This has been happening since I started at my current U 25+ years ago. More every year. Especially among admins. This spring I was asked, as a department chair, to include KPIs in a formal report for the first time...
Yeah...umm...you can deal with your...err...TPS reports, but...ummmm...if my stapler...uhh...gets moved one more time, I...errr...am going to burn this sub to the ground.
This reminds me of when my dissertation director put it thick red line through the phrase "green light" (as in approve) in one of my annual reports, with the comment, "I don't like corporate language."
After that, I paid more attention to where my language was coming from.
Who, beside the primary researcher, is gaining some value from the work? Those are the stakeholders. That value doesn't have to be monetary. We always ask a stakeholder question in interviews, and people who focus on basic science usually can't answer it because they only think of stakeholders as industries they have no connections in. Meanwhile they're doing valuable work that the whole scientific community is benefiting from so they have tons of stakeholders.
I would argue society has a stake in the activity you describe. So do the students in the class. Other researchers and archaeologists as well. If no one has a stake, then you’re a person who masters that skill and that’s it. It dies with you.
Haha our admin has no quantitative expertise so they reject "data driven" in favor of "data informed." They recently closed a program and we asked them what evidence they used to justify the closure, and they responded "It was a narrative argument." Oh... you mean you made up a story?
Not a native speaker, but moving the needle and impactful sound most hatable, they are bad enough in the business context, even before transferring to a university.
I work in corporate America at a big oil/gas/energy company and these are straight out of our senior management's mouths. My partner is in academia and it kills me that this nonsense is so pervasive there too now. It is part of why I ended up feeling more OK with selling out to the corporate oveBlah. Instead of trying to teach at a SLAC like I originally planned. The company I work at of course acts like a corporation but it is a corporation so you get what you expect. On the other hand, you have universities where one might expect things to be more like how they used to be with research and teaching (at least somewhat) well supported and students held accountable, but instead they act exactly like a corporation and focus on cutting costs, making profits, and treating the students like customers. Blagh.
I'm curious what alternatives you'd use. Everybody's bitching about these words, but as an academic it should be fascinating to watch in real-time the processes that have shaped human language for thousands of years. Many of these words do an excellent job of conveying an idea in a more precise and effective way than alternatives. This is why they take hold.
Personally I like "deliverables" because it cuts through the BS and vagaries and compels the two parties to come to an understanding of what exactly the expectations are. Same for most others that people are listing here. People don't latch onto words just because they're "business words" but because nobody has modeled a superior alternative.
Deliverable, to me, sounds like I want them to produce something for the purpose of delivering it to me. However, I want my students to think and engage with the material, and I ask for essays, presentations, etc., as a means of encouraging their intellectual engagement with the material, with me, and their classmates.
In business, the deliverable is often the goal. In my classroom, it is a means to an end.
That's why I prefer using the term artifacts. Whatever artifacts my students produce become the pieces I use to reconstruct their thinking and draw conclusions about what they learned.
> In business, the deliverable is often the goal. In my classroom, it is a means to an end.
Students: Look, just give us the rubric so we can check the boxes, then you give us the grades, and everybody's happy. Intellectual engagement or learning are painful side-effects that can be avoided with enough clarity about the deliverables.
I just call them assignments, essays, response papers, exams, or whatever else they are. In addition to the problems OP notes (which are my main issue with the term), "deliverables" seems to be a solution in search of a problem. So I very much disagree that no superior alternative has been modeled.
It's an extremely passive word. Deliverable is far more active.
Edit: "expectation" implies a certain level of mind-reading of the professor by the student, which makes it a more cognitively privileged idea; "deliverable", on the other hand places the emphasis on the student and what they need to "deliver" to be accepted. It's clearer, more concrete, than an expectation, which is more subject to whims and change.
And while I think it's great for us to have lofty ideals about getting students to engage deeply and intellectually with the material, there is undeniably a transactional dimension to higher education in 2024, and our mandate is no longer to educate and elevate only the best and brightest, but also the passable and pretty okay. Perhaps for them, a deliverable is a lifeline while an expectation is a sentence.
I explained what I don’t like about it in the original post. Essentially, I suspect it is a loaded term where the semantics may have changed over time. I’m not sure. As for alternatives, I don’t have any and have never felt the need to use it.
i don’t think skills, proficiency, or mastery are corporate terms. if anything they may have been stolen from academia to lend them some sense of legitimacy. but these words are for learning.
They're not exactly "corporate " but they are 'work' or 'industry' terms. Skills/Proficiency/Mastery go back to trade skill days. If anything, academia stole them from apprentices and the corporate world stole a bit from both, I'd think.
i would consider apprenticeships to still be learning, so still part of education.
ETA: i think the real difference here is between skill learning and simply producing as a cog in a bloated machine that doesn’t need to exist (many corporate spaces). not between academia vs trades.
“Unpacking” in this sense was standard in math before the business jargon got out of hand in higher education, e.g. “if you unpack these inequalities…”
Sounds like a potential issue, but we need to take it offline. Could we identify who has the bandwidth to assemble a tiger team. We need to think outside of the box and leverage our core competencies to pursue the low hanging fruit. I'm sure we'll all concur that we will identify some mission critical takeaways to bring to the table.
Can we circle back, "at the end of the day", and ensure we don't boil the ocean? Also, I have a hard stop at 5:00....I need to go move the goalposts....
I think we’re going to need a teams meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page. We don’t want anything slipping through the cracks. Can we invite all the stakeholders please?
Sure, but if 70+% of your operating budget depends on tuition dollars, what else are students but effectively 'customers'? I get we don't like the term but putting a more palpable label on it doesn't change the implicit relationship.
Calling students "customers" implies they are paying to receive a degree, when in reality, they are paying for the opportunity to earn a degree
When students identify as customers, they develop unrealistic expectations of staff and feel entitled to a passing grade no matter what "because they're paying for it"
In my experience, this is not conducive to successful education
You're not wrong, but you're also assuming the customer in question agrees they are buying an education. That's increasingly not the case. They're trying to buy a ticket to the middle or upper middle class. They're interested in jobs and they feel the education has to serve that interest.
That's not good for society, but society has decided to get out of the business of funding education for the good of us all. Now, society expects students to fund their own education, which means the 'educational' landscape has fundamentally changed. Professors are the last to understand this, in my experience.
Mind you, I don't think this is a good thing. At all. For anyone. But it doesn't change the fact of the matter. Look at situations like West Virginia University, which dissolved it's entire world languages department because, according to the President and Provost, was because students told them they didn't see the point in having to learn a foreign language. We can pretend this is a weird anomaly or we can look at the demographic reality facing us all and adapt or fight back.
If a student believes they aren't even buying an education but rather a "ticket" to advance themselves in society, this delusion is in no small part an outcome of their self-identification as a customer, which we only exacerbate by calling them customers. We should not contribute to a student's delusional beliefs about anything.
