The University of Phoenix has what it calls an “Academic Vision” which consists of four questions:

Do our students know what they should know?

Can they do what they should be able to do?

Are they developing values appropriate to their professions?

Are they better able to achieve their life and career goals?

These are curious questions. The first two and last seem to refer to a time after students receive their degrees, while the third seems to refer to the time during which they are pursuing their degrees. But how would one get answers to these questions?

The first two and the last would seem to require knowledge of how well students do in their lives after graduating. If Uop keeps track of its former students and acquires this information, it certainly hasn’t published it. So how well does Uop fulfill its vision in these respects? Nobody knows! So what good is the vision?

But these three questions don’t concern me very much; it’s the third that boggles my mind. It implies that different values are appropriate to different professions. 

What? Is a different set of values appropriate to accounting than MBAdmin?  How would one know? How would anyone know what they the different values are? Is there still a different set of values for psychologists? What about college professors or college administrators?  Is the set of values appropriate for professors not appropriate for administrators? Where are all of these sets of values to be found? Certainly they must exist if they are going to be taught to students. In what courses are they taught? And what if, in answer to the forth question, a student decides that the best way to achieve his life and career goals is to lie, cheat, and steal? Would those values be appropriate? Many businessmen seem to think that they are.

Of course, there are no answers to these questions, so what’s the point of this “academic vision”? It has none; it’s completely nugatory, and its mere existence raises questions about the intelligence of the person or people who wrote it? No person who commits such nonsense to writing should have an association with an educational institution; his/her ability to think would clearly not suffice. Such a person could be induced to teach nonsense without ever raising a even a whimper. And students are not educated by being fed nonsense.

When this academic vision was first presented to me, I asked my esteemed facilitator how one would know what values were appropriate to various professions. The question apparently was way over her head, for she answered by telling me that Uop had developed a course in Business Ethics sometime after the Enron fiasco was revealed. Of course, that was not an answer to my question. But I let it go and then asked if such a course would have existed if the Enron fiasco had not happened. Her answer was that she thought not. So much for Uop’s teaching of values and academic vision. As far as academic vision is concerned, Uop is as blind as a bat.