by Ken Burrows

former summer wallah at UNC Charlotte, now retired

When do you get out of the way? A catch-phrase of the "change-is-always-positive" crowd is: If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. After 45 years in academe, more than half in Summer Sessions, I found myself - and I suspect that I'm not alone - radically preferring to get what we'd once got to what we were increasingly tending to get. So there's no place for curmudgeons in the kool, corporate, data-driven, brand-brandishing, customer-knows-best, delete the "sage" and click for the "guide", suit-managed, show-me-the-money Uni, where even the most plaintive echo of faculty governance is barely audible. When you are cranky enough to believe that . . .

• The issue for Summer Session is not centralization in the administrative scheme of things, but its centrality in the educational mission
• Give-em-what-they-want types shouldn't dictate what is offered in summer; the faculty should. Customer-students don't know best; the academy should
• "Brands" are cruel and unusual enough on cows; the academy should have nothing to do with them
• Apologizing for Summer Sessions by insisting that it's trying to be at least as viable as the spring and fall ones threatens to deny summer's potential and uniqueness

. . . and other such heresies, then one had best get out of the way. So spare an old guy, for whom NAASS was the annual cure for creeping corporate accidie, a few minutes from your hand-held connectibles, and let's talk about Summer Session as something other than a business plan for a wee while.