Over my career, I have been asked to write about what higher education will “look like” in 2020. Back in 2010, it seemed so very far away. And yet, here we are.
(Oh, and before anyone writes me explaining that the next decade doesn’t begin until next year, please know that I have heard the arguments. It’s not that big a deal to me and I was literally writing about 2020 back in 2010, so the timing is right in this case!)
In looking back at that blog (originally posted on the eCollege website but has since been taken down), I got a few things right and a few things wrong.
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I noted at the time that MOOCs were not going to work. Nailed it (at least with their goals and desired outcomes at that time).
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I noted that iPhones were going to change how multimedia could work in online courses. Not sure you can say that I nailed it, but it is fair to say that there are SO, SO many more opportunities for personalized media in courses today, likely as a result of those devices…. I’ll give myself that one.
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I didn’t get right that the decade would see colleges and universities finally realize how to build better experiences for students, both in-person and online, finally seeing the majority of classroom experiences for both modalities go away from lectures. Nope, lectures still represent at least half of all college experiences (likely more). So, while we have made some headway, we’re not really even close.
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I was also watching the trend of schools rewarding some professors for teaching, leaving research out of the promotion and tenure conversation. So, I predicted that within a decade we would see large swaths of teaching faculty with the same ability to achieve P&T as anyone else. Wrong again. While there are still stories in the news (Dutch end ‘one-sided’ research focus and hope world follows), there seems to be no slowing of the research train, despite how little impact it has had on helping students learn. (And despite how little research actually impacts our world in a positive and/or meaningful way.)
So, as we sit on the precipice of 2020, I reflect not only on what the past decade has not brought, but of course what the next decade will bring. I have read a few blogs about artificial intelligence coming of age in the next ten years, but I find those claims a bit dubious. AI (now) is largely based on bad science, bad statistics, and bad inferences. Before we can make it work as promised, we have a ton of backlog to clean up – likely enough to take up most of the next 10 years.
I have read people discussing chips implanted in the brain to circumvent any need for learning. While the prospect of that is intriguing, I’m equally as curious as to how we will process and “connect” that information to anything important or meaningful. After all, information is not in short supply, sitting at our fingertips these days. But it is so very difficult for people to compile, curate, and use in a way that impacts others positively. I don’t know how helpful an information chip will be?
So let me make my bold prediction for the next decade. This one is perhaps a bit more personal to me than most. But I think it is more than just hope, which is not a strategy – I believe it is a trend that will flourish over time. So to begin, a small amount of context and a quick story.
If you read my materials regularly, you know that in my career, and now more than ever, I have worked with almost every facet of higher education closely. I have worked with almost every level of person in Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Enrollment, and more. But even though I have (literally) trained and workshopped with tens of thousands of faculty and staff, I have spent as much time with college / university administrators over my 20+ years in higher ed. I have worked with leadership as a formal colleague but also in a consultative or commercial capacity. I have coached Presidents, Provosts, Chancellors, and Deans as much as I have worked with Directors, Chairs, and tenured professors. I have managed dozens of people at one time, handled budgets in the tens of millions of dollars, and created both enrollment and retention initiatives successfully. I have worked in and around most every part of those positions, from strategic planning sessions to outcomes assessment to accreditation to promotion and tenure to teaching and learning to ed tech to initiatives….and on and on.
But in my last, formal position, I realized that I was effectively “one level” too low to accomplish everything that I felt was necessary to put our school in an advantageous position. A major reason that my team’s initiatives were only partially successful was due to other executives who were not aligned with my goals and outcomes. For some it was simply pragmatic – they had other stuff to deal with and my experimental projects were not worth their time. For others, it was genuine disdain for what I was trying to accomplish having received tremendous praise from a board that had not had much to praise in a long time. And since I had no purview over other departments, executives, nor their workflows, the tremendous results my team found sometimes fell on deaf ears.
I know, I know – this is not a new story. In fact, I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard a similar story. I would genuinely be rich. But it taught me that I really need to focus on finding a position such as Provost, Chancellor, Chief Academic Officer, or at the very least an assistant of one of those kinds of roles. And so, over time, while those postings are pretty rare, I have thrown my hat in the ring assuming other contextual factors worked for my family. It’s really the only thing that could ever take me away from the powerful work I am doing with IICE or with Campus at this point.
