Who's Laughing Now, or, I Sure Am Glad I Didn't Go Corporate

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Who's Laughing Now, or, I Sure Am Glad I Didn't Go Corporate

4/28/2004

By Terry Calhoun

I liked living in a college town and I had a young family that sort of kept me grounded. Boy, am I glad now that I stayed where I was. I know lots of people who are looking hopefully for jobs, and quite a few who are unhappily working at jobs now that pay a lot less than they were making several years ago. In "the outside world," companies are more and more driven by the "IT D'esn't Matter" philosophy expounded by a recent Harvard Business Review article by the same title, with its blood-curdling mantra of "Spend Less. Follow, don't lead. Focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities." Gasp!

I had lunch recently with a colleague from deep inside the IT structure of the University of Michigan and was pleased to learn from the conversation that although there are indeed budget cuts and some changed expectations about support work, he's able to go right ahead and do creative kinds of things, every day. He might work a 10-hour day and put in 60 hours a week, but he gets to play at work. It's expected that he'll play at work.

Here, inside higher education, we might be a little worried that budget cuts might de-motivate some of our more creative and innovative work, but no one's telling us that because IT is now simply infrastructure; we're now custodians of the virtual infrastructure, virtual maintenance workers. Pity the poor custodians of the physical infrastructure, because they don't have the freedom we do to play with their infrastructure and create new things. We do play as part of our jobs, it's expected of us, and at least in mid-2004, no one's trying to tell us we can't play anymore. Our buddies who still have jobs in the corporate sector are, by and large, being told that playing isn't allowed.

And there's no end in sight to the creative and innovative parts of our jobs. One of the news items in this edition of Syllabus IT Trends is an article called "Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Had Hoped (Yet)" by the dean of arts and sciences and the chief technology officer at the University of Virginia. If you haven't read it yet, you must do so! They provide yet another reason to be glad that you work in IT and within higher education - the fact that there is so much yet to do:

"The revolution has taken the easy ground, the unprotected edges of the city, The citadel remains above, with the flags of the old regime flying: teaching and scholarship at leading institutions of higher education remain relatively untouched. How might we take that citadel? Not by storming it. We've tried that. We must take it from within." --Excerpted from Why It Has Not Paid Off As We Had Hoped (Yet) (Virginia.edu)

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "Who's Laughing Now, or, I Sure Am Glad I Didn't Go Corporate," Campus Technology, 4/28/2004, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39781

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