Exclusive Video 11: Frames Of Reference And Evaluating Institutions, Organizations, or Groups

The set of reflections in this video are not something new I’ve come up with. In fact they arise from a kind of common experience (for me, though not necessarily for others) I’ve been having for decades, mainly when dealing with matters at academic institutions. Over the 25 years of my teaching career, I’ve worked at at least 11 different institutions, and I’ve worked with in one capacity or another many more.

One feature I’ve noticed that tends to be a constant is that in whatever college or university you pick, the people who have been working there full time for a while have a frame of reference that is very much confined to how the myriad different processes are set up at their one institution. They lack a conception of how arbitrary and often how ineffective, inefficient, or even counterproductive the ways they do things are. And because of that, they not only lack any real ideas about how they could be made better, but they often lack even a capacity to see why the standard ways they’re used to would be galling to newcomers and outsiders.