Efficiency as ethics

Inefficiency steals time from faculty, staff, and students. When we do anything routine, boring, or unnecessary, it takes our time away from doing things that are important, innovative, and long-term. That much is obvious, I hope.

But there is also a deeper ethical issue with inefficiency. For example, Rhode Island is to my knowledge the only state that requires student teaching certificates. To get one, our students must complete a form, which includes exactly the same questions as the BCI background check, sign it, then we take a stack of them to RIDE, then students must stop by and pick them up. The whole procedure is completely unnecessary, and takes a lot of time. However, I am even more concerned with the message we are sending to our students, most of whom are future teacher. The message is, yes, the system is absurd, don’t fight it, don’t question it, just get along with the program. This is not what we want to say, but that is what we are saying. Most of them will end up working in public school districts that sometimes even more bureaucratic and ossified than we are. They teach their kids the same values, and then we get them as freshmen.

I picked on one hoop to jump through, because it is imposed by the State. It is an easy target, so no one inside RIC is offended. But take an honest look around, make a list of all things we do and even more importantly that we make students do. How many of them are not essential, how many of them exist only because someone put them in place many years ago? Sometimes it was done for a good reason that no longer exists. Some were ill-conceived to begin with. And most importantly, how many of them do we have control over? If you want examples, write me an email.

Everyone should look around and examine critically his or her own work. We just cannot afford to send the message of mindless compliance to our students and to each other. Not everything can be fixed right away for many reasons. We have a number of organizational and legal constraints, and the College’s leadership is working on addressing them. But it is also a manner of the institutional culture. Everyone should notice the little inefficiencies. You don’t necessarily have to have an idea on how to solve every problem, but you should at least raise the question – why are we doing this? Do students understand why we’re doing this? If we have to, can it be done better, faster, more conveniently? Complacency is not going to get us anywhere.

Next week, I will put a discussion feature on our Faculty page, where both faculty and staff can raise those questions.