What's It All About? : Part 2

In my prior blog posting I had intended to discuss the notion that universities are all about the students, and instead, talked about everything but that. To be generous, every roundabout eventually leads to an exit.

Campus curmudgeon P.F. Kluge.

When I was in college, an alum and part-time creative writing professor, P.F. Kluge, chose to live in a freshman dorm. A safer form of embedded journalism (with vomit rather than explosive projectiles being the only obstacle), his aim was to write an expose of his alma mater.

The book, Alma Mater, came out as the college President was ending his two-decade long term. Usually a gentle man, at our senior dinner everyone could tell that President Phil Jordan was angry (and not just because a week earlier students had burned his cardboard likeness in a massive bonfire).

The place he had dedicated a life to was snubbed by Kluge as "the second best Italian restaurant in town" and as a lower tier academic institution, already demurred by its non East Coast setting, where "every kid's a winner."

"For God's sake," he roared, "is this Kenyon College or Kluge College?" ... which then led to everyone chanting one or the other, with no clear winner as the two choices sounded nearly alike. "And by the way," I am almost certain he went on to say, "there are NO jobs. So tough luck for all of you graduates." 

Kluge felt that compared to his college days on the hill, the institution now embraced a milquetoast mentality. Students got away with everything. Faculty were friends you could call by their first name rather than icons of intellectualism. The college was a pit stop, a finishing school, a temporary oasis until real life. And the students.

Oh the students were coddled and cared for rather than shaken into a higher form of consciousness. He called this phenomenon "Kamp Kenyon" and wrote about it about ten years after the book was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

At current prices, we’re more than ever obliged to deliver the goods, to turn out English majors who don’t regard the apostrophe as an unidentified flying object. This we attempt to do, at Kenyon College, and often we succeed. But the obligation to challenge is matched by another demand: to accommodate. And this has led to another institution, a burgeoning case of mission creep, something that is called Kamp Kenyon.

The Huffington Post named Kenyon College one of the nation's friendliest, an accolade that no doubt would suggest to some that accommodating students far outranked academics.

Ironically, Kluge hinted, by focusing too much on the students, Kenyon, and institutions of higher learning in general, had actually abandoned their true missions: teaching, inspiring, passing on the thrill of knowledge.

Here’s the problem. Kenyon College is about challenging and testing students, Kamp Kenyon is about accommodating clients. Kenyon College keeps students busy, Kamp Kenyon makes them happy. Kenyon Colleges trades in requirements, Kamp Kenyon in appeals that become entitlements. Kenyon College has rules, to which it makes rare exceptions. Kamp Kenyon trades in excuses which become the rule.

Much like some college presidents wanted to keep higher education away from the marketplace, Kluge wanted to keep higher education away from too much outside influence---and creature comforts. Alas, even in a small, hard to find Gothic enclave hugged by cornfields, there was no escape. (To read Kluge's "love story" for the college, or perhaps his apology, check out his excellent novel Gone Tomorrow.) Keep in mind, all of this well intentioned hang wringing happened a decade before the onslaught of social networking and mobile devices.

Beet is a modern campus satire.

In Roger Rosenblatt's satire, Beet: A Novel, the longer-term consequences of a system of higher education run by the inmates becomes clear. Here's a passage taken from a Washington Post book review:

These aspects of academia are so well pre-satirized in real life that it's a challenge to exaggerate them, but Rosenblatt pigs out with one satiric observation after another. Beet College offers "Native American Crafts and Casino Studies; the Sensitivity and Diversity Council; the Fur and Ivory Audiovisual Center; Ethnicity, Gender and Television Studies; Little People of Color; Humor and Meteorology; Bondage Studies; Serial Killers of the Northwest; Wiccan History." This is the kind of campus that awarded "a plaster-of-paris bust of Rosie O'Donnell" to the male professor most sensitive to women's issues, but then refused to let him into the meeting because he was a man. 

Is college today simply a fine dining experience?

With even Harvard, a College with the most competitive admissions process in the universe, awarding over 20% of students A's, perhaps college has simply become a fine dining experience, where a student's every whim is immediately satisfied by white gloved waiters.

One undergrad even wrote an essay in Harvard Magazine suggesting that Harvard should be harder. (My suggestion: Come over to the engineering school and delve into our courses. Or take Math 55.)

