WKRP tackling cencorship through the song, “Imagine”
I was a baby when John Lennon’s song, “Imagine” came out. I don’t know if it was considered controversial or not at the time, but growing up in a preacher’s house, I suspect it was. The line about imagining no Heaven was, I’m sure, an affront to many religious people, especially religious leaders. In fact, my first memory of the song was when it was used to make a point on WKRP in Cincinnati (one of my favorite shows of all time). Again, I was pretty young when it first aired, but I watched every rerun episode I could when I was in my teens.
The scene is this: the bumbling station manager (Mr. Carlson, played by the brilliant Gordon Jump) is facing the threat of a conservative Christian group who is boycotting the station due to their new rock-n-roll format. Carlson, who happens to also be a religious man, is meeting with the leader of a large church in the area. The seemingly Southern-Baptist preacher archetype is condemning the songs, the beats, and especially the lyrics, actually bringing up Lennon’s song as the example.
But while the assumption is that Carlson is going to cow-tow to the influential man, backing down and giving into his demands, that does not happen. The hapless Carlson suddenly grows a spine as he sees the notion of right vs wrong more clearly. He implores the religious leader to let the matter drop as Imagine is not saying there is no Heaven, but instead asking humans to imagine what life would be like if there was no Heaven. It may seem like splitting hairs to some, but to Carlson, it is a profound difference that matters. And he sees the religiosity of the group as closed-minded and looking for ways to be offended, instead of having a legitimate platform to stand on. Carlson ultimately tells the man, who is adamant that his loyal followers will boycott the station, to go ahead and do so. WKRP is not changing formats.
Imagine there’s no programs…
I recently had (to my mind) a similar encounter with a professor. I currently sit on three dissertation committees and in the past 6 months I have conferenced into three dissertation defenses. During one defense, after the committee’s private discussion with the student removed from the room, there was a lull before the student came back in to receive feedback and recommendations. So the other professors and I started discussing general topics. In particular, one tenured faculty member on the committee was pretty upset about a story she had just read and so she asked the rest of us for our thoughts (although she mostly ranted). It was an “Imagine” kind of article….
She had just read a story about Eastern Washington University (Spokane, WA) having built a new data-science program faster than ever before, due to pressures coming out of the business sector as leaders consistently state that college graduates are so skill-deficient. The crux of the story was not about EWU’s nimbleness, but instead focused on the growing number of companies and third party providers who are creating education opportunities outside of traditional college and university offerings. This professor, who teaches squarely inside a Liberal Arts program, spoke with great frustration and passion about the harm such “quasi-educational” pursuits (her words, not mine) will have on the United States.
Imagine there’s no college…
This kind of disruption has certainly been around for decades, seeing the likes of IBM and Westinghouse and GE with their own skill-based educational contexts for years. Think of Disney University or other context-specific, niche offerings that were never really designed to compete with traditional models, but likely used educational terms like “university” to help people more quickly understand that they were some model of specified learning. To call these disruptions is very generous. No traditional schools have ever really given those para-educational experiences much thought, unless they were trying to find a way to help provide some of the education held within. But that may be changing.
To be sure, the lament of “business” has been steady for years: students are graduating with no discernible skills, no ability to think more critically than anyone else, and no ability to communicate appropriately. That message has been around since the late 1800’s. David Tyack successfully argued in the late 1800’s that Progressive Education models were making students (largely males) soft mentally and physically, both in K-12 and higher education alike (A People’s History of American Higher Education, 2019).
But while the drum beat has remained persistent, a lot of these companies and leaders suddenly find themselves with many, many more means by which to produce their own brand of learning. I think of Revature, a company who takes recent college graduates (those in the Humanities being their favorite because of how much easier it is to align coding with human communication, especially when those graduates struggle to find employment), teaches them to code, then places them in jobs, taking a healthy share of the paychecks for a period of time until the contract is fulfilled. Why does the company exist? A former executive explained it to me succinctly. “We hear from banks and big companies all the time. They need developers who use computer languages universities simply don’t teach. Those schools are four to ten languages behind the times, not to mention other modern processes that most companies employ today, like project management.” The coding company is certainly not alone in this model, with companies from banks to healthcare to web bringing in people they believe do not have the proper training, so as to give them that training.
