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Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Understanding Centers of Excellence
Yesterday, I wrote about a new center of excellence that has been built at my university. Careful readers may have noticed that I never explained what, exactly, a "center of excellence" is.
Why didn't I? Well, the thing is, centers of excellence have become such a prominent trend in American higher education, it is no longer considered necessary to offer a definition whenever the topic comes up.
But you still don't know, do you?
Visualizing Excellence: As this diagram clearly shows, a "center of excellence" is a kind of nuclear explosion, closely orbited by things such as "techno-functional consulting." (Image from some company called "Customer Centria," which, we can only presume, offers "solutions" for "today's global business" or something.)
If you find yourself engaged in a conversation with university faculty and administrators about centers of excellence, here is what you are likely to do:
- Try to avoid having others find out that you don't know what a center of excellence is.
- Express your fervent support for centers of excellence. (After all, you figure, they are both central and excellent. What's not to love?)
Hmmm. So, since you are too embarrassed to ask, I will now take it upon myself to provide the public service of explaining what a center of excellence is.
First, of course, I'll need to look it up.
Like any true scholar, I begin my investigation by carefully typing "center of excellence" into the Google search box in my web browser.¹ Happily, this returns a wealth of information. Here's some of what's out there:
- "Centers of excellence affect on-target, on-value performance when they manage all processes and functions from problem definition to resolution."
- Centers of excellence will help companies to "stay ahead of the business intelligence curve."
- A center of excellence "enables organizations to centralize requirements authoring expertise, define repeatable definition processes, and to ensure communication of requirements fits internal company standards."
Okay. Well, NOW I UNDERSTAND.
To recap, here's what happened: I searched for a definition of "center of excellence," and I found that it has something to do with defining repeatable definition processes!
If you ever have a question that cannot be answered by googling, then there is one additional tactic that you, as a scholar, can undertake. And that is, of course, to look it up on Wikipedia.
Now, here's the really freaky thing. Are you sitting down? There is no "center of excellence" article on Wikipedia! Can you believe that? Really! Look it up! This is perhaps the only question humankind has ever come up with that IS NOT ANSWERED BY WIKIPEDIA.
Here's one thing we can say. Wikipedia is certainly not a "center of excellence." In fact, as a sprawling reference work written by the same millions of people who read it, Wikipedia is best described as a "diffusion of mediocrity."
Apparently, the diffusion of mediocrity can't explain what a center of excellence is. But I'd bet you that anyone at Intel's Social Media Center of Excellence could explain what Wikipedia is.
Conclusion: We must establish a center of excellence on centers of excellence.
Notes:
¹ You can tell that a lot of other people have this same question. The first suggested auto-complete search result for "center of e ..." is not "center of excellence" but "center of excellence definition."
Posted by Eric E. Johnson on June 2, 2010 at 10:56 AM | Permalink
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Excellent!
Posted by: Howard Katz | Jun 2, 2010 8:55:09 PM
Another manifestation: recent events at Middlesex University, involving a "center of excellence" colliding with market logic.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/may/07/philosophy-cuts-closures-middlesex-university
Posted by: anonymous | Jun 2, 2010 6:57:03 PM
Errata:
"calls to mind"
"...techno-scientific motor for the whole economy."
"...and innovation at the local level."
Please pardon any other mistakes I might have made.
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | Jun 2, 2010 5:05:23 PM
This calls to minds critiques of “the University” that find its barely suppressed raison d’être increasingly analogous if not quite similar to that of a transnational (bureaucratic) corporation, the central figure of which is the “administrator.” The University’s tasks become formulated in a generalized and ambiguous (or purposefully vague) logic of “accountability,” with its mission is said to be “the pursuit of ‘excellence’ in all aspects of its functioning” (Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, 1996). Narratives of “excellence” increasingly displace narratives of “culture,” the latter having been animated by purposes inspired by the “historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the [European] Enlightenment” (Reading).
The consequences for the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities are increasingly transparent. Let’s look briefly, by way of illustration, for the outcome with regard to the natural sciences, relying on a succinct analysis by the late John Ziman of the conspicuous differences (as ‘ideal types’) between “post-academic” science and its predecessor (and there’s no need to view this in Manichaean terms). In the 1940s Robert Merton proposed that the “prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions” scientists came to feel bound by, the core of the scientific ethos if you will, were more or less captured by five fundamental norms or regulative principles: Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Originality, and Scepticism (CUDOS). John Ziman argues that these norms no longer properly describe the ethos of what he terms “post-academic science” or what others have described as “Big Science.” In other words, (academic) science in roughly the last third of the twentieth century underwent “a radical, irreversible, worldwide transformation in the way that [it] is organized, managed and performed.” Of course this transformation was not absolute, thus we can speak of both continuities and differences between that sort of science which was formally and informally guided by CUDOS norms and post-academic science. Ziman contends this more straightforwardly industrial (and now highly technological and market-oriented) post-academic science is best understood by way of its alternative set of regulative principles or social norms (as Ziman explains, social and epistemic norms are closely bound up with each other):
“Very schematically, industrial science is Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Commissioned, and Expert. It produces proprietary knowledge that is not necessarily made public. It is focused on local technical problems rather than on general understanding. Industrial researchers act under managed authority rather than as individuals. Their research is commissioned to achieve practical goals, rather than undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge. They are employed as expert problem-solvers, rather than for their personal creativity. It is no accident, moreover, that these attributes spell out ‘PLACE.’ That, rather than ‘CUDOS,’ is what you get for doing good industrial science.”
