The What?
My department was run by Dean Rubicon, a cybernetic micromanager. She was very exacting; everything had to be electronic. Everything at CSH was very cyber, with predictably glitchy consequences.
Once I saw a whole restroom full of urinals all stuck on eternal-flush because of computer error. Another time, in the middle of a summer heat-wave, the heaters at the tutoring center were on full blast. Another glitch, and the IT staff was away for the long weekend, so the only solution was to open up all the windows.
At the College of San Hemlock, the design philosophy was not to do anything right, but to do everything, right or wrong, by computer.
One fine day Dean Rubicon cornered me. She ordered me to submit the SLO. I said, “The what?” She told me that the SLO must be in every course syllabus; and that it meant Student Learning Outcomes. I thought this just meant the course topics, already listed on my syllabus; but no, that’s not the SLO. Perhaps the SLO was the textbook table of contents; but no, no, no, that wasn’t the SLO either! Then what’s an SLO? Dean Rubicon was vague yet insistent. The SLO was somehow the Platonic ideal of education-ness; it was what we want the students to learn; the details don’t count! Besides, how dare I not know what an SLO is? How unprofessional of me! Having an SLO is college policy; so it didn’t matter what an SLO is, I just had to write one; or failing that, download one from the CSH website.
Baffled by such addled urgency, I queried the only person in the department office who knows anything; Belladonna, the Dean’s secretary. Belladonna explained that pressure for the SLO came from the Chancellor’s office. Chancellor Basilisk was trying to ensure accreditation for the college. Compliance with the accreditors was the issue.
So I gave in. I logged onto the department’s website and looked up its SLO. It was two paragraphs of clotted educratese. The SLO quivered with the same vague tension that radiated from Dean Rubicon. I tried to read the thing, but no trace of any meaning gelled within my mind. I then tried to insert the SLO into my syllabus’s file, but it failed to embed! Some weird invisibility code was attached to the text. Again I gave up, and copied the SLO into another file, which I printed separately, and xeroxed onto the back of the syllabus handout.
I gave the syllabus to every student on the first day of class. I insisted that the syllabus had valuable information, so they should read and understand all of it. But of course the students didn’t read everything on the syllabus. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. Or put it this way; students are more like cats than like dogs; for Fido will do what you want Fido to do, but Kitty will do what Kitty wants to do.
I handed in the revised syllabus, with SLO, to Dean Rubicon’s office; but a paper copy wasn’t what the accreditors wanted; they wanted electronic proof of compliance to their arbitrary demands.
So I had to get the SLO to the office electronically. I tried sending the office an email with the SLO attached; but the email failed. I looked for a thumb-drive to load the SLO on. The only blank drive I could find right away was from my daughter’s desk; a Speedy Gonzales thumb-drive. I loaded my SLO onto Speedy, I sneaker-netted Speedy to Socrates Hall, and I plugged Speedy into Belladonna’s computer’s port. Belladonna speedily loaded my SLO onto her computer’s desk-top. Problem solved? No! Belladonna’s word-processor couldn’t read the file!
I sensed a spooky pattern at work. When I first heard of the SLO, my response was; the what? The dean was vague, colleagues were puzzled and the accreditors didn’t say. This same automatic bafflement was displayed by the machines themselves! The SLO, a slippery beast, refused to be remembered, even by computers!
Belladonna fixed the glitch; she could read the file as a PDF. She saved it and sent it to her colleague’s computer. Problem solved! A good secretary is a pearl beyond price.
In retrospect I had to admit that Dean Rubicon was partly right. I erred by giving the wrong SLO to the wrong people. The accreditors didn’t want me to show a paper SLO - whatever that is - to the students; they wanted me to show an electronic SLO - whatever that is - to them. The SLO was a fraud and a sham, but it was their fraud and sham. How unprofessional of me not to harmonize with the bogosity program.
Naturally the students ignored the SLO; it had nothing to do with them. The student body’s resolute apathy revealed sterling indifference to nonsense, and a visceral rejection of babble. The students acquired these virtues by exposure to CSH bureaucracy. The College of San Hemlock was educational despite itself.
Still the whole caper irritated me. The SLO was an arbitrary assertion of power by out-of-touch bureaucratic empire-builders. The political dynamics were familiar; as usual Parkinson’s Law ruled, as did Murphy’s Law, the Peter Principle and every other iron law of bureaucracy. The corruption was stereotypical.
The SLO reminded me of Caesar’s incense. In the late Roman Empire, subjects had to sacrifice a pinch of incense at Caesar’s altar. Those who refused were thrown to the lions. The SLO was the incense, the accreditors were Caesar’s ravenous worshippers; the faculty had to offer up their compliance. It was a test, not of faith but of subjugation. You just had to offer the incense, or be thrown to the lions; but you didn’t have to believe in the divinity of Caesar.
I’m no martyr, but fake gods bother me. So I wondered; how do you slay a fake god? By critical intelligence, to be sure, but also a sense of humor; for a horselaugh is worth a thousand syllogisms. Aha! The weapon I needed was satire!
So one Friday morning on the campus of the College of San Hemlock, I ran an informal poll. I approached random students; I politely asked them for a moment of their time for some questions. Bless their hearts, almost all of them had time. I lost count of the sample size; more than a dozen but less than twenty; so call this poll unscientific if you wish. Nonetheless, here are the results, with divided and unanimous responses noted:
Q: When the semester began, did the instructor give you a syllabus sheet?
A(all): Yes.
Q: Did you read it?
A(divided): Yes / Some of it / I skimmed it.
Q: Did you read time, place, teacher, textbook, grading method?
A(all): Yes.
Q: Did you read everything that matters to you?
A(all): Yes.
Q: Did you read the Hours by Appointment section?
A(divided): Yes / I skimmed it / My class doesn’t have tutoring.
Q: Did you read the SLO?
A(all): The what?
I, Diogenes, swear that every single student asked about the SLO said, “The what?” Those exact words! As did I, and the Dean, and even the computers!
Therefore it is unanimous; the SLO is unknown, undefined, infinitely indistinct. It is a mind-breaking Zen koan. The SLO is nothing divided by nothing!
So here is my reply to the Riddle of the SLO:
What is the SLO?
The SLO is the What!
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