Space Invaders

Invaders from space or invaders of space?

In the classic video game Space Invaders, alien troops march ever closer to the ground.

The only hope to hold back the marching marauders is a single ship with a bevy of bullets.

While the idea for the quarter-eater was a classic sci-fi scenario, invaders from space, I think another meaning is more literal, as in the invading of space.

The fight over space is something anyone who works and lives on a university campus is all too familiar with. There is never enough, especially on historic campuses that are rubbing shoulders with bustling local communities like Cambridge and New Haven.

Clever administrators, however, seem to always find a way to grow. Cornell, Columbia, NYU are all expanding their acreage in one of the densest places on earth. Boston University went up and out to turn a once confusing urban campus into a coherent whole. Harvard Law School erected what many affectionately call Lil' Yankee Stadium on Mass Ave. And Harvard still has Allston in the wings.

But ... who needs space when you have cyberspace?

With the advent of edX and other online learning platforms, the virtual has become the new veritas. Faculty and students can now float in the endless cloud.

And yet, physical space matters---perhaps now more than ever. Space may be what keeps the traditional college and university relevant in the age of the Khan Academy and god forbid, Harvard [or insert any university].com.

At a SEAS faculty meeting Provost Alan Garber made that very point. To paraphrase, he said: We now have to work a lot harder to justify the added value that we bring to higher learning. If we can't do that, we are in real trouble.

So, on this grand Harvard Commencement day, let's give some space to space.

The campus, leafy and luxurious or cinderblocky and cramped, is a sacred place.

The built environment is meaningful. Places communicate. Roofs, walls, and floors all provide cues that help us define where we are and how we are supposed to think and feel. They tell us what a space is for and what is to be expected. To use a concept from the theater, they provide a "set" for our behavior. Buildings tell us how we are supposed to act. ("Engaging Edifices," by Chad Hanson, Chronicle of Higher Education)

10 Akron St. was called “the single most beautiful building or other structure”
recently built in metropolitan Boston.

In short, the college campus is a more than a set decoration, especially at some of the country's most beautiful institutions.

Even graduate housing, can be elevated and elegant, as in the case of 10 Akron St. in Cambridge.

“We partnered with architect Kyu Sung Woo to create a simple but elegant building suited to its prominent location along the Charles River,” said Lisa Hogarty, vice president of Harvard Campus Services. “Contemporary and highly sustainable, this building also respects the architectural traditions of Harvard and the neighborhood surrounding it. We are honored by this award and delighted to count 10 Akron St. among the most beautiful buildings in Boston.”

When stuck with older or often antiquated buildings, novel design is still possible.

The old WGBH studio, likely built in the 1950s/60s and recently taken over by Harvard, was converted into the Innovation Lab for the entire University and "hive" classrooms for the Business School.

Say "Hi" to the i-Lab.

Harvard Business School is buzzing. In part, it’s because students are working in “hives,” new circular, collaborative workspaces. But also because the hives are part of a radical rethink happening here—of everything from the storied school’s established curriculum, its pedagogy, student profiles, and outcomes, to its brand identity and physical spaces. Inspiration for the hives, for example, comes from a company founded by Harvard’s most famous dropout--they have “the look and feel of Facebook’s offices,” Dean Nitin Nohria (left) tells Fast Company.

At SEAS, we converted part our library, situated on the top floor of a 1901 building, into a flexible classroom.

Pierce 301 features an "everything on wheels" approach.

Facebook isn't the only way to be social

Building 20 at MIT, a temporary structure with eternal impact.

Building 20 at MIT, the asbestos filled claptrap (now long gone) has been hailed as an exemplar of how a temporary, low-cost space, garnered with the right attitude/philosophy (as in, smashing a bunch of brilliant people together) can lead to amazing collaborations. You don't need fancy to promote friendships.

The ever prolific Jonah Lehrer riffs on building intellectual collaboration in a New Yorker article.

Nevertheless, Building 20 quickly became a center of groundbreaking research, the Los Alamos of the East Coast, celebrated for its important work on military radar. Within a few years, the lab developed radar systems used for naval navigation, weather prediction, and the detection of bombers and U-boats.

