Comparisons

Last week a major national daily newspaper published an article that mentioned the school I currently work at with several other schools we would probably not like to be lumped in with. The problem is over their ideology - and to some extent ours. What was essentially a throw away fact in the piece generated well over 50 faculty emails calling for everything from a letter to the editor to storming the proverbial Bastille.

In the end, I chose to just send an email to the reporter and ask if she was interested in more information. It was a great lesson - because she was interested and in fact had done very thorough background and understood the distinctives of my school very well. In the end, we disagreed about some the words that she would use to describe us, but she essentially gets who we are and I have no doubt that if there is a next time it will be positive.

It got me thinking about two things. One is that I should never assume someone else's motivation. This happens to be a good reporter with relatively pure motives and no bias against Christians or any other group I can tell.

The second thing was a little trickier though. What people reacted to was that we did not want to be seen like "them". They were either too conservative, too academically inferior, or something else. It made me reflect on the fact that benchmarking with other schools is a poor way to tell as story. While we might want to have salaries in the same group as school X or the same number of square footage for students, I'm not sure that aspirational schools do much for us from a marketing perspective. Also, we probably each need to get over ourselves a bit and give the guy down the street or across the country for doing some great things - even if they do it differently.

Somewhat along those lines, let me put in a plug for the linkage of CCCU schools and some Catholic Colleges. This is a centuries old theological divide, but I have seen many recent signs that we may have a scary amount in common and much we could learn from each other.