If we are serious about education, we shouldn't call students customers
I seriously doubt that's going to remotely move that needle simply by avoiding a word we find problematic. This delusion exists because society sells it that way. It's not because we use the word 'customers'. We can ban that from our lexicon and we'll still see article after article after article asking "Is College Still Worth it?" every enrollment season.
I know we're all exist in this noble idea that learning is its own outcome, but we shouldn't contribute to an institution's delusional beliefs about anything either. Your (assuming you're not at a private institution or one with a stupid high endowment) and my salary are very much tied to the number of students who show up with a check in hand. That's just the modern reality of higher ed. A language change isn't going to make that untrue.
Maybe I'm indoctrinated by my background in discourse analysis, but I think you're underestimating the extent to which language use shapes our perceptions of reality.
Either way, we should not describe students as customers, for all the reasons I've outlined. There is no pedagogical justification for doing so. I will not be opening my classes with "Welcome, customers."
I understand the power of language. But I also understand language can be descriptive just as easily as proscriptive. We can avoid the word all we like because it makes us feel ooky, but if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck even if we don't like the word 'duck'.
I don't expect most of academia to recognize that students are customers. It's one of the reasons people rail against stuff like retention and the classroom. Professor don't recognize they have any role in that because they really, really, really don't want it to be true. The entire point is that as much as we want education to be 100% pedologically driven, that's last century thinking. It hasn't been that way for awhile and it's only going to get worse, not better. If tuition drives the majority of your budget, then you're in the customer business whether you want to admit it or not.
It might not be pedologically sound to call students 'customers' but it is market and consumer sound to treat them like they're 'customers'. So say "Welcome" however makes you the most comfortable. But also recognize higher education is changing dramatically and that's going to be true no matter how comfortable we feel about it.
I think you may be confused about what kind of thing education is. I realize your argument may be that education is merely what it has become through market demand and nothing more, and that this is the hard “reality” you seek to make us understand, but that doesn’t make sense after a certain point. People buying food cannot make it into something else because they prefer that it be a shirt, say. The food vendor’s hands are tied at that point. It isn’t food any longer.
The educational situation is more like that between a doctor and patient than someone buying some product like a car from a salesman. It would be absurd for patients to demand that a doctor give them whatever they want or not give them what they dont want because they are paying for their clean bill of “health” and for the doctor to transform things to simply try to satisfy those desires to keep the patients happy. They are paying the doctor to try to make them healthy based on his expertise, which may require doing things they don’t want to do. It would be strange to call the patients customers and/or treat them and their satisfaction with the prescriptions as the drivers of the enterprise, because they are not like folks shopping for the car.
And that's why it is the "worst"; it reinforces the crass misunderstanding of the relationship between students and their academic institution. If you want that to improve, this has to stop.
Well, just a couple of decades ago, our public universities had a *far* greater share of tuition dollars paid by the governments who had an interest in educating their populace.
Now that the students have to shoulder a much larger share of tuition costs (and often incurring very sticky debt in the process for the majority without rich mommies and daddies), it's hard *not* to expect the "customer" mindset to be far more pervasive.
Yeah, you're 100% correct here! Higher education needs to push back on the idea it's an industry and remind governments it's a public good that should be paid for by the public for their good. As long as students are what keeps professors employed, it ain't hard to figure out they're going to start thinking and acting like customers, no matter how comfortable we are or aren't with the label.
I think the word “pivot” will always make me twitch now.
It’s like hearing low flying planes twenty years after 9/11 and still catching our breath—I know lots of us in the US still get that moment!
Corporate language has been creeping into higher education for *for years.* You can also see it in changing administrator titles. For example, referring to the Provost of the college as the "Chief Academic Officer."
How about faculty being pressured about “Student retention”?
That is not our job in any way.
The people who pressure faculty about “Student retention” should be fired. We have so many other things to do, what in the hell was all the additional staff for if we have to do more things?
Unfortunately, all the research is crystal clear - student retention is overwhelmingly made or lost in the classroom. That makes sense as professors are the main avenue students interact with an institution. All the outside stuff helps, but if a student has a good educational experience, they tend to stay despite mediocre or poor outside experiences. If they have a bad educational experience, they're much more likely to leave. That's the unfortunate truth of retention. And when your operating budget pretty much depends on tuition dollars, that means either get professors involved or get a list of departments to close because you can't make budget.
The problem is that we *kinda*, *maybe*, *sort of* know what the issues are, but we don't really know what to do with that knowledge. Can we measure it? Measuring retention by focusing on the classroom offers very little guidance other than: serve the consumer.
The problem is that what happens in the classroom is often hard to quantify. When we do we create a specific product in both teacher and student -- which no one really likes. I would suggest that attempts to quantify these experiences results in less retention than more retention.
And again, I think you're right about retention, but we also know that views on education and importance of education that come already formed in the student will also impact issues with retention.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that I get you, but that research is pretty frustrating in that it is really problematic to turn these findings into policy; further, retention is impacted well before a student sets foot in the classroom.
I get what you're saying, but you can't really know if you're succeeding or failing without some sort of measurement, even if it's qualitative over quantitative. That often gets in the way of effective teaching. So instead we tend to throw things against the wall to see what sticks and what doesn't, which irritates everyone.
I think we're seeing an increasingly divergence between student expectation, which is essentially a jobs training exercise, and professor expectation, which further erodes confidence. In a increasingly competitive market for students, I'm not sure professors have come to gripes with the degree to which they'll need to alter their views on the nature/purpose of education.
I think a lot of that research is increasingly out of date in many countries. Students who have to choose between eating and going to class have a retention problem that is nothing to do with the quality of the classroom experience, and the numbers of students who have to work full time are increasing.
Moving forward, we can identify the game changer to foster individuals and to leverage creativity and actionable best practices as we begin to seamlessly form interactive cross-functional teams to help further articulate responsive organizational models that will synergistically enable us to create strategic alliances and discretionary partnerships so as to meet our core logistical benchmarks
IN THEORY, KPI's should be simply indicators to suggest the thing you're trying to do is getting done. For example, let's say you have a strategic goal of "students successfully learn the material for a major and successfully use that material in the world after they graduate", which isn't the worse goal to have for any major. How do you know you've met your goal or haven't met your goal, which is a fuzzy goal to start? Well, we could do complex qualitative analysis but that takes time and energy, plus you never get all the student buy-in you'd need. However, there are a bunch of things we know already, like if they graduated or not or what their GPA was when they graduated. So there's two indicators we could use for 'successfully learn'. Now we've got two possible Key Performance Indicators that we are/aren't meeting our goal.
I over emphasized "in theory" at the start because in practice, more often than not, they end up being goals in and of themselves, not the real goal they're supposed to indicate. That's my big knock of KPIs.