As mentioned, there is a troubling irony that as colleges and universities strive to meet the demands of their students (the top of my inverse pyramid in the last blog), or in the words of our own dean, attempt to "put teaching and learning first", that the educational experience can be diluted.

Imagine instead, as Robert Hutchins did, The University of Utopia. A place focused only on higher learning (the wonderful tagline used in a Northeastern University marketing blitz a few years back.). Hutchins' wrote:

“Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if possible.”

That's not the Four Season's; it's a BU dorm.

One may accuse me of cynicism, but Hutchins' Baconian-inspired idealism is not likely to take hold. The $100 million sports complexes, five star accommodations like those at Boston University (nicer than most hotels), vegan dining options, courses on happiness, and so on, are not going away.

Kluge's simpler, "real" college experience is a dream permanently deferred and best for novels. (A more eye opening view of college days of the past can be found in Philip Roth's Indignation---the anti-campus novel).

With the students apparently winning, has higher education lost?

Based upon my experience of helping to develop a new engineering-focused college admissions tour this summer, I think there is a different, more upbeat, way of looking at things. Yes, it is all about the students*---but with that lovely little asterisk at the end.

Our new tour, in draft stage, was developed with the generous help of a recent graduate in computer science, Neena Kamath '11 (now a project manager at Microsoft). Neena, in fact, began giving the tours on her own due to demand by students and parents who wished to know more about science and engineering at Harvard. (Imagine a gift like that for a public relations professional.)

During a "mock" tour with our dean and other administrators, Neena talked about the traditional Harvard experience, the Yard, the house system, the Harry Potteresque dining experience in Annenberg; academics; interactions with faculty; and the basic bread-and-butter of student life.

Her equal focus, however, was on what some might consider all the "extras" that get in the way of traditional classroom learning. Namely: research in the lab; Hack Nights; Robocup competitions in Turkey; summer internships; starting companies; going abroad; networking with future employers; engaging with alumni; varsity sports and intramural sports; ski trips with faculty and lab mates; concerts; using digital resources; living in Cambridge/Boston; volunteering; and so on.

A Harvard HackNight doesn't look like traditional learning.

It became clear that for her, there was not much of a distinction between what happened inside and outside of the classroom. Meaning, everything was part of being at student at Harvard---and everything offered an opportunity for learning, knowledge, and growth.

Harvard extended in ways that I could not even imagine, well beyond even the extensive campus that flanks the Charles river.

Despite advising freshman for five years, I suddenly realized that I really did not know what it was like to be a student in the 21st-century. That also led me to believe that many others who work in and write about academia (even those with noble intentions) may not know either.

So, a more accurate statement may be: universities are all about the student experience. And that experience is shaped by other students, faculty, administrators, the physical campus, resources, and outside activities. The relationship among all of those things should be a constant push-and-pull, rather than an idee fixe. And with social networking, online learning, and e-books---oh my!--- any higher ed utopia is going to be a moving target.

The insight that my campus experience is not the same as a student's experience may seem incredibly obvious, but only by hearing Neena's perspective on the tour, did it suddenly make sense.

Thus, it's only fair then to end with a profound student insight about the college experience:

"It's not at all what I expected it would be, but it's awesome."

- Olga Zinoveva '12, computer science concentrator

What's It All About? : Part 1

They are all about the students. Universities, that is.

On days when complaints outnumbered oxygen molecules, an administrative associate dean I worked with loved to draw the following reverse organizational pyramid.

Students, the most important population, is at the top

followed by the faculty (tenured & non-tenured);

researchers and postdoctoral fellows;

members of the staff;

administrators; &

the dean.

In fact, he said he used this party trick primarily on the dean---a way to remind him about what truly mattered when internal politics led to boiling over bouts of anger and frustration. If the end goal was not going to support the top level of the pyramid, then he needed to rethink things.

A lot of scholars of academia (a celebration of meta-knowledge to the extreme: academics who study the academy) dislike that diagram and the kind of thinking it suggests. They say it frames the students-as-consumers model, promotes illicit (or at least, unwise) industry-academic partnerships, or worse, celebrates the for-profit model for higher education. (Oh horrors!)

An academic spire as seen through a corporate window.

I am going to focus a bit on the industry-academic partnerships and the notion of the student-first mentality (in a roundabout way, of course). The for-profit model for education (which even fair Harvard benefits from) will be saved for another day.

