For the fact is that, when placed in the timeline of Mike and Sully’s world, and the events we already know will take place in Monsters Inc, it is clear that Monsters University, as an institution, has no future. It is difficult to see how the faculty could be expected to work under such a dysfunctional managerial style.ĭisturbing as these features of Monsters University are, in the broader scheme of things they are of little concern. Moreover, the fact that there is a statue to Dean Hardscrabble placed inside the main lecture theater of the school which she administers bespeaks of a level of administrative hubris rarely seen outside of certain English universities. She also is clearly far too involved in the extracurricular life of the school, and in particular with its powerful fraternity and sorority culture. It is a generally accepted rule of university governance that the faculty control the curriculum, and yet here we see administrative interference on a very worrying scale. She seems to feel it her right to observe and even interrupt lectures in progress, to overrule the teaching decisions of tenured faculty monsters, and to generally interfere with the curriculum’s content and standards whenever she feels like it. The role of Dean Hardscrabble in the everyday life of the university is particularly disturbing. One has to wonder whether Monsters University recruits these talented young giant monsters for anything other than their athletic ability.Ī second problem is more organizational. And yet all of the classrooms are tiny, or accessible only by very small doors that even a moderately-sized undergraduate would have trouble fitting through. Disturbingly, the two giant monsters we see are both depicted playing sports: a female giant monster is shown playing giant ultimate frisbee (or possibly ultimate giant frisbee), and a giant slug monster is evidently the key player on the football team. Classroom spaces also seem poorly equipped to address the needs of nontraditional monsters, especially giant monsters. Campus transportation seems non-existent, despite the fact that we see slug-like monsters unable to get to class in anything like a timely fashion. Lecture theaters are ill-suited for anything but the most direct sort of instruction, and the physical plant has clearly failed to keep pace with the diversity of the student body. The campus has a machine shop devoted to manufacturing doors, but that seems to be about the extent of its capital investment in anything other than faux collegiate gothic buildings. Instruction is resolutely “chalk and talk”, with faculty members presenting dull lectures to (often very large) classes of obviously disaffected students.
As the MU website suggests and the film reveals in more detail, Monsters University is a highly traditional institution with many problematic aspects in both its organization and culture.
(But really, if you are the sort of person who would be genuinely upset by having someone reveal a few plot points in Monsters University, I am not sure I have any sympathy for you at all.) As it turned out, while my initial reactions focused on aspects of everyday campus life at MU, my considered reaction is that, as an institution, Monsters University is doomed.įirst, campus life. Do I have to say there will be spoilers? Of course there will be spoilers. What sort of pedagogical techniques are in vogue there? Is the flipped classroom all the rage? What’s the structure of the curriculum? These are natural questions to ask of a children’s movie about imaginary creatures. As a faculty member at what is generally thought of as America’s most monstrous university, I was naturally interested in seeing how higher education worked in Monstropolis. Monsters University, the prequel to Monsters, Inc, opened this weekend.
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