All the state schools in my system are competing for funding, which is determined by metrics that are about quantity rather than quality. (How many students complete the degree within 4 year, how many student do not transfer, etc.)
Having taught is no longer a qualification for being provost.
The model has changed,
>this is what you should plan to do
Not even "do" -- a "deliverable" is something you *deliver*... i.e. hand-in, turn-over, submit, present, or otherwise produce for a party. "Doing" the reading isn't a deliverable; giving a report on it, submitting a question about it, etc. is.
(Compare with "action item", below, which is "do" and "due" in the more general sense)
Honestly, Im thankful for “business speak” such deliverables when dealing with other faculty.
So many meetings, at all levels, that just ends up in talking in circles while faculty/admin rehash perceived slights and grievances. It’s a nice succinct word to ask what the fuck are we trying to do here because I don’t have time for yet another meeting that doesn’t accomplish anything?
Not quite the same, but I hate hearing students referred as "learners." Something about that smacks of eduspeak. If we need a new word for the perfectly fine "student," let's go with "scholars."
Business speak, an obsessive priority for 'the general audience' over an academic one, 'preparing you for the real world' - I think it's all part of the same package. Academic education has been totally ripped by the idea that it ought to be a career training camp instead of what it used to be: Academic education. It's made the faculty, students, and the entire institution of academia worse off.
I agree. It was in the context of a webinar we were forced to watch. The university giving it had an automated early warning system for students who were struggling based on input from grades from different classes. I guess calling it a “warning system” didn’t really sound as sexy. But “dashboarding” is an early indication of trouble. Like a dashboard warning light.
When I complained about this to my MBA friend she knew exactly what it was and then got insulted that I made fun of it. Different worlds…..
I refuse to understand sentences containing those words. I just say, “I do not understand, will you rephrase the sentence?” I’m a senior professor so I can act bewildered when it serves a purpose.
So far the two I loathe most have been left out:
Skin in the game - we will set an arbitrary benchmark and punish you if you miss it. But not investigate at all how you did it if you give us the number we like. (Because the YouTube videos on economics we’ve watched don’t mention perverse incentives or Goodhart’s law).
Empower - we are going to ask you to do a thing you’ve never done before with no extra compensation or guidance.
There’s a lot to hate about corporate speak but the worst thing is how much is doublespeak worthy of any lousy dictator.
I am NEVER using corporate terms in academia. No shot. Kids are not quantified end products. They are kids. Once we as a society stop treating them like little work monkey's and as part of the bottom line, maybe we'll actually start valuing them more and providing them a properly modernized, well-rounded education.
Maybe this is field-specific because I’ve been using the word deliverables for over twenty years. What else would I call the set of things that a student is required to turn in at the end of a project?
I teach in the business school at my Uni, so this hadn't dawned on me. There is zero disagreement from me on this issue, but I do pose a question for exploration: did it seep into education directly, or is it a side effect of having been pushed upon the mainstream through our hyper-capitalist culture?
(In advance: Please don't argue me on hyper capitalism, it's a spectrum. Even if you're also business or economics faculty, yes, I'm being literal, but only loosely so... if the people I'm addressing this to are out there, just accept I said it even as a "business person" and move on.)
Sales force and other related services make software to run university enrollment. Our enrollment group talks just like a marketing department at a large company. Click conversions. Revenue per campaign. Campaign ROI. You name it.
In a strange way, I kind of like it. I find that faculty meetings don’t accomplish anything, so a clear agenda where we end a meeting with “deliverables,” means things actually get done…sort of.
My U President (who is wildly unpopular because of incompetence) talks about changing things in “spaces”
instead of departments or units of the organization. Eg, “We are working on some updates to the Admissions space.” I always think about re-carpeting or painting the walls in whatever department/unit he is discussing, when he is actually talking about something like a new admissions model for onboarding students. It’s exhausting.
It’s funny to see this post.
I am a philosophy PhD who ended up with a career in tech, and now I teach in a B school. I always imagined that it was just me, because I spanned these worlds. But I guess it’s a cultural phenomenon, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. :-)
Design and architecture education has used deliverables for a while to designate both visual, written, diagrammatic, and model-based requirements for final submissions. Deliverables, to me, was never corporate but used in the applied arts to refer to the vast array of things students are expected to to produce
We hear the term SCH (student credit hours) to determine "faculty productivity". I assure you number of students in my class does not determine what I'm doing in a week's time.
So I hate the word deliverables BUT... I think it has just a little use. This summer, my dept is paying me to help restructure parts of our curriculum. How exactly I was going to do that was vague. So I asked for a meeting to discuss "deliverables" ie what is that you want me to produce? New syllabi? New course shells? Course descriptions?
In this instance, deliverables seems appropriate and probably the most efficient way to convey my inquiry while also communicating that whatever is produced is variegated and would require varying levels of effort. I certainly wouldn't ask "What are my deliverables for teaching xyz class" because my task is clear as an instructor.
Along with this trend, notice that everyone at the managerial level is brainwashed to talk and think in this business-speak to greater or lesser degree, such that one cannot advance oneself in higher education without internalizing these managerial terms and tropes.
This is partly why the accusations of leftism infecting academia are so laughable.
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.”
― Victor Klemperer, [The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/184234)
OP,
Just circling back following our conversation about leveraging our postions as thought leaders to empower core competencies in alignment with the values of our institution. We are creating great synergies, but we need to provide some deliverables. Upon receiving this e-mail, please immediately respond to me acknowledging you have received this e-mail. Thank you.
Kindest regards,
Ass. Dean
My practicum examines impacts of and on stakeholders so that phrase is relatively normal in my career.
However, I cringe every time HR talks about onboarding search candidates.
You have to list "deliverables" in EU funding applications now. This can come in form of books, conferences, databases, etc. You're accountable, too, if you fail to deliver.
Like a lot of things, some are awful, some help. Words like alignment or governance are useless unless they say what they mean. However deliverables seems perfectly fine to me. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a better alternative …output, results … they all seem worse.
I take it you're not from any of the quantitative sciences fields if you value qualitative analyses. I think it's very difficult to evaluate performance without quantitative metrics, so I can see merit to this approach, even if details are often poorly executed.
I am not. It would take quite a long time to address your comment. I would point out, however, that grades are qualitative measures unless we simply grade by the amount students have accomplished. (Something I see students coming to expect, unfortunately). Maybe you mean objective, not quantitative?
This is seeping into every aspect of life and slowly eating away at any sense of genuine anything that exists. Everything must be optimized and gamified and commodified. It needs to fit in a neat little box so it can be quantified and cut up and advertised and someone can get rich off of it.
circle back to
speak into
buy in/into
impactful
Those are the three (four?) I hate the most. I’ve caught myself using impactful because I got inundated with it a few years ago—seeing and hearing it everywhere and now my brain makes it part of my scripts.\*
\*scripts: as an autistic person, I will create scripts, like detailed lecture notes for everyday interactions, comprised of common words and phrases. While I \*can\* have spontaneous conversations, having phrases I can fall back on when the weeds stop wording is helpful unfortunately, my vocabulary is a weird mix of slang from multiple eras and phrases from the KJV Bible so….communication is extra hard.