In the early 2000's, Harvard's former president Derek Bok wrote a slim book called Universities in the Marketplace decrying the increasing commercialization of celebrated institutions like those in the Ivy League.

Bok---a truly lovely and humble person whom I had the pleasure of interviewing several years ago---decried the cozying up to corporations and the virtual professionalization of college sports as the bellwethers of doom. Put simply, he wrote:

Was everything in the university for sale if the price was right?

Bok's warnings were sincere and prescient. (Think of the recent Ohio State football scandal or the ever tenuous relationship between physicians and pharmaceutical companies---yes, right here at good old Harvard.)

"Old Kenyon," 1998, colored pencil, Andrew Woodward.

That said, his book struck me as nostalgic, a desire to return to the days when universities were more like the Magic Mountain than markers of cultural currency (something I wrote about in my prior blog posting).

After all, letting the outside world in transformed universities for the better. More women. More diversity. More financial aid. More connections across the globe. And well, made institutions of higher learning more relevant.  

(As an aside, the ongoing tension of how much of the outside world to let slide into the ivy gates is an old chestnut of a story. One never seems surprised to learn that famed Harvard President Charles William Eliot tried to unload the institution's engineering programs (including giving the entire thing, lock, stock, and barrel, to MIT) no less than six times because he felt that professional education of the practical kind had no place in a bastion of liberal, rarefied thinking. Meaning, places like Harvard were not meant to dirty themselves with the vagaries of the real world.) He lost that battle thanks to a thoughtful donor (Gordon McKay) and the wisdom of the Massachusetts courts.)

At engineering schools like SEAS---even one based in a long tradition of applied science---the need to engage with the outside world has long been paramount.

Case in point, the Mark I, the first large-scale electromechanical computer was developed by IBM and Harvard---and a lot of financial support from Uncle Sam. That innovation took place more than 50 years ago. In fact, I just learned from our dean that Harvard received the first federal research grant in the U.S. to support radar work in Cruft Hall.

The Harvard-IBM Mark I in action.

By contrast, in the 1970s when An Wang was a student at Harvard he created magnetic core memory. This form of memory helped to build modern computation. As for what happened next, Wikipedia truly delivers a stinger:

Wang and Woo were working at Harvard University's Computation Laboratory at the time but, unlike MIT, Harvard was not interested in promoting inventions created in their labs. Instead Wang was able to patent the system on his own.

Imagine the worth of Harvard's endowment today if the University would have bothered with things like intellectual property. Then again, it is not so much the potential profits as it is the cavalier attitude that is truly damning.

The sturm-und-drang of industry-academic relationships is worth several blog postings---well, probably a full book. So, instead, I will simply say that collaboration with industry, as well as a focus on the kinds of things that companies do (profit, products, marketing) has long been a source of contention in the ivory tower.

Many believe that it is a slippery slope that could lead to the end of the modern academy as we know it. iPads and Google are already upending (or at least, annoying) the marbled gatekeepers of knowledge.

Others (like me!) believe institution-to-institution handshaking is an exciting, fluid, ever-evolving enterprise that offers a lot of fantastic potential (and can be free of pitfalls with the right planning.) After all, new forms of energy and computing are likely to be driven by strategic university-corporate-government partnerships. (For a stunning, fictional look at this, read Solar by Ian McEwan.)

Nevertheless, leaving that fun debate aside, let's focus on the latest enemy of the good ship academe. Administrators!

Back to School pokes fun at academic administrators.

Benjamin Ginsberg, a faculty member of Johns Hopkins, just published: The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters.

Any faculty member reflecting on the title will no doubt cheer!

Any university administrator or staff member will no doubt ask, "How can I get a job at this mythical and wonderful institution Professor Ginsberg is describing!" (If true of his home base, Johns Hopkins may very well be awash with job applicants in the next few weeks.)

While I haven't read the book (yet), the brief overview from Inside Higher Ed provides a good deal of food for thought:

The larger result, he argues, is that universities have shifted their resources and attention away from teaching and research in order to feed a cadre of administrators who, he says, do little to advance the central mission of universities and serve chiefly to inflate their own sense of importance by increasing the number of people who report to them.

After reading the above many staff may reverse their prior assessment of the book's title and cheer alongside the faculty. The rise of oblique titles like Executive Associate Vice Dean for Institutional Strategy, Knowledge Wrangling, and Party Planning rarely helps matters.