Event better, a Harvard researcher has a study that supports the notion that creating close knit quarters promotes great work:

A few years ago, Isaac Kohane, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, published a study that looked at scientific research conducted by groups in an attempt to determine the effect that physical proximity had on the quality of the research ... Once the data was amassed, the correlation became clear: when coauthors were closer together, their papers tended to be of significantly higher quality. The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart.

Tours are still tops

Campus tours remain the single most important factor in influencing where a student ends up applying and ultimately going to college. So said a colleague in the Harvard College Admissions Office.

As a school which just started a new college tour, we found out that folks really want to know where they would potentially be living, thinking, and playing. No one asks the guides, "What are the online learning options like?"

Instead, they want to go inside, poke around, see the labs, and the guts of the entire institution. The broader lesson here is that, as communicators, we need to convey how our spaces promote learning, collaboration, and build character. And if your audiences cannot "visit" or access certain spaces, you need to find way to bring them inside anyway.

Harvard did a brilliant thing when it sent photographers into all of the Houses (which are strictly off limits to anyone but those who live there) and showed all the cool hidden spaces, like a basement printing press and a sunken theater.

The university in the city, or in Harvard's case, the square that completes the circle

Even the the most rural higher education institutions do not exist in isolation. Space includes the space in and around the campus.

Middlebury, a liberal arts school in Vermont, takes advantage of nearby farms.

Harvard has the Square. Harvard Square, from the T-stop to the Out of Town News stand, is the first thing that visitors encounter before they step foot onto the Yard.

At the University of Wisconsin, the worked with the city to create an entirely new entryway to the campus, what the New York Times called "a 7-block front door."

University Square added density and activities to an area that was really underutilized,” said Susan A. Springman, a senior project manager at Mullins Group, a commercial developer in Madison and the former president of Executive Management when University Square was under development. “The project really made this area come alive because it complements what’s close by.”

Space, however much or little of it is available, marches on.

Coda

Out my window the campus is filled with capped-and-gowned individuals. The sound of bagpipes still punctuate the air. Families and friends are doing grab-and-grin shots. Hugs and high five are ubiquitous.

As I wrote a year or so ago, it's magic.

 At engineering schools, where we embrace technology and disruption, the classical campus matters. Design has to happen somewhere. Everyone oohs and ahhs over a 3D printer precisely because that CAD/CAM conversion into burnt plastic ends up as an object you can hold and handle.

As we look ahead 5 or 10 years, I think the goal is to have our cake and eat it too. In the era of Le Whif (breathable chocolate invented by one of our own faculty members), there's still nothing that beats a good, old fashioned, icing-laden confection.

Congrats to our grads and thanks for a great year.

Non-Disruptive Innovation: Part 2

Experiment Fund launch.

The aptly named Experiment Fund launched a week ago at Harvard.

With Facebook gearing up for its grand IPO, the timing was poetic.

The Fund, the brainchild of triple alum Patrick Chung from NEA, aims to encourage students to stay on campus and in Cambridge by providing early seed funding for innovations to help them through the "valley of death."

The founders of Tivli, a student (now alumni)-based start-up that aims to re-invent television, were the case study darlings at the launch.

Describing how they decked out their dorm room with tin foil and wiring, the scruffy duo seemed like a latter day version of the two Steves (Wozniak and Jobs, the founders of Apple). 

Zach Hamed, Nicholas Krasey, Ho Tuan, and you-know-who.

Tivli's Nicholas Krasney '09 and Ho Tuan '09 may hope to score the next billion dollar IPO, but you could tell from the way they spoke that the problem ('hey, wouldn't it be great if we could...') was the thing that drove them.

More than the money, the Fund is about cultivating risk, fostering the "Hacker Way" Mark Zuckerberg has been espousing, and making good-intentioned screw ups "okay" at an institution that finds it difficult to talk about failure.

In a thought-provoking op-ed in The Crimson Benjamin T. Hand ’12 wrote (a mere three days after the Experiment Fund launch) about failure:

What struck me most about all of this was the difficulty in talking about it with people at Harvard—even close friends. I don’t mean that I felt uncomfortable sharing it, about exposing my own ineptitude or disappointment: in fact, I almost always feel more comfortable sharing my failures than I do sharing my successes. Instead, I found that people at Harvard have difficulty holding a serious discussion about failure in the lives of our friends and classmates.

