Our Journey, Day 84

It's day 84, and it looks like it might be time to stop making videos of these daily posts, I think. They don't get a lot of views and they're pretty time-consuming to make. Of my top ten videos this month on YouTube, only one of these is on the list, and it's number nine. Also, there's not a lot happening in Bemidji State's slow-motion collision with the iceberg. The deck-chairs are still being moved around, I suppose. But I'm no longer that interested. The VP in charge of strategic enrollment management has just announced yesterday that she has taken a new job at a company that offers enrollment marketing and Slate services to Higher Ed. The president thanked her for her two-year record of success in his announcement. Later in the day I got an email from this exiting VP asking me to update her on the progress of the Z-Degree at BSU, which had been part of the five-page Strategic Enrollment Management Plan spreadsheet the task force spent last year producing.

What progress? It's not even clear yet how the 22 departments are going to consolidate into six "schools" or what majors are going to be eliminated. So it's way to soon to even speculate what programs might be available to offer Z-Degrees, much less which might have faculty who would be willing to try, given the morale problems created by the current retrenchments and the fear of a next round in the near future. I imagine this particular VP is completely unaware of these issues, though. About six months before the actual retrenchment I said something in a private conversation with her that suggested we might be headed for rough water and she challenged me on it, as if I was saying something that was not only ridiculous but disloyal. That was the last conversation we had, actually. The sooner she's gone from BSU the better. And actually, the sooner I stop thinking about it, the better. This does nothing for my mental health, and I need to be finding positive ways to move forward, both on the Z-Degree effort and more generally, on my next thing. I have no time to be dragged back into this morass of negativity surrounding BSU's executive management team.

But in any case, I think this will be the last of the videos for a while. Maybe I'll pop in with one, occasionally. Or if there's something really dramatic to report. I'll keep posting in this journey blog each day, because I think it will be interesting to look back on, later. I'm also beginning to post more substantial content on the new blog, Lifelong Learners. Today I dropped a full review and synopsis of The Great Conversation, the first book of the Great Books series. I hope people find that interesting.