Many an eyebrow was raised, in fact, when members of the Harvard community read (on the University's homepage, mind you) that there was a summit for the institution's 1,000+ IT staff. 

Yes, that's 1,000.

Good god, with that kind of base, we must not just be living in the realm of cloud computing but be manufacturing storms that are altering the global IT climate. If so, why doesn't my email work again? And what is up with those quadruple log-ins for the wonky financial systems?

If Ginsberg wants an "I told you so!" moment this way well be his watershed. Not so fast.

First, like it or not, universities do exist in the real world. The genie Bok was hoping to put back into the bottle has long since dissipated into a billion nanoparticles. The world is far more complex these days. Harvard is a large scale enterprise that employs tens of thousands of people, houses, feeds, and cares for tens of thousands more, and educates even greater numbers.

That means 1,000 IT folks could be about right to keep the institution running smoothly. And to give proper credit to our IT folks, they support more than just email, storage, and networking, but web development, open access scholarship, research computing, and on and on.

Second, while administrative bulk no doubt happens, growth often has a reason---often unseen by faculty. With the arrival of ARPA-E, for example, the regulations on reporting on federal funding suddenly became far more complicated. If faculty wanted the money, universities had to hire more administrators and staff to manage the paperwork.

Some administrators may wish to build empires, but I suspect most just want to get the work done---and get it done well.

Stanley Fish, hero to administrators everywhere!

Third, as cranky academic Stanley Fish once argued in a piece called "First, Kill All the Administrators", most faculty do not want to do the majority of the administrative tasks.

They simply do not have the time. After all, they are here to teach and do research (which I think, Ginsberg says is the very priority that is being undermined.)

Moreover, administrating is difficult and specialized work. At least that what those in the administrating business, like me, tend to argue.

Relish in the following eloquent paragraphs by Fish:

So, once again, what do you need administrators for anyway? You need administrators to develop and put in place and, yes, administer the policies and procedures that enable those who scorn them to do the work they consider so much more valuable than the work of administration.

Most faculty members believe that their lives would be so much easier if only administrators would get out of the way and let them get on with the job; heaven, they think, would be a university without any administrators at all, except, of course, those in charge of payroll. The truth is that if it weren't for administrators, there would be no class schedules and therefore no classes to teach, no admissions office and therefore no students to dazzle, no facilities management and therefore no laboratories to work in, no tenure process and therefore no security of employment, no budget officers and therefore no money for equipment, travel, lectures, and teaching awards.

James I of England once famously (and prophetically) said, "No bishops, no king." I say, no administrators, no life of the mind.

Bravo. Administrators can now feel vindicated! At the very least, Ginsberg and Fish's criticisms may cancel one another out. Quite neatly.

So, what happened to the original claim of this blog. Universities are all about the students. Right? Yet, I've blathered on and on, not even talking about students, which may say something in itself.

Well, I will get to that claim... in my next post.

In the meantime, here's a preview from one of my favorite books, The University of Utopia, by Robert M. Hutchins (former President of the University of Chicago during what must have been the glory days.)

...the function of education is to take boys and girls and develop them as human beings to the highest possibility that they have: to train them to make the best use of their gifts.

Mixed Metaphors, Leading Questions

Last week, I visited Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Nestled on the Upper West Side, the campus is a lush reprieve from the city---connected, yet protected.

In the case of Harvard, Cambridge and the campus, while distinct, ebb and flow, melding into one another.

Northwest Corner Building at Columbia.

From the top floor of Columbia's soon-to-be-finished Northwest Corner Building, the near entirety of New York City stretches out below---you can even see the cranes hulking over Columbia's second campus.

Spanish architect and former Harvard Design School faculty member Raphael Moneo designed the Northwest Corner Building, a large glass and steel structure dedicated to interdisciplinary science and engineering.

Laboratory of Integrated Science & Engineering at Harvard.

Moneo also designed Harvard's Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering (LISE), a building which is impressive because of its depth (5 stories live underground) and its melding with the less than television-perfect Gordon McKay Lab.

From the outside, both buildings look like stretched, grayscale Rubik's Cubes). From the inside, both share interiors that seem whisper quiet, subtle, and almost soothing. Let's face it, modern research is very cool.