Moreover,
“post-academic science is under pressure to give more obvious value for money. Many features of the new mode of knowledge production have arisen ‘in the context of application'—that is, in the course of research on technological, environmental, medical or societal problems. More generally, science is being pressed into the service of the nation as the driving force in the national R & D system, a wealth-creating techno-scientific motor for the whole economy.
In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is “guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time.” Symptomatic of such control is Lewontin’s anecdotal observation that “No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.” Ziman explains how deeply this new ethos has been inscribed in the practice of scientific research:
...[A]s researchers become more dependent on project grants, the ‘Matthew Effect’ is enhanced. Competition for real money takes precedence over competition for scientific credibility as the driving force of science. With so many researchers relying completely on research grants or contracts for their personal livelihood, winning these become an end in itself. Research groups are transformed into samll business enterprises. The metaphorical forum of scientific opinion is turned into an actual market in research sciences.
Ziman provides us with a bounty of reasons for thinking deeply about the vulnerability of scientists to “the demands of their paymasters,” be they of private provenance or the product of the State’s science policy.
With respect to the humanities and the social sciences, I suspect this means an inability to articulate and give concrete expression to the principles and praxis of a “Liberal education,” or, at any rate, that such principles have become solely rhetorical in a pejorative sense, trumped in reality by omnipresent corporate, market and bureaucratic imperatives of the sort that would not have surprised Marx, Weber or Sombart. In this scenario, the University is no longer meaningfully anchored in axiomatic values inspired by sincere attempts to forumlate the myriad generalizable criteria for human need and fulfillment (or eudaimonia) but becomes entangled in the larger society’s bewitchment by the signs and symbols of success and failure, of fleeting identities and social status, of hedonic foci and narcissistic pursuits. Arnoldian sweetness and light is derisively dismissed as naïve and impractical. Capital: cultural, material, economic and otherwise, is the predominant idol of the tribe. The student is first and foremost a consumer of education:
“Students’ frequent perception of themselves and/or their parents as consumers is not merely wrongheaded, since the contemporary University is busily transforming itself from an ideological arm of the state into a bureaucratically organized and relatively autonomous counsumer-oriented corporation .”
The University is slavishly dedicated to the singular task of generating “human resources” for the marketplace. The institutional fallout for “the Humanities” is devastating, a fact that disturbs the sleep of a few cranks and eccentrics or may provoke a handful of non-technocratic intellectuals.
The insidious discourse of “excellence” is meant to reassure all parties of the quantifiable quality of an educational system that provides more bang for its buck. As Readings has explained, such discourse serves to avoid addressing precisely what quality and pertinence might or should be. “Performance indicators” invoke economic jargon and models for evaluative purposes that effectively elide or efface the differences between “accountablility” and “accounting:”
“The social responsibility of the University, its accountability to society, is solely a matter of services rendered for a fee. Accountability is a synonym for accounting in the ‘academic lexicon.’” (Readings)
By way of conclusion:
“In this context, excellence responds very well to the needs of technological capitalism in the production and processing of information in that it allows for the increasing integration of all activities into a generalized market, while permitting a large degree of flexibility and innovation at the locl level. Excellence is thus the integrating principle that allows ‘diversity’ (the other watchword of the University prospectus) to be tolerated without threatening the unity of the system. The point is not that no one knows what excellence is but that EVERYONE has his or her own idea of what it is. And once excellence has been generally accepted as an organizing principle, there is no need to argue about differing definitions. Everyone is excellent, in their own way, and everyone has more of a stake in be left alone to be excellent than in intervening in the administrative process. There is a clear parallel here to the condition of the political subject under contemporary capitalism. Excellence draws only one boundary: the boundary that protects the unrestricted power of the bureaucracy. And if a particular department’s kind of excellence fails to conform, then that department can be eliminated without apparent risk to the system. This has been, for example, the fate of many classics departments. It is beginning to happen to philosophy.” (Readings) [Anyone following recent posts at Leiter Reports will be familiar with this.]
For an article that further explores many of these topics in the context of New Labour’s plan for the universities in Britain, see Ross McKibbin’s article in the London Review of Books (25 Frebruary 2010): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n04/ross-mckibbin/good-for-business
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | Jun 2, 2010 1:34:15 PM
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