From 6/20/2006

The Senior Vice President of the consultancy group we hired was in today, wanting to talk about how we are segmenting the phonathon program in our Annual Fund. It came up in the meeting about how it’s not ethically invalid for a university to purchase email lists from email list providers, how that a students previous experience with their university is very much different from a corporate relationship.

And just what do y’all think? Would you be comfortable if the University that you graduated from paid some email-list salesman for your email address? Is it ethical? What say my readers?! I wanna know!

So we got to talking about how people behave when exposed to our phonathon program. I relate it to my experiences with telemarketers, in so far that for me, my telephone is not a warmly lit, fuzzy welcome mat to every Tom, Dick, or Harry caller. I make it a matter of personal right to disconnect a telephone circuit when it suits me, if that is hanging up while someone is trying to sell me something, so be it. Ultimately I think it comes down to the fine sensation of whether or not you have a vested interest in communicating with someone, or if they are being intrusive (maybe insolent, even) in persisting their contact beyond your desire to maintain that contact. I find it very easy these days to simply hang up the telephone when a stranger tries to sell me something I do not want.

I’ve been called “cold and heartless” by various people because of my self-serving right to hang up the telephone when I really want to.

Then, shortly afterwards I tried to open up the notion that todays alumni that are graduating may not behave in the same way that this consultancy firm is telling us they will. I suspect that the nature of the game has changed and we are not compensating for that change in gameplay. In the past, when you were smart, when you were lucky, when you really wanted to, you went to a University and pursued a bachelors degree. The drive was personal, it was uniquely desired and all your own. You went to a prestigious institution, you took classes, you were serious about it, and you really loved your time there because it was something you were fully wanting to do. You graduated as a class, you knew other people in your class and they were your friends. As you all aged, your deep affection for where you went was carried along and as you were a success, you made sure that the place you went to, the place you were lucky to go to, was in some small way bettered later on via a nice big donation or a series of smaller donations over time. This is how it has been since the beginning…

Until around the 90’s… the 90’s changed a lot.

Instead of a culture and world where you could get a job out of high school, now you can’t, really – and be “successful” or “happy” and who doesn’t want that? So you need more education. That’s the fundamental change in the game. It went from “want” to “need”. When it became a needful thing, it became common. Every dullard went to college, everyone did, everyone took their SAT’s, everyone borrowed or had family to support them through school – because the culture was pounding it into your head that there was absolutely no future at all for high school graduates. Because of this it stopped being “K through Twelve” and started to be “K through Sixteen”. This is a fundamental change in how we perceive our education. K-16 now puts college as super-high-school. It’s wonderfully optional (no, no it isn’t, if you want to be happy), but instead of being “optionally desirous” it now is “optionally needful”. This change had effects in one direction, but not in the other. Keep in mind this unidirectional change, it’s important.

Since going to a University (or College) is needful more than desirable, this has changed how people who are undergoing it perceive their time. Now college is common, everyone does it, even the morons. You don’t have to be smart really, you aren’t there because you really want to be, you are there because you’ve no other choice, it’s another pressure that is put-upon you as you grow. This little nugget of pressure grows into adversity, suffering, and anger. You care not a drop for anyone else who you deal with in a day-to-day basis because it’s just like high school, only now with cars, apartments, jobs, and the first glimmers of true adult independence. You are a slave to your credit-hour achievement mark – you strive for 120. You might have friends in college, but nobody ever really expects those relationships to matter, they didn’t in high school, why should they matter in super-high-school? When you think back to your college days, what is more common? A tight-knit group of like-minded people who really desired to learn and grow or the perception of endless adversity as “The Grown Ups” blocked each and every move forward you made, grumbling and pissing and moaning as you passed by. Does it feel more like a real honest achievement or rather does it feel like a trip through a food mill in which you avoided successfully the paddles pushing you into the mesh below?

This isn’t the only change either! Not only did the situation change, but the people playing the game changed! Now kids are growing up in a K-16 world where they attend not Universities or Colleges, but rather ESP’s. Educational Service Providers. I’ve written about this before, how in the heyday of the long-ago, a University Professor was up on a dais, his lectern, where he professed, taught, and lead. The University of the long ago was a place where you respected your professors, there was a little fear, a little trepidation and a lot of obeisance. This was how it has been and how it was “meant to be”, but it didn’t stay that way. Instead of this notion of a University being a special place, now it’s an Educational Service Provider. The professors? Educational Service Provider Employees. The students? Educational Service Provider Customers. Now instead of the old way, when going to University was special and marked you as being exceedingly bright, you are just like all the others in the giant throng of the K-16 food mill. Students now treat their tenured professors like a customer would treat a clerk behind a counter. Students email professors making demands, being full-of-themselves with “Customer is Always Right” mentality. It doesn’t hurt the development of this when the University system regards students as “Walking Streams of Income”. The University treats the students like cattle, so the cattle treat the University like it’s a farm. The nature of the game has changed, even the nature of the place has taken this change.

Remember when I made mention of the importance of this unidirectional change? The students changed, the academy-component changed, but the University hasn’t. I suspect that as the alumni who graduated from contemporary University get old enough to give, that they won’t. That what they’ll remember isn’t how wonderful their time was spent with people of equal brightness, all shining brightly – but rather they’ll remember their acceptable time, spent with people of pitifully equal brightness, shining dully. The path that alumni relations takes has to be fundamentally different, we can’t use the classic indicators anymore, we can’t depend on “Class Identification” or “All your Friends” or even “The University that Cares” because obviously, they don’t really (will 2439-0790 please step forward!). Instead of these approaches there will have to be new approaches made, and I don’t really have a lot of faith that we can even read the rules for the new game, let alone play it.

So I sit back while this consultant is going on and on about “if they aren’t ever going to give, then drop ‘em, ignore them and concentrate on those that will.” and I think to myself that if they aren’t going to give, ignoring them is exactly what they expect. There is no reason to change, to see if the path we are on is taking us in the right direction, after all, alumni will always give.

Always.