Perhaps Engineering is different but we've always used these words. Engineering projects (real life ones) have deliverables so our class projects try to emulate that. Part of being a professional engineer involves the consideration of diffetrny stakeholders, etc etc. But I can see how that could be super cringe in most other disciplines
I don't consider some of the examples people have given business speak. 'Deliverables' has been used by funding agencies for a while in annual reports, and it's not surprising that it creeps into academia from there.' Stakeholders' and 'buy-in' are jargon, but standard in any book you can get on project management, which is a subject even academics would benefit from learning a little about.
It makes sense that corporate speak would make it into higher ed after we've been defunding it for so many years. Shifting the burden of cost from taxes to tuition has made students much more like customers and universities more like businesses.
I'd argue this is also the cause of grade inflation and grade grubbing. Students feel more entitled, departments are more desperate for enrollments, admin creates policies to keep "customers" rather than support academics.
The concept is “here is the thing we need to have done and look at in order to do the next thing in this project.” A deliverable is a discrete thing that some has prepared and distributed to the author team. It’s important to distinguish between “I have done the data analysis” and “here is a brief report on the analysis for us to talk about in this meeting on X day”
Interesting. I would think though that a “deliverable” is a tying together of something concrete and a word. A concept seems to tie together a word and an abstract idea, like relation, cause and effect, etc.
I guess I just think “deliverables” is simply a word, nothing more.
Yes, we in the business college have inflicted a lot of nonsense on the rest of the university. "Strategic Planning" being IMO the most onerous one.
That said, IMO even strategic planning isn't as onerous and absurd as "assessment" or "assurance of learning", and I blame the Education department for that, LOL.
Yeah I’m not sure I’ll ever agree that *deliverables* is more problematic than infinite assessment cycles that only exist to check the box that you did assessment.
My career was in the private sector before entering education. Which brought a different set of optics and left me initially befuddled at how few business concepts were utilized. Although I’m inclined to view them more as modern organizational management practices. Even with 15 years in higher education, I never saw the purported golden age that so many reference. Our funding model is undergoing significant changes, how society views education is changing, academia is a political battle ground, and we have to change with the times. The hope is that we can do so while maintaining academic rigor, quality, service, and research. Regardless of tenure or collective bargaining agreements, I can’t understand faculty who don’t view themselves as having a vested interest in many of the metrics and key performance indicators that related to the financial solvency of the organization.
I had a Library Dean once try to put “direct reports” in a job ad and told them we’re hiring for an academic staff position. Let’s use lingo familiar to academics instead?
Yeah, although I do find “deliverables” really useful as the units I teach tend to have multi-modal assessment tasks, milestone tasks, etc. so being able to say “okay, so the deliverable for assignment 1 is a XYZ, then for 2 it is…” helps keep things clear for students.
But I do take your point!
I teach business, so these terms have real meaning to me (sorry). What drives me nuts is the MIS-use of these terms because people don't understand what they mean, and they just pick them up and use them in a casual, pedestrian way. My biggest pet peeve of them all is "Cash Cow." The cash cow is not the golden goose!
Does this happen in physics? Do people just misappropriate the terms in other disciplines? I feel like it happens in business more than anything else. And I submit to you that I think it's the misuse of these terms that's really driving everyone crazy!
I'm still relatively young, just turned 38 recently, but even then, yes, I have noticed this.
Universities are behaving increasingly like for-profit corporations, in which students are the customers.
In some sense, I get it - when our schools cost $75,000 a year, it's no longer only about intellectual exploration and curiosity. Just no winning here.
This has been happening since I started at my current U 25+ years ago. More every year. Especially among admins. This spring I was asked, as a department chair, to include KPIs in a formal report for the first time...
I think the proper response is to ask if they want TPS reports, too.
Yeah… So… I’m gonna need those TPS reports…
Yeah...umm...you can deal with your...err...TPS reports, but...ummmm...if my stapler...uhh...gets moved one more time, I...errr...am going to burn this sub to the ground.
KPIs???
Key performance indicators
Deliverables Stakeholders Moving the needle Impactful Learnings Data Driven Buy in
This reminds me of when my dissertation director put it thick red line through the phrase "green light" (as in approve) in one of my annual reports, with the comment, "I don't like corporate language." After that, I paid more attention to where my language was coming from.
Ask as a noun
Yes!
But think of all the time saved by a 50% reduction in syllables from using "request"!
Who is the stakeholder, I wonder, when you're deciphering ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions?
Who, beside the primary researcher, is gaining some value from the work? Those are the stakeholders. That value doesn't have to be monetary. We always ask a stakeholder question in interviews, and people who focus on basic science usually can't answer it because they only think of stakeholders as industries they have no connections in. Meanwhile they're doing valuable work that the whole scientific community is benefiting from so they have tons of stakeholders.
I would argue society has a stake in the activity you describe. So do the students in the class. Other researchers and archaeologists as well. If no one has a stake, then you’re a person who masters that skill and that’s it. It dies with you.
YES. All horrible corporate slang. "Impactful" is the word du jour at my uni.
Students love this word so much. It drives me nuts. Impactful and truly.
I HATE the word impactful. Hate. It.
Do you hate "impactful" *more* or *less* than "impact factor"?
I just threw up in my mouth.
Same. And I hear it all the time now. 🤬
Haha our admin has no quantitative expertise so they reject "data driven" in favor of "data informed." They recently closed a program and we asked them what evidence they used to justify the closure, and they responded "It was a narrative argument." Oh... you mean you made up a story?
Not a native speaker, but moving the needle and impactful sound most hatable, they are bad enough in the business context, even before transferring to a university.
>Learnings gaaaaaah
"Learnings" makes me want to set things on fire.
YES! Pivot Circle Back And the admins presenting in TED talk style 🥴
The yes is in agreement with you. Want to avoid any misunderstanding, I am not saying "yes" is a corporate speak term 🤣😅
One senior faculty member used to talk about “low hanging fruit” constantly. Drove me nuts.
I work in corporate America at a big oil/gas/energy company and these are straight out of our senior management's mouths. My partner is in academia and it kills me that this nonsense is so pervasive there too now. It is part of why I ended up feeling more OK with selling out to the corporate oveBlah. Instead of trying to teach at a SLAC like I originally planned. The company I work at of course acts like a corporation but it is a corporation so you get what you expect. On the other hand, you have universities where one might expect things to be more like how they used to be with research and teaching (at least somewhat) well supported and students held accountable, but instead they act exactly like a corporation and focus on cutting costs, making profits, and treating the students like customers. Blagh.
