Higher education faces looming threats from every direction. Dwindling enrollments. The demographic cliff. The enduring myth that professors have the time, inclination, and personal charm to brainwash the nation’s youth. Fire. Brimstone. Eternal damnation. The philosophy department getting merged with seven other departments, leading to your redundancy, your likely firing, and your doomed attempts to spin your PhD in poststructuralist theory into a job as whatever a “project manager” is.
But have you heard the good news? The college is rolling out a new strategic initiative.
We know the faculty feel overworked. Between teaching, research, advising, and ever-increasing but little-acknowledged service to the college, you’re beyond burnout. One more request for additional uncompensated labor and you might literally explode into a nerdy-ass ball of flame.
But the strategic initiative has a bigger plan for us all. You’re suffering now, but if you fight through the pain and work extra hard in support of the new strategic initiative, you’ll taste the sweet afterlife of a successfully executed strategic initiative. Once the prophecies of the strategic initiative have been brought to fulfillment, budget deficits will shrink, prestige and reputation will grow, that weird smell on the first floor of the student center will dissipate, and you’ll never be frazzled or beleaguered again.
Praise initiative!
A lot of you are probably wondering what the new strategic initiative is. Well, it’s complicated and hard to explain. It moves in mysterious ways. We’re building this plane as we fly it, as they say in the new strategic initiative biz. But fear not, because the strategic initiative will reveal itself in all its glorious details at a time when you are ready to comprehend it.
When we reach the kingdom of the new strategic initiative:
- The low enrollment shall be made high.
- The once apathetic students shall do the reading gratefully.
- Tweed blazers shall give “dark academia chic” rather than “thrift store clearance.”
- The US president shall cease his extortion, and the state legislators shall cease their content surveillance.
- The anxiety-induced eczema shall clear up, and your mother shall cease her intimations that law school would have been a better choice.
- The humanities departments shall be respected, or at least tolerated, or at the very least, the science departments will let their Humanities colleagues teach service courses like Medical Narratives and Medical Ethics, and maybe even History of Medicine.
- The art studio, once damp and unventilated, shall become exalted—as exalted as the shiny locker rooms of the recruitment-driven sports teams—unless the new strategic initiative involves cutting Studio Art in favor of a new Corporate Logo Design degree, but we’re not saying that is part of the new strategic initiative; again, all the details have not been worked out.
Thanks be to initiative!
Yes, we understand that some of you may feel that the new strategic initiative does not substantively address the college’s problems. That’s because those heretics don’t yet have a personal relationship with our Lord and Savior, the college’s new strategic initiative. All you need to do to attain that personal relationship is to welcome the new strategic initiative into your hearts.
And you can invite the new strategic initiative into your hearts by filling out the volunteer survey, which will arrive in your email shortly after this meeting. Time commitment and compensation are among the details that have not yet been worked out. However, the strategic initiative giveth and the strategic initiative taketh away, and we’d wager a guess that it giveth minimal compensation and taketh away loads of time.
