UNT Four Bold Goals: My Comments

CC image from Craig D. Blackmon, FAIA

Unfortunately, my invitation to speak at the UNT Four Bold Goals presentation never arrived, so I thought I’d offer my planned speech here:

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, people, and other examples of living organisms around the city, region, state, country, and around the world, galaxy, universe, our dimension and other dimensions everywhere, including those dedicated to a commitment of excellence both within and without the University of North Texas, which has remained an extremely vibrant, dedicated, student-centered, world-class community of students, teachers, staff members, donors, stakeholders, and dedicated members of our community, who shape our future with bright, innovative ideas that will transform and educate today’s students, who are tomorrow’s leaders, architects, doctors, veterinarians, veterinarian assistants, and pastry chefs, from whom the finest and most engaging pastries will emerge not only as delicious but also as flaky, buttery, and crispy, all without giving us that flat, tasteless feeling in our mouths as if we just listened to twenty minutes of nebulous, overly-long, pretentious “goals” that will promptly be forgotten in a few weeks when we announce yet another tuition raise from our students in order to pay for more events such as football games, pastry competitions, and rebranding announcements, all while attempting to get our staff to agree to at-will employment, which will make it easier to fire them to make room for more pastry chefs and pretentious dialog.

You might be thinking that UNT’s “Four Bold Goals” are, without considering the bright, engaging, and informative perspectives that each of these goals offer each and every member of the UNT community, in effect, decidedly unbold, and that this was all a rather cheap way of making the administration, which comprises innovative, forward-thinking, active members of the Mean Green community, look better without offering any sort of actual direction or effort towards comprehensive, intelligent ways to solve the problems faced by our university, other public and private universities in Texas, other universities in Texas, as well as universities around the world, by stuffing every buzzword, catchphrase, and empty slogan into runon sentences that you feel may never end, but I can assure you beyond any sort of reasonable, sane, and pragmatic doubt that this is not the case, because as you can clearly tell, these forward-thinking, thought-provoking, intuitive solutions are extremely new in their boldness, not only in terms of their overall levels of bold, fresh, open, engaging ideas, but also as they relate to the exciting, in-depth, active action that the goals clearly perform in an excellent and fascinating manner, not unlike your average pastry-filled manner.

For those of you worrying about how you can afford the $20,000 in debt that Texas college students are averaging after graduation or nervous that your job at this university is making every conceivable effort to fire you in order to purchase bigger offices in Dallas, rest assured that we will not be discussing that issue today, or at least in any sort of public way. Now leave. Out the back. Thank you.