Per Wired magazine, Cognizant Technology Solutions in combination with a company called Per Scholas has started offering training to prospective employees in NY for technology jobs. Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) has joined the Southern Careers Institute to build out Woz U. Seeing the need bubble up to the surface for so long, even the US Chamber of Commerce has gotten into the act. Their USCC Foundation launched its Talent Pipeline Management Academy in late 2019, encouraging employers to directly ensure that the education system produces people with the skills actually required. Add to that other giants of industry such as Accenture, Boeing and Microsoft, who have come together to build the Internet of Learning Consortium, and the disruption seems to have not only sped up, but to finally be in (scalable) place so as to legitimately disrupt.
Consider the prediction from John Kroger on Inside Higher Ed last month. One of his ten trends to watch involves this very thing:
People have been predicting for decades that technology would disrupt higher education, but little has changed. The reality is that technology does not disrupt industries – more agile and sophisticated companies do. Given the deep frustration of the tech industry with the current state of education, expect companies like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook and Google to enter the K-12 and higher education space not just as software providers, but as education providers with their own suites of learning management software, courses, and credentials. The tech companies will enter the space as part of their competition for mindshare, but the end result will be to push aside many traditional higher education providers.
Bryan Alexander, a futurist and long time academic whom I follow on various platforms, added his thoughts about this particular prediction:
A very interesting forecast. Note that it doesn’t see any academic entities or other nonprofits entering that disruption space, which is quite an assessment. Instead, it focuses on the business sector, and in particular the very large tech companies as leading actors. I do wonder about the last two sentences. One focuses on class technology, rather than content, which is what we’re seeing now.
Ironically, I believe this prediction ties quite closely to another (Kroger) prediction regarding the loss of Humanities / Liberal Arts majors increasing even more than today. Already students seem to be leaving those “soft skills” programs at very high rates. But the perceived need to get more practical training in addition to tying monetary advantage to STEM or computer science or business pursuits seems to play directly into the idea of a Google or Tesla or IBM or Morgan Stanley providing exactly the kind of education students are seeking, without the over-inflated price of college.
Imagine there’s no philosophy major…
If you read my stuff with any regularity, you know I have two books on education just waiting for a publisher. I’ll not lament the dozens of “we’re not accepting submissions” letters I have received and will instead speak to the collegial feedback I have gotten on one chapter in particular. The end of my book on Education 3.0 has a chapter titled, “The Garden of E-D-U.” (Clever, right?) In it, I spend a bit of time vision casting what life could be life, were the ideas and solutions in the book to be put into practice.
One such section of that chapter revolves around a specific, newly created “university” experience, which is an offering from the giants of Silicon Valley. Imagine if Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc., came together and offered their own credential-granting institution. Imagine if that included badges, certificates, diplomas, AA, BA, MA, and PhD degrees. Imagine if those smaller (even micro) credentials were accepted unilaterally by those companies. They would quickly be adopted by smaller organizations and likely even by other big organizations such as Walmart or Dell. Those credential-bearing participants would suddenly be marketable both specifically and/or generally, depending on the degree they held. And it would not matter to many if those institutions were accredited or not, seeing so much alignment between the credential(s) and the desired needs of organizations. (Interesting – look at Kroger’s prediction about Accreditation too – important stuff.)
Will any of that actually happen? I suspect it will. While I hope the leadership of such an enterprise has both formal AND informal, educational AND commercial experience, as I feel it would encourage such a disruption to take root more evenly and even quickly, I suspect it is inevitable.
In the meantime, will these informal learning organizations frustrate academics? I think that too, is inevitable. The aforementioned Wired article speaks to the frustration of academics. Some of that frustration is due to the self-imposed nature of formal education and its bureaucracy. But some is also fear of being replaced from an outside force. That’s part of what genuine disruption is, after all. It certainly does not help their case that so few academics have served in non-academic (commercial) roles. But at least for now, the signal of a bachelor’s degree is standing up to the scrutiny. How long that will last and whether the two can both exist in the same ecosystem are the real questions here.
I would hope that more and more institutions find ways to align, collaborate, and even partner across formal and informal educational contexts. If designed effectively, there could be a handsome product after merging theory and application more authentically. But if not, then I suspect Kroger’s first prediction will also come to fruition, seeing more than 100 colleges and universities die in the next decade. So let us look ahead and make some smart partnerships as well as decisions.
Good luck and good learning.