Saturday, April 01, 2006

Faculty Follies - it seems trivial, but only because it is

A notice from my employer, Griffith University recently arrived via email. Among other vital matters, the email noted that "Council approved a change in the title Deputy Vice Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) to Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic)".

In response to queries from academic staff, the following explanation was offered for the name change: "The two reasons for making this change were technical. The first is that ‘Teaching and Learning’ is now an old fashioned way of describing these sorts of portfolios, with ‘Learning and Teaching’ now the agreed and preferred ordering...".

Huh? a double whammy here. A non-sequitur (the presumably new-fashioned title was not used anyway); and a non-sensical (teaching and learning are seamlessly integrated, reciprocal activities, so the order in which they appear in the couplet Teaching/Learning is - or ought to be - irrelevant... and mind-numbingly trivial).