Whether you’re looking at another university or SU’s website, catching up with colleagues at a conference or traipsing around in the snow on a study tour to Eastern and Northern Europe, one of the barriers to learning is what I always call the “they call a Twix a Raider problem”.
Subconsciously we’re on the look out for things that we assume to be similar, so that we can compare how those things are delivered, promoted, framed, measured, run or governed.
That allows for a dominant model of development – we all basically have the same scaffolding (in SUs a voice dept, a board, a CEO, elected student leaders, etc or in a university a VC, “student services”, estates and so on) and then we seek to learn how those things are done differently in practice through support, culture, training or whatever.
The problem is that sometimes, even though the Twix looks like a Raider, it really isn’t. And if you eat a lots of Twixes, learning about Raiders might be worse for your learning than if you’ve never had a Twix at all.
