Are We Reaching? : Part 1

Courtesy of Flickr user daveknapik

How do you reach students?

That sounds like some kind of existential or leading pedagogical question. A question that has been "answered" in movies like Mona Lisa Smile, Dead Poets Society, or the Great Debaters. To reach students just add an inspiring, yet stern lecturer who makes a connection; stand on a table and profess an uncomfortable truth; or in the case of where I work, rip a textbook in half and say, "don't be part of the heard."

(That last bit really happened, as part of a video on innovation at Harvard. A member of the engineering faculty really did cleave a book in two with his bare hands---a trick that was performed earlier at a Harvard Think Big talk by a computer science instructor. I promise, we really do like the printed page.)

On the other hand, watch The Social Network, and well, the solution to getting inside a student's digital soul is right there in the title.

In my line of work the question of how to reach students is, alas, quite literal: as in, how do you get students to find out about a new program in applied computational science, an event with the former president of India, an internship opportunity with Microsoft, or gasp, a policy on the proper use of the school's identity.

How do you get them to stop, drop, and not roll their eyes?

How do you get them to slow down their buzzing brains to let in a nanosecond of new information?

As a communications officer, you are besieged by daily requests to "help get the word out" or to "encourage your students to apply for great opportunity #1,853" or to "get the community to show their spirit and volunteer for marching in a parade!"

My office gets overwhelmed coping with the publicity; I cannot imagine how those on the receiving end of all of these urgent missives feel. Well, actually, part of my job is to try to figure out how to communicate with clarity under such constraints.

Illustration by Mark Todd.

Yet, wait. Aren't these the kind of multitasking, socially networked, over-programmed kids who can process ad infinitum? Can't they juggle knives and knowledge without being cut? Don't they drink from the fire hose of veritas?

In the New York Times, alum and book publisher James Atlas called them the Super People.

"It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking."

Of course, Atlas is describing a Super Person's ability to walk, talk, chew gum, and save the world all at the same time.

Such parallel processing also implies that these students can attend to vast amounts of information and well, attend lots of events---without reverting to information overload (as in the funny commercials for the Bing search engine.)



So what's one more thing? As I have mentioned in prior posts, an amazing aspect of Harvard (or any university for that matter) is its convening power.

In a given week we have more activities that any one person could even read about let alone show up for---even if aided by Hermione's Time Turner (a magical device that allows her to be in two place at once, primarily so she can take additional academic courses).

The activities are both internal (hosted by a school like ours), university-wide (like the 375h birthday party), or external (as in visits by heads of state). Moreover, for most students, all of these activities are in addition to their classes, clubs, and athletic activities.

I recall a late, great applied physics faculty member extolling my office for "putting out far too many event announcements"---as in, why do we possibly need to host so many colloquia given that there's no way to attend them all. He conflated our publicizing the events with us actually producing them.

In fact, at Harvard, every time you turn around you see yet another great lecture series on topic x. Every center, de facto, has its own series. Every department has several. Every school has hundreds if not thousands. And if you miss it, don't worry, you can watch it later online.

In addition to lecture series, each entity also now seems to have some kind of academic program even if they are not actually a school or have no way to grant a degree (a consortium, concentration, short-course, or a fellowship); a grants or awards program; and often an opportunity to tackle a given problem by just signing up!

Harvard, like many institutions of higher learning, reflects the Super People mindset. Some might say that such places, through the ever-increasing competitive admissions race, may have helped create the very Super People it now supports, and thus, is perpetuating the over-programming. In short, the snake bites its own tail again and again.

SEAS paraders at the 375th. Photo courtesy of Harvard Magazine.

For the 375th celebration of Harvard, for example, various deans and faculty were invited to multiple special events all at the same time (and often quite far apart, phyiscally). The response for how to deal with this dilemma was to, I kid you not, "think of it as a kind of pub crawl".

Our dean (and many others from what I heard) found this exasperating. Keep in mind, these are the kind of leaders that, by virtue of their roles, are inevitably overbooked.

I get the sense from the students that, each day, they face a very similar challenge of how to map out their days and nights.

As communications offices are, in part, there to help organize the chaos into something coherent for their various audiences, how can we become the best executive secretaries we can be and help ease the selection process or narrow down the choices?

I view this as a two-pronged issue.

• On a practical level, how do you get the messages (often which are important, exciting, useful) through all the clutter without becoming part of the clutter? In my day, we had a weekly printed publication of all of the events and activities at the college (all rendered in eye-harming 8 point type). If it wasn't in that publication, it wasn't happening on campus (or at least the students didn't want the administration know that it was happening.)
  
  
• On a philosophical level, how do you deal with what author Barry Schwartz calls the "paradox of choice." Too many choices is often worse than fewer ones, if not paralyzing. In a related book by Johah Leher, How We Decide, the author describes a scenario where he was so overwhelmed by the overwhelming selection of supermarket cereals that he clammed up and stood frozen in the isle for several minutes.

In my next posting, I will present some solutions.

In the meantime, if you want to feel dizzy, just check out the University calendar. I mean, wow. It's overwhelming in that cool kind of way---so much is happening all at once, all within a relatively concentrated space.

Maybe Harvard should borrow a popular tagline and apply it it itself: "To infinity and beyond."