A mere seven years into the new millennium, President Steinberg decided to organize the Presidential Task Force on the Millennium Student.
The task force is charged with finding the “best practices and action steps … [for] overall excellence across the University,” according to an announcement for the task force’s kick-off meeting last Tuesday.
The announcement goes on to describe how the task force will identify “The initiatives and areas of concern identified at this meeting [which] will help form the basis for the development of subcommittees.
“The subcommittees will have the responsibility of investigating / researching a specific set of issues and report findings and recommendations to the Task Force chairs who will direct the implementation of immediate and evolving recommendations in accordance with shared governance at the University.”
“Task force,” “best practices,” “action steps,” “initiatives,” “subcommittees,” “investigations,” “findings,” “recommendations,” and “implementation”: these are the buzzwords of bureaucracy.
It is bureaucracy that causes students to go through the hassle of opting in or out of insurance every semester, providing the same information each time.
It is bureaucracy that forces freshmen to check in with an academic advisor to remove an advising hold on their registration, even if students are simply going through the motions of seeing the counselor without addressing any of their actual concerns.
It is bureaucracy that Provost Lawrence Frank cited as the reason why students in the College of Education are often set back a semester because they don’t know that they have to pass the English Competency Exam before they can be admitted to the college.
And this bureaucracy is trying to address the weaknesses that are caused by bureaucracy by creating more bureaucracy. This would be funny if our educations didn’t depend on it.
Last semester the Free Speech Task Force was charged with the important mission of regulating polices on free speech after students were told that they could only protest in “free speech zones.” The task force later found that no such zones exist, that everywhere is a “free speech zone.” The Constitution could have told us that.
These task forces are token gestures of concern toward the students and their needs, and they remain meaningless, as nothing tangible seems to come from them. If the Free Speech Task Force came to any definitive findings, why were they not widely shared with the university community?
Furthermore, task forces and the bureaucracy they imply turn students away from getting involved in important movements on campus that will have an impact on their daily lives as NEIU students.
It is no coincidence that the Presidential Task Force on the Millennium Student has come into being as the university prepares for reaccredidation. The task force is now also charged with disseminating its results to the university community and how those results will be put into action. It’s time to see some force in our task forces.