Mediocrity and laziness in our universities

A graduate diploma in education, teaching or learning addresses such a problem. In the United Kingdom, a graduate diploma is expected as a condition of university employment. It is not the case here.

The argument for academics not holding teaching qualifications used to run as follows. Universities are different educational environments from high school. We are researchers, not teachers. This type of justification can no longer be sustained as academics are both teachers and researchers. We need to verify not only the relationship between these functions, but our public accountability to undertake them. Too many university academics do not hold either a doctorate or teaching qualification. There is no external confirmation or evaluation of their scholarship or classroom praxis.

Our students are not to blame. The replacement of educational revelation and international standards with technical competency and vocational skills is a product of the managerial transformation of universities. Academics must transcend this banality and mediocrity. Ronald Simpson, in reviewing his academic life at retirement, believed that his experience has taught him an important lesson. He believed that there are four ways to categorise the events in life.

•  Important and urgent
•  Important and non urgent
•  Not important and urgent
•  Not important and not urgent

Most of us spend far too much time worrying about the urgent, but not important. Such trivialities are not the point of universities. We are so frantically consumed and distracted by crisis management that we miss the causes of the initial problem.

I ask that those who work in education, or believe in it, think about the important, not the urgent. Put the attention on staff and students, teaching and learning. Stop wasting time with talk of generic competencies, mission statements and strategic plans. If we do not, then we are living Douglas Coupland’s dystopia: we are all “just a breath away from a job in telemarketing.”