The dean of Columbia's SEAS (noting unlike us, they have applied science rather than applied sciences), Feniosky Peña-Mora, accompanied a group of other ivy deans (and their communications counterparts) on a campus tour of the new building---as well as the campus as a whole.

Columbia U engineering dean Feniosky Peña-Mora.

I learned that Columbia's engineering program has around 11 departments. Harvard's has no departments---but instead, loosely affiliated areas (that well, are becoming more department-like).

Dean Peña-Mora mentioned the challenge and opportunity of a truly interdisciplinary building (not owned by one school or a given academic area). The Northwest Corner Building houses neuro, nano, and if I recall correctly, a lot of imaging, all fields that draw on faculty across science and engineering.

I nodded in understanding, as LISE was designed as a shared research facility and the newer Northwest Building---500,000 square feed of interdisciplinary science goodness---houses Harvard schools, departments, and institutes from all realms.

(And yes, two Northwest buildings on two ivy campuses is kind of funny. If Princeton opens one then maybe that hints that all the ivies plan to merge. Moneo did, however, build their neuro/psychology complex.)

In an academically freeform building, the questions of who-goes-where and who-gets-what are live wires for the newish Columbia dean (he's been on the job for about two years). I didn't have the heart to tell him that these questions remain many years after the buildings are completed and occupied. Meaning, the Rubik's Cube metaphor is accurate, as there will be a constant shift of people and research. Yet the perfect geometric solution (solid color on each side) is not the end goal or even a desired objective.

Almost if on cue Dean Peña-Mora said, "Well, you know, working with faculty is like herding cats." (Even better, he said this among a group of his fellow ivy engineering deans.) A quick search reveals that the original use of that phrase was to describe the difficulty of managing programmers (dating to the mid-1980's). As it has gained cultural currency, EDS even used it in a Superbowl commercial.



Georgia Perimeter College English professor Rob Jenkins has riffed on this metaphor at length.

Thanks to the quest to quantify the qualitative, some sociology researchers went one step further, exploring what kind of catnip might be required to get faculty aligned.

A paper titled “Social Rewards Perceived By Faculty in Their Relationships With Administrators” provides an interesting look at just what kinds of interactions fall short in the eyes of professors …

Department chairs and deans who visit them in their offices periodically? Not important, said the bulk of professors surveyed for the study that was detailed in the paper. Deans who engage them in problem solving? Thanks, but no thanks, the professors said. What if deans or department chairs make an effort to know their families? That doesn’t really matter to faculty members either, the report says.

So department chairs, if you’re reading, here are some of the things that 90 percent or more of the respondents consider “important” or “extremely important”: Demonstrating respect for them as colleagues, showing appreciation for their professional abilities, considering them an asset to the department, respecting their opinion, responding to phone calls and emails in a timely manner, and understanding their scholarly interests.

Also important to professors: 85 percent of them want department chairs to hold them in high esteem, and, in a nod to collegiality, 77 percent said it’s important to be acknowledged by their department chair in passing.

Full article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://bit.ly/kWOwbi

Upon first reading, the study suggests that faculty simply want to be told how utterly fantastic they are ("Wow, you not only deserved tenure for your creation of transparent aluminum, but how about some box seats at Fenway!"). They want to be glorified (as in, "I absolutely get why your research on quantum entanglement is the most important research in the universe."). They want to be, like tech-savvy tweens, texted back immediately ("OMG! We will send someone to fix your leaking air conditioner immediately!")

Obviously, this is a very one-dimensional and inaccurate assessment of faculty at any institution. The study, alas, seems to celebrate a wrongheaded view of academia---the ivory tower of overprivileged intellectuals in need of constant ego-boosting.

I sent this excerpt to a group of our administrators as an FYI. Our former dean, Venkatesh "Venky" Narayanamuti, stopped by my office for a chat.

Ever wise he remarked, "You know, the study doesn't reveal anything that is all that surprising. What faculty really want is for someone to really listen to them. And even if just at a surface level, have a basic understanding of what they are doing."

That, he said, goes a long way toward earning their trust---critical when difficult decisions need to be made and even more critical in an age of interdisciplinary buildings (and mindsets) where the rules are always shifting to keep up with research that has no natural boundaries.

While I cannot think of one right now, we need a new non-cat metaphor for leading faculty at 21st century research universities.

For the turner-of-phrase, fame surely awaits.