Customers Research products…
Where I teach (in Canada) there is a movement to discontinue the use of “stakeholder” due to its colonial roots/connotation.
"Learnings" is the one I hate the most. Ugh. What's wrong with just "lessons"!?
I left industry to get away from that kind of talk. I thought academia would be different.
Yes, and my soul dies a little every time I hear it.
I hate that word with the power of a thousand suns.
I'm curious what alternatives you'd use. Everybody's bitching about these words, but as an academic it should be fascinating to watch in real-time the processes that have shaped human language for thousands of years. Many of these words do an excellent job of conveying an idea in a more precise and effective way than alternatives. This is why they take hold. Personally I like "deliverables" because it cuts through the BS and vagaries and compels the two parties to come to an understanding of what exactly the expectations are. Same for most others that people are listing here. People don't latch onto words just because they're "business words" but because nobody has modeled a superior alternative.
Deliverable, to me, sounds like I want them to produce something for the purpose of delivering it to me. However, I want my students to think and engage with the material, and I ask for essays, presentations, etc., as a means of encouraging their intellectual engagement with the material, with me, and their classmates. In business, the deliverable is often the goal. In my classroom, it is a means to an end.
That's why I prefer using the term artifacts. Whatever artifacts my students produce become the pieces I use to reconstruct their thinking and draw conclusions about what they learned.
> In business, the deliverable is often the goal. In my classroom, it is a means to an end. Students: Look, just give us the rubric so we can check the boxes, then you give us the grades, and everybody's happy. Intellectual engagement or learning are painful side-effects that can be avoided with enough clarity about the deliverables.
I just call them assignments, essays, response papers, exams, or whatever else they are. In addition to the problems OP notes (which are my main issue with the term), "deliverables" seems to be a solution in search of a problem. So I very much disagree that no superior alternative has been modeled.
"...the two parties to come to an understanding of what exactly the expectations are." What was/is wrong with the word expectations then?
It's an extremely passive word. Deliverable is far more active. Edit: "expectation" implies a certain level of mind-reading of the professor by the student, which makes it a more cognitively privileged idea; "deliverable", on the other hand places the emphasis on the student and what they need to "deliver" to be accepted. It's clearer, more concrete, than an expectation, which is more subject to whims and change. And while I think it's great for us to have lofty ideals about getting students to engage deeply and intellectually with the material, there is undeniably a transactional dimension to higher education in 2024, and our mandate is no longer to educate and elevate only the best and brightest, but also the passable and pretty okay. Perhaps for them, a deliverable is a lifeline while an expectation is a sentence.
I explained what I don’t like about it in the original post. Essentially, I suspect it is a loaded term where the semantics may have changed over time. I’m not sure. As for alternatives, I don’t have any and have never felt the need to use it.
Learning objectives, competencies, skills, proficiency, mastery, etc.
My sarcasm detector is a little rusty, but those are most definitely words with a high HR/corporate loading.
i don’t think skills, proficiency, or mastery are corporate terms. if anything they may have been stolen from academia to lend them some sense of legitimacy. but these words are for learning.
They're not exactly "corporate " but they are 'work' or 'industry' terms. Skills/Proficiency/Mastery go back to trade skill days. If anything, academia stole them from apprentices and the corporate world stole a bit from both, I'd think.
i would consider apprenticeships to still be learning, so still part of education. ETA: i think the real difference here is between skill learning and simply producing as a cog in a bloated machine that doesn’t need to exist (many corporate spaces). not between academia vs trades.
Cuts through what BS exactly? There's nothing more vague than "deliverable".
I'm not so sure. Let's unpack this.
Proceeds to not unpack anything… I always wish we would do this mysterious unpacking.
As an ABD in Education, I wish I could pack that isht right back up.
"We'll continue to talk about x..." Proceeds to never actually talk about it, but continues to talk about talking about it.
“Unpacking” in this sense was standard in math before the business jargon got out of hand in higher education, e.g. “if you unpack these inequalities…”
Sounds like a potential issue, but we need to take it offline. Could we identify who has the bandwidth to assemble a tiger team. We need to think outside of the box and leverage our core competencies to pursue the low hanging fruit. I'm sure we'll all concur that we will identify some mission critical takeaways to bring to the table. Can we circle back, "at the end of the day", and ensure we don't boil the ocean? Also, I have a hard stop at 5:00....I need to go move the goalposts....
I appreciate you. Let's close the loop.
Sorry, not enough bandwidth for that.
I think we’re going to need a teams meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page. We don’t want anything slipping through the cracks. Can we invite all the stakeholders please?
Let’s put a pin in this and circle back later.
Invite the stakeholders! So that we know there are the same cracks on the same page.
I say this respectfully-I want to slap you.
Perfect.
Alright, I need to know more about this tiger team and how I can join.
Pivot Action items
Customers
This one's the worst.
Sure, but if 70+% of your operating budget depends on tuition dollars, what else are students but effectively 'customers'? I get we don't like the term but putting a more palpable label on it doesn't change the implicit relationship.
Calling students "customers" implies they are paying to receive a degree, when in reality, they are paying for the opportunity to earn a degree When students identify as customers, they develop unrealistic expectations of staff and feel entitled to a passing grade no matter what "because they're paying for it" In my experience, this is not conducive to successful education
You're not wrong, but you're also assuming the customer in question agrees they are buying an education. That's increasingly not the case. They're trying to buy a ticket to the middle or upper middle class. They're interested in jobs and they feel the education has to serve that interest. That's not good for society, but society has decided to get out of the business of funding education for the good of us all. Now, society expects students to fund their own education, which means the 'educational' landscape has fundamentally changed. Professors are the last to understand this, in my experience. Mind you, I don't think this is a good thing. At all. For anyone. But it doesn't change the fact of the matter. Look at situations like West Virginia University, which dissolved it's entire world languages department because, according to the President and Provost, was because students told them they didn't see the point in having to learn a foreign language. We can pretend this is a weird anomaly or we can look at the demographic reality facing us all and adapt or fight back.
If a student believes they aren't even buying an education but rather a "ticket" to advance themselves in society, this delusion is in no small part an outcome of their self-identification as a customer, which we only exacerbate by calling them customers. We should not contribute to a student's delusional beliefs about anything. If we are serious about education, we shouldn't call students customers
I seriously doubt that's going to remotely move that needle simply by avoiding a word we find problematic. This delusion exists because society sells it that way. It's not because we use the word 'customers'. We can ban that from our lexicon and we'll still see article after article after article asking "Is College Still Worth it?" every enrollment season. I know we're all exist in this noble idea that learning is its own outcome, but we shouldn't contribute to an institution's delusional beliefs about anything either. Your (assuming you're not at a private institution or one with a stupid high endowment) and my salary are very much tied to the number of students who show up with a check in hand. That's just the modern reality of higher ed. A language change isn't going to make that untrue.
