The Wake

The Driven to Discover campaign that started in late September asks the public to enter their “single greatest question,” but it also allows University researchers to show off their research, and not really answer the questions. What a great “campaign,” huh?

DTD easily allows those inside and outside of the University to see what our researchers have been up to, with University experts answering the questions being asked. It lets all those who are interested in the research being done at the U to easily access the information. I mean who wouldn’t be sucked in by the question, “What is my dog thinking?”

But it also makes one wonder, who is asking these questions and who chooses who answers them? Are these questions asked just solely to “show off” a project the U is doing? If so, then this campaign is nothing but that, showing off.

On the campaign’s website, discover.umn.edu, there are links to featured discoveries happening at the U. While I am not trying to put down these discoveries, this is where DTD’s connection to strategic positioning becomes obvious. The campaign’s goal is to show that the University can be one of the top three public research institutions, and to show that the all-important U of M is making a difference. But what kind of difference?

While there are questions on the site about what I would call “important” research, such as curing Alzheimer’s disease and making affordable food for all, there is also a featured question that asks, “What came first? The chicken or the egg?” Now I know this question has plagued generations of people, but to me it just doesn’t seem to be important in the least bit. There’s another about Elvis. Aside from the fact that I have never been a fan of the hip-shaking rocker, I don’t see the point of this question either. Oh, but if you were wondering, the egg did come first according to Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum of Natural History. That’s the other semi-fishy thing about this project: who decides who answers the questions?

Lanyon is a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, so I guess he’s qualified, but for some of the questions it seems they never get an answer. To the ever popular “What is my dog thinking?” The response is simply, “no one can say for certain.” Well, to me, that doesn’t give new information about anything and the theories involved in some of the answers don’t reveal anything to me either.

Some of the questions “How ‘fluid’ is the poverty incidence in the metro area?” and “Will solid matter ever be able to travel at the speed of light?” strike me as odd because it seems like they were tailored for those answering and were not asked by your average joe. Now maybe I’ve lost faith in my fellow man, but it does seem suspicious that some of the questions asked are almost too “educated sounding” to not have been written by someone in the field being questioned.

But the people in the pictures with their question are pretty to look at and are most likely models, instead of the people actually answering the question. This unusually high occurrence of attractiveness on the University staff calls to question if those adorable faces are who they claim to be. And makes me more certain that these inquiries are not made up by average students and residents. No names, ages or occupations are attached to the questions, so who is asking them? “Average Minnesotans from all walks of life,” the site says. Again, that tells me nothing.

Of all of the questions asked (submitted online) in a week, only one is displayed on the website as the question of the week. This too seems weird because, who chooses the question of the week? Is that really the best question that was asked? I think chances are they’re picking the question they know someone on staff can answer, highlighting their research project at the same time. Two birds with one stone … or egg, I guess.

So here is what this “discovery” effort has “driven” me to believe; the University created this website in which it can make up questions supposedly asked by real people and then their most famous “names,” or researchers get to answer the questions to showcase their research. What a great promotion, I’m sure the cost of it is one of the reasons tuition is rising. Maybe I’ll ask that question next week.