So last summer, I was surprised to get a phone call from a faculty member at a school where I had applied for such a leadership position. Through an ironic set of circumstances, this professor happened to hear me speak at a conference (out of state) we both attended. I will simply leave it at this – he liked my keynote and the ensuing workshops very much. Then, we both returned home.
Apparently, one day at lunch, this prof mentioned my name to a colleague. That colleague then mentioned that she was on the search committee for the institution’s most senior academic leadership position and she had seen my name in the stack of applicants. The professor who had brought up my name was pleasantly surprised and immediately asked how my interview had gone. That was when he was told that there was no interview. The committee had dismissed me outright because I had not followed the “traditional” path to a Provost, having been a Chair, then a Dean, and then perhaps a VPAA, etc. As well, my experience as a Vice President with large companies, even though they were all academically focused in support of the higher education mission, were not considered experience by this committee at all. And so, I was dismissed outright. No follow up, no interview, and no recognition of all of the things that might benefit the institution. All of the things that likely make me one of the best potential candidates out there were dismissed out too “out of the box” for this institution.
That was when this professor called me. We met for lunch at a local Chili’s and, after about a half hour of higher education talk, he transitioned to tell me this story. His eyes watered as he told me that his institution was near-sighted and lacked innovation or creativity or courage. He told me of (extremely common) dysfunction after dysfunction and described how someone with better ideas and solutions was needed. It was very compelling. So, after allowing him to vent and rant, I finally tried to let him off the hook. And that is what leads to my prediction for the next decade in higher ed.
While it may be too late for me to take advantage of, I am hopeful that the trend continues regarding higher education leadership. What trend?
Well, if you read the Chronicle’s long term stories about where Provost’s come from or the report which spawned the story from the consulting firm Deloitte, what struck me was how many schools are hiring “unconventional” people for those positions. Yes, the stories often speak to a lack of convention being discipline specific, but I’m going deeper than that. While the numbers are not tipping the scales by any means, it seems that a lot of the schools who hire non-academic leaders of the academy have really flourished. Yes, there have been a few bad eggs too, but if you look at the percentage of bad Chancellors / Provosts / VPAAs who come out of traditional Dean-ships or Vice President-ships, those percentages are higher than non-academic choices.
Why do I say this is an important trend and why are many non-academy executives doing so well? I believe it goes back to Dyer’s remarks in the Innovator’s DNA (2011). When those researchers looked at innovative organizations, based on multiple criteria including success, they found a few key takeaways.
First is leadership. Leadership matters greatly. From the book:
“…top executives do not feel personally responsible for coming up with strategic innovations. Rather, they feel responsible for facilitating the innovation process. In stark contrast, senior executives of the most innovative companies—a mere 15% in our study—don’t delegate creative work. They do it themselves.”
I do not think it is unfair to say that most top university leaders are not engaging in innovation personally. Almost every institution I know of sees leadership inundated with bureaucratic, stifling process work. They believe this to be the norm and the job. And so, while many senior executives claim to have created innovation hubs or platforms for innovation, almost none do this work personally, which almost always sees an organization falter in terms of new ideas, innovative strategies, or creative solutions.
The second thing Dyer, et al found as a key to innovation is the notion of associative thinking. I’ve blogged about this many times, but the idea is pretty straight forward. Innovation is really based on taking concepts or solutions from one context and employing them in another context. (Note, this is not how the term is used in other parts of the world, so to my friends across the oceans, think of associative thinking as lateral thinking, creative thinking, and strategic thinking rolled into one.)
But here we see example after example of people who took interesting or clever or highly strategic ideas from another industry and applied them within their own industry, working through the particular gates and impedance issues while still finding success. Gladwell speaks of many such associative thinking moments, as do Pink and Friedman. In fact, if you look at the genre of business success books, you are likely reading example after example of associative thinking in action.