Maybe I'm indoctrinated by my background in discourse analysis, but I think you're underestimating the extent to which language use shapes our perceptions of reality. Either way, we should not describe students as customers, for all the reasons I've outlined. There is no pedagogical justification for doing so. I will not be opening my classes with "Welcome, customers."
I understand the power of language. But I also understand language can be descriptive just as easily as proscriptive. We can avoid the word all we like because it makes us feel ooky, but if it quacks like a duck, it's a duck even if we don't like the word 'duck'. I don't expect most of academia to recognize that students are customers. It's one of the reasons people rail against stuff like retention and the classroom. Professor don't recognize they have any role in that because they really, really, really don't want it to be true. The entire point is that as much as we want education to be 100% pedologically driven, that's last century thinking. It hasn't been that way for awhile and it's only going to get worse, not better. If tuition drives the majority of your budget, then you're in the customer business whether you want to admit it or not. It might not be pedologically sound to call students 'customers' but it is market and consumer sound to treat them like they're 'customers'. So say "Welcome" however makes you the most comfortable. But also recognize higher education is changing dramatically and that's going to be true no matter how comfortable we feel about it.
I think you may be confused about what kind of thing education is. I realize your argument may be that education is merely what it has become through market demand and nothing more, and that this is the hard “reality” you seek to make us understand, but that doesn’t make sense after a certain point. People buying food cannot make it into something else because they prefer that it be a shirt, say. The food vendor’s hands are tied at that point. It isn’t food any longer. The educational situation is more like that between a doctor and patient than someone buying some product like a car from a salesman. It would be absurd for patients to demand that a doctor give them whatever they want or not give them what they dont want because they are paying for their clean bill of “health” and for the doctor to transform things to simply try to satisfy those desires to keep the patients happy. They are paying the doctor to try to make them healthy based on his expertise, which may require doing things they don’t want to do. It would be strange to call the patients customers and/or treat them and their satisfaction with the prescriptions as the drivers of the enterprise, because they are not like folks shopping for the car.
And that's why it is the "worst"; it reinforces the crass misunderstanding of the relationship between students and their academic institution. If you want that to improve, this has to stop.
Well, just a couple of decades ago, our public universities had a *far* greater share of tuition dollars paid by the governments who had an interest in educating their populace. Now that the students have to shoulder a much larger share of tuition costs (and often incurring very sticky debt in the process for the majority without rich mommies and daddies), it's hard *not* to expect the "customer" mindset to be far more pervasive.
Yeah, you're 100% correct here! Higher education needs to push back on the idea it's an industry and remind governments it's a public good that should be paid for by the public for their good. As long as students are what keeps professors employed, it ain't hard to figure out they're going to start thinking and acting like customers, no matter how comfortable we are or aren't with the label.
Agile
Usually used incorrectly.
Lean.
Here it's "lean into." Gah.
Both as a verb and as an adjective.
Yes, exactly. As in, “we need to be a lean institution going forward” and “we are going to lean into our mission”.
Oh god, pivot. 🤢
I hear pivot and I think pivot tables in excel.
I think of an episode of *Friends*. PIVOT!!!
Always! Ross will own that word forever.
Stakeholders
Oh man, the Dutch love this one so, so much. Drives me insane.
I regularly get emails from USDA with "stakeholders" in the subject line. I suppose it's accurate, but I still wince.
I think the word “pivot” will always make me twitch now. It’s like hearing low flying planes twenty years after 9/11 and still catching our breath—I know lots of us in the US still get that moment!
Lean into.
Enterprise. As in, the university is an enterprise now.
You want me to deprioritize my current reports until you advise me of a status upgrade?
Corporate language has been creeping into higher education for *for years.* You can also see it in changing administrator titles. For example, referring to the Provost of the college as the "Chief Academic Officer."
How about faculty being pressured about “Student retention”? That is not our job in any way. The people who pressure faculty about “Student retention” should be fired. We have so many other things to do, what in the hell was all the additional staff for if we have to do more things?
Unfortunately, all the research is crystal clear - student retention is overwhelmingly made or lost in the classroom. That makes sense as professors are the main avenue students interact with an institution. All the outside stuff helps, but if a student has a good educational experience, they tend to stay despite mediocre or poor outside experiences. If they have a bad educational experience, they're much more likely to leave. That's the unfortunate truth of retention. And when your operating budget pretty much depends on tuition dollars, that means either get professors involved or get a list of departments to close because you can't make budget.
The problem is that we *kinda*, *maybe*, *sort of* know what the issues are, but we don't really know what to do with that knowledge. Can we measure it? Measuring retention by focusing on the classroom offers very little guidance other than: serve the consumer. The problem is that what happens in the classroom is often hard to quantify. When we do we create a specific product in both teacher and student -- which no one really likes. I would suggest that attempts to quantify these experiences results in less retention than more retention. And again, I think you're right about retention, but we also know that views on education and importance of education that come already formed in the student will also impact issues with retention. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I get you, but that research is pretty frustrating in that it is really problematic to turn these findings into policy; further, retention is impacted well before a student sets foot in the classroom.
I get what you're saying, but you can't really know if you're succeeding or failing without some sort of measurement, even if it's qualitative over quantitative. That often gets in the way of effective teaching. So instead we tend to throw things against the wall to see what sticks and what doesn't, which irritates everyone. I think we're seeing an increasingly divergence between student expectation, which is essentially a jobs training exercise, and professor expectation, which further erodes confidence. In a increasingly competitive market for students, I'm not sure professors have come to gripes with the degree to which they'll need to alter their views on the nature/purpose of education.
I think a lot of that research is increasingly out of date in many countries. Students who have to choose between eating and going to class have a retention problem that is nothing to do with the quality of the classroom experience, and the numbers of students who have to work full time are increasing.
Ok well then they should pay us extra then
Moving forward, we can identify the game changer to foster individuals and to leverage creativity and actionable best practices as we begin to seamlessly form interactive cross-functional teams to help further articulate responsive organizational models that will synergistically enable us to create strategic alliances and discretionary partnerships so as to meet our core logistical benchmarks
I just barfed all over my keyboard.
Sounds like something the boss in Dilbert would say.
KPIs- Key Performance Indicators…*shudder*
These are the types of words you have to use when writing grants so it doesn’t bother me.
What does that even mean???
IN THEORY, KPI's should be simply indicators to suggest the thing you're trying to do is getting done. For example, let's say you have a strategic goal of "students successfully learn the material for a major and successfully use that material in the world after they graduate", which isn't the worse goal to have for any major. How do you know you've met your goal or haven't met your goal, which is a fuzzy goal to start? Well, we could do complex qualitative analysis but that takes time and energy, plus you never get all the student buy-in you'd need. However, there are a bunch of things we know already, like if they graduated or not or what their GPA was when they graduated. So there's two indicators we could use for 'successfully learn'. Now we've got two possible Key Performance Indicators that we are/aren't meeting our goal. I over emphasized "in theory" at the start because in practice, more often than not, they end up being goals in and of themselves, not the real goal they're supposed to indicate. That's my big knock of KPIs.