Dissecting this dichotomy (making failure safe/ensuring success) is at the heart of the future of this, and all, academic institutions.

Risk adverse education may be the real threat.

Cutting through the ivy, academic Neal Gabler (who knows Harvard first hand, as he served as a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School), provided an ironic take on the "one percent" that perpetuates the struggle many students face.

More, 1 percent education may make students risk-averse. Though educators are fond of saying you learn from failure, with today’s stakes, the best students know you cannot really afford to fail. You can’t even afford minor missteps. That is one of the lessons of 1 percent education: 1 percenters must always succeed.

As a Freshman adviser busy signing study cards in January, I had my own personal experience with the fear that students hold close. An undergraduate believed he would put himself at extreme risk by taking a course that appeared light or "not useful" (in this case, one on Japanese culture and anime).

He felt that future graduate programs and employers would view such an indulgence as a black mark on his record. I told him that if that ever were to happen to have the interested party call me and I would have it out with them.

Gabler had similar, more troubling moments at Harvard:

One of my student assistants at the Kennedy School, where I served a fellowship last semester, confessed to me that he and his classmates were constantly being told that they were the best of the best, which pressures them to prove it by pursuing the sorts of activities and research that wins honors. It is not only narcissism we have to worry about; it is solipsism ... In the end, 1 percent education is as much a vision of life as it is a standard of academic achievement — a recrudescence of social Darwinism disguised as meritocracy.

Is it realistic to propose countering such heady forces? A culture shift of a culture that has developed over nearly 400 years? As I mentioned in my last post, I think communications may play a large role in helping to promote a "third way." I also think this third way may also counter the gloom-and-doom predictions about the future of higher education. 

1. Institutions, especially those like Harvard, must own up to their own failures---and be open about experimentation. In annual reports, state-of-the-school speeches, and and in every day hallway conversations, say what's working, what's not working, and what could be better.

In an engineering school that is overhauling its curriculum, carving out every available space for new teaching labs, and growing with growing pains, this does happen. Not perhaps as much as it should---but it does happen.

Our dean routinely tells audiences that we need to do better in terms of advising and that along the way, we have made choices that have not always worked out. The eyes, however, always remain on the prize: putting students and teaching first.

2. Taking inspiration from student innovators, institutions must allow faculty and staff to experiment as well and launch things in a beta-state (and report on them!). Grand experiments like redesigning General Education are important, but are so massive and mission critical that when they are finally introduced they seem neutered rather than nuanced.

Harry Lewis gave a speech describing this Harvard's onerous process to launch the new General Education program:

We have taken too many decisions piecemeal. In the process we have inadequately disciplined our ambitions. We have also spent too much time securing our self-interests. It’s a shame, since the Task Force gave us a way of thinking about General Education that should have produced wonderful results for our students. Instead, we are going to relieve the pressure on ourselves to make hard choices by transferring that pressure to our students.

High fashion and high design at SEAS.

Contrast this to short-courses and programs during Wintersession, which are, to borrow a phrase from earlier, experiments. Students know this going in---and are okay with it!

They see, first hand, faculty taking risks and admitting that they do not know whether something will work. For communications professionals, this is a gold mine for stories.

At SEAS, we ...

• hosted a jDesign course with IDEO; 

• offered an introduction to aviation (something not taught here since the early 20th century);

• and provided an intensive look at sustainable biomaterials.

Design Preceptor Joe Zinter, who helped with the jDesign course, said it best:

For an engineering program, jDesign was pretty progressive. SEAS is pushing hard against the conventional engineering paradigm, and that's pretty rad.

One of the great things about Harvard's new middle term was that for the first two years, it was underfunded due to budget constraints. This put far less pressure on those wanting to create programs, and such an attitude has continued even as internal grants to create and support activities have increased.

For a winter project grand and, um, expensive, like Harvard Business School's field program that sent 900 MBA students around the world, it was still viewed as risky, experimental, and fluid.

