APPENDIX 18

Potential Obstacles to Marketing the Wandwaver
Solution to Universities

    The "Wandwaver Solution" is both a proposal and a plan for revolutionary change in the university, to be accomplished through evolutionary processes. The processes may require a period of about five years to complete. The change is viewed as comprehensive, multi-faceted, and posing a challenge to all components of today's university to collaborate to arrive at its projected outcome. The projected outcome is designated "The Great University".

    Experience in offering previous proposals for comprehensive change identifies these hazards to be anticipated in presenting such proposals:

  • Underview. Readers are unaccustomed to dealing with complex proposals for comprehensive change. They often approach them superficially, as though they were much smaller in import and scope

  • Showstopper Search. Readers may set out to find just one aspect of a proposal or plan with which they can thoroughly disagree, and take that as sufficient basis to reject everything out of hand. Because a large and diverse population needs to be involved in moving from today's university to the Great University, the variety of points of view that enter the evaluatory arena is quite large. Often readers are not ready to learn how or why a proposal or plan, distributed across a variety of university components, incorporates concepts that are, in part, not specific in catering to lesser interests

  • Untested Misinterpretation. Readers may misinterpret radically what is being said, and not bother to test that misinterpretation. The language that is needed to describe comprehensive proposals and plans has been seriously debased in current practice and may, inadvertently, give misleading cues that arise in the reader's mind based on repetitive experience from the past

  • Non-Closure. Some readers today expect any proposal or plan to be self- contained, and are not willing to turn to supportive literature for expanding in depth their comprehension of what is being said, or to correct misinterpretations

  • Antipathy to Focus. Although the university is the bastion of knowledge in society; faith in, and willingness to apply within academia, academic knowledge developed in the highest traditions, often gives way to the idea that every point of view deserves equal weight; that none is qualified to hold sway over another; so that the necessary focus for comprehensive change, itself, becomes a prisoner of antipathy to in-depth understanding

    These possibilities can be kept in mind when opportunities to explain or market the Wandwaver Solution arise.