But if you are in higher education, you are probably already ahead of me. This kind of thinking does not readily exist across higher education. Why? Perhaps because the hires are almost exclusively from within, ensuring people who have been fully indoctrinated in ‘how we do things’ instead of ‘what might be.’
Think about the utter dysfunction of higher education which has been in place for decades, if not centuries. Where else do you know of a customer (student) experience, costing so much, yet being so very poor? How many other industries see the kind of deeply ensconced silos go unattended, in fact being emboldened through other initiatives and technologies? All the while, the numbers (as a whole) get worse and worse in terms of cost, retention rate, enrollment, creation of critical thinkers, and much more. Senge’s work on Systems Thinking has not really made much progress within the collective of higher education.
Of course while all of this is going on, everyone and their brother is lining up to take shots at higher education. Not immune to #MeToo, seeing major racial issues popping up across campuses nationwide, and parents as well as politicians asking how valuable a college degree is, sees our beloved higher ed world under heavy fire.
So what have a few brave, forward-thinking institutions done? They have found leaders who are not bound by the past. They have found leaders who have experiences far beyond the walls of the academy. They have brought in leaders who know how to build culture while still building success, using innovative ideas from other sectors or industries to push their institutions forward. Those courageous organizations didn’t worry about the (silly) arguments put forward by some traditional institutions. “Faculty will never respect someone who is not a tenured professor.” It is not terribly controversial to say that many faculty do not respect most any administrator, regardless of their history. But many faculty are also reasonable people who would never require a shared experience as a basis for respect. “How can a person deliver tenure if they have never gone through the tenure process?” The quick and easy answer here is that if the tenure process is not transparent and objective, to the point that any person can determine if someone is eligible, then the process is fundamentally flawed. (This is something a non-academic Provost would fix immediately, by the way.) “How will a non-professor know how to make tough decisions about programs to fund and programs to cut?” Again, it is not hard to argue that a non-biased “outsider” would actually have an easier time discerning the best possible position based on the numbers and the statistics as well as copious other inputs, minus historical baggage. Plus, this is likely something they have had to do for years from a commercial perspective anyway.
Again, speaking personally, the irony here is that I do have formal, academic experience AND commercial, innovation experience. I have worked as a program coordinator and an associate vice president for a university, just as I have been a Chief Academic Officer for an ed tech company and the education liaison for another. I have been sent to leadership camps and retreats led by Zappos, Nintendo, Google, and Microsoft. But I have also worked on specific, research driven, direct initiatives with Ivy league schools, R-1 universities, and community college consortium. Let me say again, I’m likely too early to the party. This prediction is going to get more traction and see more results in the latter part of the upcoming decade, not the early part. By then, I hope to be contemplating retirement.
Obviously, I have painted the landscape with a pretty large brush here. No, not all higher education administrators are weak. There are obviously a handful of bright, vibrant, clever academic leaders out there – you read about them in IHE or the Chronicle all the time! But the general problems in and around higher ed are not going away, also seeing new issues emerge every year. That suggests the way we’ve always worked is not actually working anymore and that many of the current leaders are without ideas. And as the predictions are for more and more schools to close in the next several years, this is actually a pretty significant issue. Finally, it is important to say that people simply don’t know what they don’t know. How could a person know they were too narrowly focused or without enough outside context to make a better choice? This is not all about the Dunning-Kruger effect where a person believes themselves to be competent even though they are not. No, it is simply about seeing the world through a different lens, allowing for more options, more solutions, and more success.
So, if I happen to be blogging again in 2030, I’ll try to remember to go back and see what I said in 2019. We’ll see if the trend grows and broadens as I suspect it will. To those few, innovative academic leaders out there, keep up the great work. Ironically, they are often the ones who call and ask me for thoughts or help around various strategies and initiatives and I am honored. And so, until then, I will continue to do my best to coach, counsel, and otherwise consult with leaders who are in need of associative thinking to move their institutions forward.
And to everyone in higher ed, I hope you can break into 2020 refreshed, recharged, and with a renewed sense of purpose, seeking ways to push the boundaries of our existing boxes. For what we do is no easy task and is incredibly important.
Good luck and good learning.