The trips were also an experiment in HBS’s logistical capabilities. Sending 1,000 students, faculty, and support staff around the globe took the coordinated efforts of HBS Executive Education, external relations, legal and other administrators, and the School’s global research centers. While HBS prides itself on a robust alumni network, the task of finding enough global partners to help create 150 team trips required HBS to reach out and work with alumni on an unprecedented scale, Moon said. “We’ve had to use muscles we’ve never really had to use before,” she said. “In the process, we’re developing some different kinds of flexibility we’re just beginning to tap into. We’re inspired.”

3. In the age where sharing everything is the norm, institutions should be okay with crowdsourcing "raw" and direct assessments---via blogs, videos, etc.---and not over-varnishing everything.

Institutions fight hard to maintain their brands, especially when threats are on the horizon (online learning, for-profit higher education, and even calls by the current President to control skyrocketing tuition costs).

The Harvard brand flies above it all.

In turn, communications professionals, while well intentioned, often over edit to appease various audiences and stakeholders and provide institutional messages.

(You can always tell when you read those 'said a spokesperson' quotes how often they have been through the wash cycle.)

Given that even companies like Google and Facebook (both of which encourage their employees to be honest and unfiltered to speed innovation) spend money on internal and external communications to project a unified image, we cannot expect communications to be done solely by the crowd.

There is a middle ground. We can step back a lot more. First, make sure to highlight content that comes directly from students, faculty, and staff.

• BostonInno has run a fantastic series on student-innovation, written by students at Harvard.
• HBS, with its site redesign, is pushing out faculty blogs in a big way.
• Two students created a rap (note: foul language) dedicated to a professor.

Further, when producing and editing content, go for a light touch.

• Watch the jDesign video. While roduced by the SEAS Communications Office (the voice of the school), the piece is focused on letting the students/faculty tell the story.

It may be unrealistic to expect that by being more open with communications on risks, experiments, and failures that institutional culture change will ensue, but it is a start.

Doing nothing or remaining too scared to talk about truth with a little 't' may leave an institution, in the words of Richard DeMillo so "trapped by tradition and culture that they are unable to act to save themselves from economic and political forces that are reshaping other institutions."

In our case, one of the best pieces of publicity we have had in many years was from a student interviewed by the Boston Globe.

“It’s really a different environment from when Zuckerberg was here," Hamed said. “He was working with his roommates in his dorm room; I’ve been able to work with an innovation lab. I’ve talked to venture capitalists; I’ve looked at term sheets. I have office space and people to work with. “If Zuckerberg were here today, I bet he would have stayed a little longer,’’ he said.

One could see this as a "diss" about how Harvard used to be. As alumni like to point out "there was nothing wrong with my education, so why must you always insist on saying that it needs to be transformed!" Point taken.

Instead, I think Hamed's quip should be seen as a testament to the University's willingness to embrace change---and change led from the bottom up, by students---while still remaining Crimson at its core.

Even Harvard's E.O.Wilson has an iPad with his book on it.

After all, I think any higher education institution would be okay with being seen as "gutsy", "bold", or "daring" --- if it was all about improving its rock-steady commitment to education and research.

Deep down, everyone harbors a secret desire to be seen like Apple. Ever-entrepreneurial and super cool.

Such soul searching in higher education could bring on an existential crisis. Let's change everything! We are under attack!

Yet, not all innovation has to be completely disruptive, simply thoughtful and honest---and shared.

Naader “Naad” Banki and Steven Gagliano, seniors at the University of Southern California, wrote an editorial for the Washington Post that everyone with a connection to higher ed should heed.

Today’s university culture places too much of a premium on accomplishments over true understanding. What fosters “true understanding”? To some extent, it requires awareness of oneself. But it also demands the ability to appreciate the ways in which one’s upbringing influenced and continues to contribute to the development of one’s identity. The mark of a true leader is the ability to employ a system of self-reflection, in order to learn from both successes and failures without feeling anchored by a sense of incompetence. As students in the modern sphere of academia, we are piloted by the necessity to know rather than the invitation to think and engage in introspective dialogue.

In the words of another innovator, the audience is indeed listening. We just need to make sure to put our heads to the ground before we speak.

