A hallmark of the University of Not-Bielefeld is how invested it is in teaching. Not in real teaching, of course, because that costs real money and if you want to build 1.4 million Euros worth of bike racks, something’s got to give, right? Instead, the University’s emphasis here lies much more on promoting its commitment to teaching rather than actually following through on that commitment. As a result, we get bombarded every other year or so with yet another new program they’ve dreamed up that is invariably focussed around the “classrooms of tomorrow”.
But what happens when tomorrow is already yesterday?
A case in point is the sign pictured on the right advertising the Tag des Lehrens and Lernens (Day of Teaching and Learning) with the meaningless tagline of “Classrooms of the future. Design the campus of tomorrow together!” Again, instead of this unrelenting focus on the future, how about a little bit more attention on the present for a change? More to the point, June 2024 has long since come and gone but the sign still remains. (Although, to be fair, it is only the next year and not the every-other one for the next bombardment. Substance like this requires thought.) Hell, even the magnets have long since lost interest and the whole poster is starting to sag southwards. Now if this isn’t literally a true sign of the University’s commitment to teaching, nothing is.
But what always amazes me about these campaigns is that the University of Not-Bielefeld loves coming up with names for them for which the mandatory acronyms are utterly unpronounceable. TdLL? (Bottom right in the picture.) Phonetically it sounds like TGIF. But on a Monday. (Or TTFN on any day.) Much better would be to flip the two Ls in the program name around and then use the English translation of it. That acronym—DoLT—is both eminently more pronounceable as well as probably much more representative of those people running these programs.
However …
Undoubtedly the greatest acronym to ever come out of the University of Not-Bielefeld was for their Schulische Hochschulinformationstag (School Universityinformationday), an open-house day intended to introduce graduating high-school students to the University. Unusually, the acronym for it was not only easy to pronounce, it was also highly memorable as well as being incredibly informative and honest about what it was standing for. All of which meant, naturally, that its days were numbered and it soon had to give way to the “acronym of tomorrow”, the literally punchier but less honest HIT to match the more parsimoniously renamed day (Hochschulinformationstag).
And the best part was that it took the University years to realize why they should make the change …
The Blog About Fog 