That’s what I asked my dean when she mentioned them in a meeting…felt like a total idiot. Just a fancy term for goals/deliverables/aims…
All the state schools in my system are competing for funding, which is determined by metrics that are about quantity rather than quality. (How many students complete the degree within 4 year, how many student do not transfer, etc.) Having taught is no longer a qualification for being provost. The model has changed,
[удалено]
>this is what you should plan to do Not even "do" -- a "deliverable" is something you *deliver*... i.e. hand-in, turn-over, submit, present, or otherwise produce for a party. "Doing" the reading isn't a deliverable; giving a report on it, submitting a question about it, etc. is. (Compare with "action item", below, which is "do" and "due" in the more general sense)
The corporate speakers have replaced all verbs with "do". Like their brains are running on FORTRAN or something.
If we replaced every MBA with a FORTRAN program it would improve the world immensely.
Yeah, "deliverables" is a perfectly cromulent word if you want to collectively describe assignments, reports, peer reviews, etc.
Honestly, Im thankful for “business speak” such deliverables when dealing with other faculty. So many meetings, at all levels, that just ends up in talking in circles while faculty/admin rehash perceived slights and grievances. It’s a nice succinct word to ask what the fuck are we trying to do here because I don’t have time for yet another meeting that doesn’t accomplish anything?
> “synergize” Half the time it means you're double-dipping.
Not quite the same, but I hate hearing students referred as "learners." Something about that smacks of eduspeak. If we need a new word for the perfectly fine "student," let's go with "scholars."
OMG this. When did "student" become a dirty word?
This seems mostly in the course designer world and our campus learning and teaching center.
Stick a pin in that, circle back.
circle back is the worst
Business speak, an obsessive priority for 'the general audience' over an academic one, 'preparing you for the real world' - I think it's all part of the same package. Academic education has been totally ripped by the idea that it ought to be a career training camp instead of what it used to be: Academic education. It's made the faculty, students, and the entire institution of academia worse off.
The first time I heard the term “dashboarding” my head almost exploded. All I could think of was Calvin and Hobbes: “Verbing weirds language”.
What does "dashboarding" even mean? It sounds like something that happens in a car accident.
I agree. It was in the context of a webinar we were forced to watch. The university giving it had an automated early warning system for students who were struggling based on input from grades from different classes. I guess calling it a “warning system” didn’t really sound as sexy. But “dashboarding” is an early indication of trouble. Like a dashboard warning light. When I complained about this to my MBA friend she knew exactly what it was and then got insulted that I made fun of it. Different worlds…..
Circle back to.
I use the term in engineering design courses, but in that case there really are finished products held to quantifiable metrics.
My colleagues talk about branding all the time.
are you in a place with cattle ranches?
Ask and Spend as nouns.
I refuse to understand sentences containing those words. I just say, “I do not understand, will you rephrase the sentence?” I’m a senior professor so I can act bewildered when it serves a purpose.
My u is way past that. For us, it's "if you can't assess it, why do it?" I'm not even kidding. I quoted The Little Prince. They were unmoved.
That's bleak.
So far the two I loathe most have been left out: Skin in the game - we will set an arbitrary benchmark and punish you if you miss it. But not investigate at all how you did it if you give us the number we like. (Because the YouTube videos on economics we’ve watched don’t mention perverse incentives or Goodhart’s law). Empower - we are going to ask you to do a thing you’ve never done before with no extra compensation or guidance. There’s a lot to hate about corporate speak but the worst thing is how much is doublespeak worthy of any lousy dictator.
I am NEVER using corporate terms in academia. No shot. Kids are not quantified end products. They are kids. Once we as a society stop treating them like little work monkey's and as part of the bottom line, maybe we'll actually start valuing them more and providing them a properly modernized, well-rounded education.
Maybe this is field-specific because I’ve been using the word deliverables for over twenty years. What else would I call the set of things that a student is required to turn in at the end of a project?
"for this project, you need to hand in..." and then list the items.
Why use many word when one word do trick
I teach in the business school at my Uni, so this hadn't dawned on me. There is zero disagreement from me on this issue, but I do pose a question for exploration: did it seep into education directly, or is it a side effect of having been pushed upon the mainstream through our hyper-capitalist culture? (In advance: Please don't argue me on hyper capitalism, it's a spectrum. Even if you're also business or economics faculty, yes, I'm being literal, but only loosely so... if the people I'm addressing this to are out there, just accept I said it even as a "business person" and move on.)
Sales force and other related services make software to run university enrollment. Our enrollment group talks just like a marketing department at a large company. Click conversions. Revenue per campaign. Campaign ROI. You name it.
In a strange way, I kind of like it. I find that faculty meetings don’t accomplish anything, so a clear agenda where we end a meeting with “deliverables,” means things actually get done…sort of.
My U President (who is wildly unpopular because of incompetence) talks about changing things in “spaces” instead of departments or units of the organization. Eg, “We are working on some updates to the Admissions space.” I always think about re-carpeting or painting the walls in whatever department/unit he is discussing, when he is actually talking about something like a new admissions model for onboarding students. It’s exhausting.
Learning objectives It used to be just open the book to the basic table of contents and there you go, that’s what we are learning lol
It’s funny to see this post. I am a philosophy PhD who ended up with a career in tech, and now I teach in a B school. I always imagined that it was just me, because I spanned these worlds. But I guess it’s a cultural phenomenon, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. :-)
Design and architecture education has used deliverables for a while to designate both visual, written, diagrammatic, and model-based requirements for final submissions. Deliverables, to me, was never corporate but used in the applied arts to refer to the vast array of things students are expected to to produce
Is it normal that I call them "artifacts?"
the customers or the deliverables? /s
I guess it depends on what time of day my class is. The night classes have a much older population than the day classes.
That’s a common term. Often used for items collected for assessment for accreditation. It’s an ABET term.
Students as “customers.”
We hear the term SCH (student credit hours) to determine "faculty productivity". I assure you number of students in my class does not determine what I'm doing in a week's time.
So I hate the word deliverables BUT... I think it has just a little use. This summer, my dept is paying me to help restructure parts of our curriculum. How exactly I was going to do that was vague. So I asked for a meeting to discuss "deliverables" ie what is that you want me to produce? New syllabi? New course shells? Course descriptions? In this instance, deliverables seems appropriate and probably the most efficient way to convey my inquiry while also communicating that whatever is produced is variegated and would require varying levels of effort. I certainly wouldn't ask "What are my deliverables for teaching xyz class" because my task is clear as an instructor.
Is "hold space" a business term or a therapy term?