Non-Disruptive Innovation: Part 1

"Centuries-old" scholar Abelard is hailed as a model teacher.

The flap copy (i.e., the folded portions of the jacket on a print book---remember those?) for From Abelard to Apple by Richard A. DeMillo screams that higher ed institutions are "clinging precariously to a centuries-old model."

Egad!

Not your typical policy wonk, former university administrator, or staunch DoH or DoLA (defender of the humanities/defender of the liberal arts), DeMillo is a computer science prof and former center director at Georgia Tech. He even has industry experience under his belt, having served as the first-ever CTO at Hewlett-Packard. So in short, he's got the kind of cred to make one take notice.

"Disruption is important, but even more important is why some schools make good choices and why others seem so trapped by tradition and culture that they are unable to act to save themselves from economic and political forces that are reshaping other institutions," he said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. 

Clayton Christensen's portend that disruption is coming to the groves of academe has everyone passing around magic elixir fix-it-alls. More online learning! Greater emphasis on outcomes! Zeroing-in on the essentials (and less on new gyms, luxury dorms, and organic dining options). Even presidential hopeful Mitt Romney took time out to praise for-profit higher learning (before investigating the price tag or outcomes).

A once college is now a state park.

By contrast, DeMillo offers no single remedy. Instead, he suggests that all higher educational institutions, especially those in the messy middle (not big state U's or the top Ivy or Ivy-like places), clearly define their value proposition---or be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Good news for all of us in public relations, as we have been telling our deans and presidents about the need to better define our respective value propositions for years... through better marketing!


And yet, we must admit that we always need something new and exciting to tout, and often look with envy at our corporate world counterparts and their constant roll out of shiny new products.

By contrast, many institutions of higher learning appear old and unchanging. With those fancy iron gates around the quads and yards (easily spotted where I work), some campuses even appear proudly aloof---and that may not always be a bad thing (a nod to former Harvard president and DoH or DoLA supreme Derek Bok).

An alumni survey done about a decade ago, however, revealed that Harvard most reminded its graduates, in terms of its willingness to change, as akin to the Vatican.

Good news. A lot has changed in the past ten years---and even more in the past five.

“It’s really a different environment from when Zuckerberg was here,’’ Hamed said. “He was working with his roommates in his dorm room; I’ve been able to work with an innovation lab. I’ve talked to venture capitalists; I’ve looked at term sheets. I have office space and people to work with. “If Zuckerberg were here today, I bet he would have stayed a little longer,’’ he said. (Boston Globe)

DeMillo doesn't suggest that universities are un-evolving or devolving a la Kurt Vonnegut's riot-fest Galapagos. What he has right is that higher education has continually changed over the centuries and decades.

They now support a good portion of the R&D in this country. Have some of the world's best museums. Amazing libraries (even now). And so on. Moreover, the sheer variety of American higher educational approaches (from co-op programs to great book programs to online only) is, in fact, utterly astounding.

So what's the problem? DeMillo is worried that the market will no longer tolerate such variety, especially as cheaper (as in the free Khan Academy) or alternative programs (like badges instead of degrees) begin to dig in. Unless an institution can show value-add (amazing teaching, dynamic learning, great job placement, value for $, etc.) its once beautiful campus may end up as a park.

He doesn't want market forces to do to the majority of colleges and universities what they did to Polaroid, Blockbuster, and Barnes & Noble. They need to get ahead of the curve---STAT!

The top 1% (to borrow a popular phase) have already gotten the hint and are enjoying a grand head start.

"Where are the daring experiments? They are at places like MIT and Stanford. The ability to set your own agenda is a powerful advantage for the elite colleges. Truly innovative universities will do the best in the long run, and you have to get a lot of ideas on the table. The elites seem to be the ones that are most interested in doing that." (Inside Higher Ed)

Want specific examples? MIT's Open Courseware. The online AI course for everyone and for credit at Stanford.

Those are big ticket experiments. They make the news and make their respective institution's publicity shops grin from ear-to-ear.

Even students applaud such moves.

Mr. Nguyen [who enrolled in Stanford's AI course tells Wired Campus that he is a big fan of the online lecture format, however. “I think this is the future of education,” he says. (Chronicle of Higher Education).

