Key? I Thought You Had the Key

I don't usually use an e-mail I've sent as a blog posting, but this one is slightly different. We've all had different experiences lately with the new method of distributing keys to students. For some of us it's worked out OK, for others not quite so satisfactory. While I'm on the positive side of the equation I do see problems in the structural situation this represents and implications for future re-arrangements of methods and procedures. This change over seems to be having more problems that it should and that itself is the real problem. Here's my response back to an e-mail Glen Armitage had written last night.

Thanks Glenn.

I’m reluctant to speak out, but it’s turning into more of a philosophical and operational issue than just keys. We will, no doubt, be experiencing more of this kind of fall-out due to re-organizations in the future and all for a similar reason: that of cost cutting. It has turned, oddly, into a staff only issue with all of us uncertain who is in charge and who to even talk with at a college level.

The ad hoc solutions that some of us have come up with are varied and uncertain. One-card is only a solution if it’s installed. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it and a real solution is still needed now and right now. I’m lucky that I’m part of the library and fit into the “academic” list of users that are allowed. We’ve re-thought our keys, coalesced into using just one key for all of our doors and it is, so far, working, though the real burden has shifted from me onto the library people to enter our information into their data-base – and often. That turns out to be not as easy as in the past. More time of more people are involved now. How’s that for cost cutting.

It is also, I think, a reflection of the separation between the “class oriented day” and the “outside of class day” that both students and staff experience. People who are not involved seem to think it’s a small issue, but those of us who look students in the eye each day and have to say we don’t know what the answer is have a harder time understanding why no one seems to be helping. It’s sort of like the problem of getting water to the people trapped in the sports stadium in New Orleans – please help us.  

John Bruner has solved his problem at the Yurt Radio with a biometric device (well it’s been working for a couple of days so far), but all of us have variants of who and how students need to get keys and the information trail that gets generated in its wake. What seems to be the real unifying theme here is variations.

In the past the switchboard operators were sophisticated enough and thoughtful enough to handle the oddities, subtleties and emergencies that surround the keys and through a narrative exchange tell us when there were problems. (there’s that word narrative again) Now, there is no one answer, no one experience.

So my real worry is that in the name of cost cutting we alter the usual landscape of student life and the flow of the day. We have, indeed, saved money with regard to Public Safety but we have incurred a real cost on the other end of the spectrum in daily student life. The social ecology of the day is often hidden or at least occluded to most administrators and faculty and it has fallen to staff, singularly, to solve, ad hoc, a complex and surprisingly far-reaching problem.

We all need to get better at doing this and I think we could use some help. It’s not just about the keys. If we can’t solve this what happens when we run into a real problem?

gunther

So, that's my e-mail to Glenn.

My key problems, thankfully, are small and we're still thinking of ways to re-work what we do to make more adjustments and allowances, but it's start and stop as we go along discovering both the good and bad of slightly changed and still changing  circumstances. 

My point really is that as we come upon more changes in the future, and we will for good and reasonable reasons, we need to more quickly grasp the subtleties and newly induced problems and then quickly and commonly agree on implementations. The ad hoc problem solving ends up fractionating the daily student experience. No two offices now have the same methods. It's all a grab bag of reasoning and implementations. That's never a good user experience and that's my point.

gunther