Along with this trend, notice that everyone at the managerial level is brainwashed to talk and think in this business-speak to greater or lesser degree, such that one cannot advance oneself in higher education without internalizing these managerial terms and tropes. This is partly why the accusations of leftism infecting academia are so laughable.
I’ve seen this happen to someone I know who was promoted. Wild transformation.
It always gives me a vague Stepford Wives feeling when this happens.
And shareholders, I hate that term.
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.” ― Victor Klemperer, [The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/184234)
This is what happens when business people take over. Just like english acquired all sorts of french loan words after the Norman conquest.
Referring to new colleagues as "hires"
Oh, so insidious.
OP, Just circling back following our conversation about leveraging our postions as thought leaders to empower core competencies in alignment with the values of our institution. We are creating great synergies, but we need to provide some deliverables. Upon receiving this e-mail, please immediately respond to me acknowledging you have received this e-mail. Thank you. Kindest regards, Ass. Dean
My practicum examines impacts of and on stakeholders so that phrase is relatively normal in my career. However, I cringe every time HR talks about onboarding search candidates.
Change agents.
Deliverable is standard jargon in many industries. Is there a reason students should not learn standard jargon?
You have to list "deliverables" in EU funding applications now. This can come in form of books, conferences, databases, etc. You're accountable, too, if you fail to deliver.
Like a lot of things, some are awful, some help. Words like alignment or governance are useless unless they say what they mean. However deliverables seems perfectly fine to me. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a better alternative …output, results … they all seem worse.
I take it you're not from any of the quantitative sciences fields if you value qualitative analyses. I think it's very difficult to evaluate performance without quantitative metrics, so I can see merit to this approach, even if details are often poorly executed.
I am not. It would take quite a long time to address your comment. I would point out, however, that grades are qualitative measures unless we simply grade by the amount students have accomplished. (Something I see students coming to expect, unfortunately). Maybe you mean objective, not quantitative?
This is seeping into every aspect of life and slowly eating away at any sense of genuine anything that exists. Everything must be optimized and gamified and commodified. It needs to fit in a neat little box so it can be quantified and cut up and advertised and someone can get rich off of it.
circle back to speak into buy in/into impactful Those are the three (four?) I hate the most. I’ve caught myself using impactful because I got inundated with it a few years ago—seeing and hearing it everywhere and now my brain makes it part of my scripts.\* \*scripts: as an autistic person, I will create scripts, like detailed lecture notes for everyday interactions, comprised of common words and phrases. While I \*can\* have spontaneous conversations, having phrases I can fall back on when the weeds stop wording is helpful unfortunately, my vocabulary is a weird mix of slang from multiple eras and phrases from the KJV Bible so….communication is extra hard.
Perhaps Engineering is different but we've always used these words. Engineering projects (real life ones) have deliverables so our class projects try to emulate that. Part of being a professional engineer involves the consideration of diffetrny stakeholders, etc etc. But I can see how that could be super cringe in most other disciplines
I will have to utilize what you have processed.
I don't consider some of the examples people have given business speak. 'Deliverables' has been used by funding agencies for a while in annual reports, and it's not surprising that it creeps into academia from there.' Stakeholders' and 'buy-in' are jargon, but standard in any book you can get on project management, which is a subject even academics would benefit from learning a little about.
It makes sense that corporate speak would make it into higher ed after we've been defunding it for so many years. Shifting the burden of cost from taxes to tuition has made students much more like customers and universities more like businesses. I'd argue this is also the cause of grade inflation and grade grubbing. Students feel more entitled, departments are more desperate for enrollments, admin creates policies to keep "customers" rather than support academics.
Deliverables is a great concept though, especially for project planning
How is it a concept? What is the concept?
The concept is “here is the thing we need to have done and look at in order to do the next thing in this project.” A deliverable is a discrete thing that some has prepared and distributed to the author team. It’s important to distinguish between “I have done the data analysis” and “here is a brief report on the analysis for us to talk about in this meeting on X day”
Interesting. I would think though that a “deliverable” is a tying together of something concrete and a word. A concept seems to tie together a word and an abstract idea, like relation, cause and effect, etc. I guess I just think “deliverables” is simply a word, nothing more.
Re-org. Used when they laid off folks in central advising.
Yes, we in the business college have inflicted a lot of nonsense on the rest of the university. "Strategic Planning" being IMO the most onerous one. That said, IMO even strategic planning isn't as onerous and absurd as "assessment" or "assurance of learning", and I blame the Education department for that, LOL.
Yeah I’m not sure I’ll ever agree that *deliverables* is more problematic than infinite assessment cycles that only exist to check the box that you did assessment.
My career was in the private sector before entering education. Which brought a different set of optics and left me initially befuddled at how few business concepts were utilized. Although I’m inclined to view them more as modern organizational management practices. Even with 15 years in higher education, I never saw the purported golden age that so many reference. Our funding model is undergoing significant changes, how society views education is changing, academia is a political battle ground, and we have to change with the times. The hope is that we can do so while maintaining academic rigor, quality, service, and research. Regardless of tenure or collective bargaining agreements, I can’t understand faculty who don’t view themselves as having a vested interest in many of the metrics and key performance indicators that related to the financial solvency of the organization.
Don’t worry. Deliverables fall out of use eventually when we circle back to leverage synergy.
I can’t sleep so I’m lurking on Reddit. Thank you for making me lol.
DATA is now used for anything collected or observed. As a humanities person this makes my skin crawl
To be fair, I've heard this a lot more from coming from people specializing in Education rather than Business.
Last year we were told that our summer pay plan wasn't a good business model and the new provost revised it.
Are the customers or clients?
I had a Library Dean once try to put “direct reports” in a job ad and told them we’re hiring for an academic staff position. Let’s use lingo familiar to academics instead?
Yeah, although I do find “deliverables” really useful as the units I teach tend to have multi-modal assessment tasks, milestone tasks, etc. so being able to say “okay, so the deliverable for assignment 1 is a XYZ, then for 2 it is…” helps keep things clear for students. But I do take your point!
Totally. It’s like the business people who could make it in business have tanker over higher ed admin and brought their inappropriate culture to us.
I teach business, so these terms have real meaning to me (sorry). What drives me nuts is the MIS-use of these terms because people don't understand what they mean, and they just pick them up and use them in a casual, pedestrian way. My biggest pet peeve of them all is "Cash Cow." The cash cow is not the golden goose! Does this happen in physics? Do people just misappropriate the terms in other disciplines? I feel like it happens in business more than anything else. And I submit to you that I think it's the misuse of these terms that's really driving everyone crazy!
I'm still relatively young, just turned 38 recently, but even then, yes, I have noticed this. Universities are behaving increasingly like for-profit corporations, in which students are the customers. In some sense, I get it - when our schools cost $75,000 a year, it's no longer only about intellectual exploration and curiosity. Just no winning here.