DeMillo is more reserved, saying he doesn't know what the future will look like, but that higher ed leaders have to strive to not be bested by it. The real changes, he hints, will not actually be at the 1% elite institutions---which will be pretty much be fine no matter what happens.

Sure, the ivies and tech institutes will influence everyone else as they plunge into online learning, unveil innovative classrooms, and design truly global experiences. That will likely be positive (as the push for diversity and financial aid has been) and help raise many boats.

Yet, the lauded institutions that seem to be the most daring are, in fact, the most risk averse. When thinking about innovation they are only able to conceive of it on a grand, massive scale equal to their intellectual heft. Meaning, they tend to invest in endeavors they are fairly certain will be successful.

Under his guise of gloom and doom DeMillo actually has a message of hope: the middle-tiered institutions may very well be the places where the grandest experiments arise---out of necessity.

Innovation enabler Paul Bottino suggests small yet wild experiments.

Paul Bottino, who runs the Technology and Entrepreneurship Program at Harvard (TECH), based at SEAS, has long advocated that the big league schools should be the ones that help foster an environment of experimentation.

One that could have a true trickle down effect.

By focusing too much on grand gestures, however, they miss out on the iterative and incremental steps that ultimately fuel true innovation.

He recently said: Why can't places like Harvard be more like the idea incubators and try a bunch of ideas on a small scale? They have zero risk!

Engage alumni (one of the biggest assets of any institution) in brand new ways. Create specific social networks that open up knowledge. Rethink the lecture (as our own Eric Mazur is already doing). Try out short, wacky course ideas.

Encourage the kind of thinking in and outside the classroom that is okay with failure.

As I will explore in Part 2, communications professionals have a role to play in all of this.

In addition to pushing out the cleaned-up, positive releases about amazing accomplishments, PR pros might want to consider writing pieces that celebrate the kinds of experiments that, metaphorically, blew up the lab.

At Harvard, we have a natural place to start. J.K. Rowling's 2008 Commencement Address (one of the most downloaded items from the Harvard servers several years running).

The title: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination."

Show and Tell

It's the end of the semester at Harvard.

Classes are over. Exams are done or soon to be done. The calming rush to the break has begun. Even the weather, once strangely Floridian, has surrendered to cold, usual habits.

A delicious demo at the Science & Cooking Fair.

At SEAS, each day brings yet another fair (your pick of elegant programming or pasta 2.0); exhibition (innovations like email you can squeeze or cable TV right on your laptop), or end of class project demo (racing ATVs powered by screwdriver motors or racing cell lines on a microfluidic track).

You might say that engineers like to show off.

Then again, demonstrating solutions, innovations, and engaging with an audience is part of the design process.

For the attendees the events are inspiring, fun, eye-opening, and sometimes overwhelming. Upon leaving the CS 50 fair---jam packed with students, squeeze balls, and heavy bass beats (and several costumed angry birds)---many felt as if they had just left a late night club on Landsdowne street.

I wouldn't want to be that egg.

During the fray of back-to-back expos, I myself tasted egg free garlic aioli; learned about a smart course/concentration selection tool that takes dumb data and transforms into useful intelligence; delved into the inner workings of a new, safer cranial drill; and met Lit majors who built Andoid apps and biologists who created online anatomy tools.

In the words of our dean, that we are attracting concentrators from all fields is downright "cool."

After each showcase, I heard a similar refrain from friends and colleagues who had the chance to peak into the inner workings of active learning: "I would love to take that class!"; "I want to see even more---let me know when anything else is coming up."; "I mean, wow, this is not the same Harvard of even five years ago."

These reactions---for a field that most high school students know almost nothing about ("Intel survey of teenagers shows that they don't know what engineers do, limiting from choosing those careers.") may suggest that we are winning the war on scientific and engineering literacy.

It's a good, if not great, start---but only a start.

The fairs, after all, only show a part of the inner workings of engineering and the applied sciences. The latter elements (especially the applied sciences) are harder to get your hands around.

At Harvard, we pride ourselves on our distinguished history of basic science and theory. Soil mechanics. Radio. NMR. Environmental modelling. The mechanics of cracking and breaking.

