The Mystery of the Writer Who Could Not Read
My Southern Oregon University colleague Bobby Arellano published an essay last year that, among its effects, reminded me of this bleak truth: what educators mostly do is fail to communicate with our students.
We might be tempted to conceive of our relentless failures of communication as bad outcomes, not just failures to communicate, but strategic failures committed by our selves, or our institutions.
But the key insight that emerged from my reflection on Bobby’s essay is that we in higher education are not the only ones whose professional lives are silently characterized by failures to communicate.
Consider our grand commercial enterprises, for example. These institutions are often large. They have, by the standards of a small public university, seemingly infinite resources. And they have a very simple set of messages to convey, the intent of which can typically be boiled down to one desired behavior.
And yet they mostly fail. For every product sold to every customer, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of messages directed to consumers that do not result in sales. We all see advertisements every day for products that we never intend to buy, for which we could not even conceive ourselves as customers. And that’s even when targeted by the best insights that Big Data and its algorithms can provide.
The not-quite-hidden truth: for most commercial enterprises, great market success actually means “good enough to overcome the vast and interconnected ecosystem of failed communications within which occasional successes happen.”
Which is not, at its heart, a criticism of marketing, or even consumerism. It is, rather, an acknowledgement of the world from which our students emerge onto our campuses, and into which they return.
But the “message” of education is necessarily and properly more complex than Buy All The Things.
It entails creating the circumstances under which our students might figure out how to make All The Things buyable. Or how to make good decisions about life. Or maybe, even, how to work together to make a better world.
