A few weeks ago I participated in the Minary Conference on Alumni Education. After attending every year from 1989 until 2004, I returned to find a much smaller group than I remembered from the 1990s, when 60 or more people attended every year. This year 25 participants attended, and I was worried that the interactions would be more spare and perhaps less valuable than those I remembered from past years.
I need not have worried. The smaller group created the one-on-one interactions that make the alumni education community tightly-knit and productive.
Below are some highlights. Anyone who was there and who wishes to add more info, or to correct anything I got wrong, please add a comment on the Alumni Futures web site.
- Monique E. Rocca, Assistant Professor of Wildland Fire Science at Colorado State University was the "faculty member in residence" and she gave great classroom and on-site education about the science and policy around wildfires in North America. Unfortunately, in the last ten days her insights became very relevant to those of us living in Southern California. You never can tell when something academic will suddenly become personal.
- Professor Rocca described in a couple of sentences her "broad research goals." Academics can do this. It's the academic version of the entrepreneur's "elevator pitch." I think that alumni executives should develop and practice a couple of sentences that summarize our broad goals as professionals.
This ties in a little with our standard struggle to answer the question, "And what do you do?":
- I'm a fundraiser.
- I'm an educator.
- I run a non-profit.
- I'm a higher ed administrator.
All of them may be true; not one of them tells the whole story.
- Metrics were the focus of a plenary session plus a couple of breakouts. Conference chair Andrew Gossen of Princeton cut straight to the heart of the risks of applying quantitative methods to alumni relations. He pointed out that when we measure, we give the impression we can accurately gauge much - or even most - of what we do. This, said Andrew, is often "a veneer of measurement" that can be misleading, or that at best will be misinterpreted.
And yet universities try to act more like private sector businesses every day and this is one driver of the search for measurement: "the new vice president wants numbers." But, as Andrew suggests, "Metrics are only valuable to the extent they help us do our jobs better."
There's a chicken-egg relationship here, as MIT's Melissa Gresh pointed out. "Your programs will give you an idea of what you need to measure, and your measurements will in turn give you some ideas about how to run your programs."
I'll finish off this recap with a second posting on Monday.