Definitely a bunch of HR speak, which more than anything was my point about having academics (who in my experience use this kind of language more than people in the "real world") in charge of leading us forward rather than people with tangible experience leading an organization through a period of major change.Yeah. It looks like it’s from the business buzzwords thread written by a lawyer or business bro rather than a biochemist.
Even a university like Wake brings in more revenue from research in areas like biochem than from sports and branding. That’s certainly the case at larger universities. That’s one reason academics are in charge.
I also get the argument that people don't want/need Wake to be competing at the top levels of sports or ranked amongst the best colleges, and that is certainly a fair perspective. I don't expect us to be competing for national championships in major sports or compared to Yale either. But it's pretty sad that a school that prides itself in academics is ranked as an equivalent to Texas A&M and worse than Rutgers. Now, obviously that doesn't mean the education you would receive there is better, but from an optics perspective it is pretty pathetic. I don't think anybody expects Currie and/or Wente to come out and lay out some 5-10 year plan publicly, but it frustrates me, despite really liking him, how much Currie spouts BS about Wake (e.g. being the "fastest growing power conference fanbase") which clearly isn't true to anybody who knows sports, and all correspondence I've seen from Wente being filled with fluff.
To me, I don't see any way we are involved in whatever becomes of the national B1G/SEC conglomerate that seems inevitable. Think our best possible outcome is to end up in the level directly below that, competing against the "misfits" from the national conference (Duke, GT, Northwestern, VT, Vandy, UVA seem like decent possibilities here). Not sure what our strategy should be to make that happen, but I agree with Kent that any success will be predicated on having foreknowledge of other movers and being proactive rather than reactive (you can see pretty clearly how being reactive worked for Oregon St. and Washington St.).Genuinely curious (a) what strategies you all think exist to keep Wake from getting left out of a 2-super-league NCAA and (b) what strategies you’d expect the Wake President to publicly reveal.
The reality is Wente and Currie aren't the ones largely responsible for putting us in the situation we are in now,