them up for free room and board.

Vaughn: I don't think either of you are familiar with our problems.

Hooper: I think that I am familiar with the fact that you are going to ignore this particular problem until it is too late and the Board bites you in the ass.  Dr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect storm, a deus ex machina.

Vaughn: Huh?

Hooper: It's really a miracle of de-evolution. All this machine does is eat up federal aid, fire up your congressmen, and make students go elsewhere.

Vaughn: You would like that, wouldn't you, get your name in the Chronicle.  Fellows, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on an enrollment plan. And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see my strategic plan come tumbling out.

The perceived solution to crisis management is always thought to be in sound strategic planning, as if taking a small portion of your staff off campus for two days to spin your wheels is a sound strategy. Everything comes back to the Mission.

Commonality among mission statements is a half-day's research project, provided you can stay awake through it. In 2011, as I was still transitioning from a private university to a community college, I noticed the lack of originality, and went to prove the trend via a fill-in-the-blank test for identifying institutional trends with mission statements. I provided a random ten institutions from their mission statements in "Burn Down The Mission Statement; or, Pass the Mission Template" (always good to get Elton John and Tori Amos together, although the pianos might be a tad anxious). As I summed up the chosen mission statements:

Almost everyone [mission statements] is global, sees a responsibility to city, state, nation, and world.  Many are land-grant institutions.  Most promote diversity.  All are dedicated to education, some specifying whether that is undergraduate, graduate or both.  Almost all value research and scholarship.

In 2015, building from an article questioning if a liberal arts' college aggressively cutting programs is abandoning its mission, I tried taking the accepted, usual, exit route, citing research from accreditation that defines the importance of institutional missions. However, that didn't last long, as the strains of Dave Stewart's guitar and Annie Lennox's voice quickly took me to song parody, "The Mission Here, Man."

Well, I was born from an original charter.

I was born from a simple land grant.

And if I had a dollar bill

For all the politicians' rant,

There'd be a mountain of money

Piled up to aid students who can't.

My founder made me good.

My founder made me strong.

He said, "be true to our goals

And the students will come along.

But's there just one thing

That you must understand:

You can fool with the vision

But don't mess with the mission here, man."

Even before retirement, I grew weary of these metaphorical driving decisions. After all, I must have made have such a decision 350 or more times. By 2023, I hate the drive and posted only eleven education-focused blogs (with my "Inside the HEAD" series, I posted over 70 in a four--month period). The only ones posted in 2024 came after retirement and basically allowed me to revel in my escape from the traffic. There's only so long an alert, creative driver can stay accident free in higher education. 

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If interested, fuller readings of the sources mentioned here are linked below (with poems available at the ever-expanding "The Blog Under The Bed").

Day 331: Yes "Roundabout"

Day Time In The Switching Yard

"Choose Your College Like A Cut of Meat"

"Eau de Humanities"

 "The Brand. The Bland"

"The Freewheelin' Credit Hour"

"We Bring Interesting Things To Light

12 Angry Profs

In Kind

Confirmation Bias Age

"I Give You President Undertaker"

Jaws: This Time It's Financial

Burn Down The Mission Statement; or, Pass the Mission Template

The Mission Here, Man

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A Life In Words Mostly Unread Series Home Page (with all 3 installments as of 4/14/2026)