Even theoretical physics can be fun.

Today, a good number of our faculty remain committed to teasing out the limits of applied math (modeling how a flower grows and forms); rethinking common concepts like the stability of emulsions; or bending and twisting the laws of physics.

However impressive and important, these are not the easiest findings to display and play with (let alone write about).

When reporting on more theoretically-minded findings, a common joke in the SEAS Communications Office is that the following line will inevitably have to be invoked: "To achieve the breakthrough the team conducted some very sophisticated modelling."

Meaning, if we went into the details, the amount of math we would need to show and terms we would need to define would be harrowing.

The challenge of making theory tangible brings to mind a fantastic editorial by Bruce Wightman, "A Better Rationale for Science Literacy."

I think there may be a better reason that science literacy should be a major component of higher-education curricula. There is something transcendent about studying science. The humanities and social sciences, for the most part, concern themselves with the creations of human beings, our behavior, or the structure of our societies. In contrast, the sciences force us to confront the smallness and irrelevance of human beings; they serve as an antidote to self-obsession. Physics teaches us that time and matter are not absolutes; biology, that astonishing complexity can arise from a long, natural, stepwise process. The scope and existential implications of these ideas are immense.

Yes ... a lot of engineering is hands-on, touchable, and even tasteable---and by being so, it readily inspires. At the same time, to get to those apps and neat demos, required a lot of theory, wild physics, and all the intangible things that don't fit well in a display. They too are vital.

Equally emphasizing theory is also an anecdote to those worry that too much emphasis on engineering (a practical science) means that we are taking away from the traditional values of academia, or learning for its own sake.

In A Crimson article about the Occupy Harvard movement, alum and journalist Christopher Hedges sounded the warning cry:

In his speech, Hedges stressed the importance of the liberal arts education and expressed concerns about the increasing focus on science and technical fields at Harvard, saying that Harvard has begun to transform into 'a giant sort of engineering school with a few liberal arts courses.'

While he was way off base on his facts (engineering students comprise a mere 12% of the undergraduate student body), he and many others commit a far deeper error about engineering and the applied sciences. So much of their value comes from the quest to understand the way the world works, whether that has any practical import or not.

Wonder, it turns out, is reason enough to go exploring. And not just for ivory tower academics.

Mining on the moon may be a good reason to raise taxes.

When asked to explain why he would spend tax dollars on mining minerals on the moon, Newt Gingrich gave a savvy, yet sensitive response.

Just as the moon shot inspired him as a kid, he too wanted to inspire today's kids to go into science and engineering by giving them a grand, seemingly impossible challenge.

In an era where jobs, taxes, and the economy rule, the idea that a fiscal conservative would appeal to knowledge for is own sake was, well, amazing. And so, bravo!

In the coming years, more fairs that allow the Harvard community and the public to get their hands around engineering will likely debut. That's fantastic.

At the same time, we should not forget the quieter, less showy aspects that fuel discovery. Back to Wightman:"But first and foremost, they should become scientifically literate because, to borrow Darwin's phrase, "there is grandeur in this view of life."

Idealism, it turns out, is absolutely compatible with innovation.

Higher Things

Food stuff in the form of an ethereal, but very real foam.

"And... we also make things. Create stuff. You know, physical objects."

That quip came out of a white-board enabled conversation about defining Harvard. In fact, I said it and my colleague at the design school immediately seconded the notion.

As mentioned in prior posts, institutions grounded in the liberal arts, even those with heavy research components, become addicted to high-minded gerunds like: educating leaders; creating the next generation of thinkers; pushing the boundaries; facilitating innovation; advancing knowledge; making the world a better place; empowering change.

All are aspirational and even inspirational ideals. All are also very abstract---and not the easiest to hone in on analytically.

In her baccalaureate address of 2011, Harvard President Drew Faust said:

The original mission of Harvard was to inculcate goodness. As I have said before, 'veritas' was not value-neutral. It came with ethical underpinning, designed to help you ask the questions 'What do I truly value? How do I want to live my life?' The world you face is daunting, and it is uncertain. Charting a course is hard. But you are well prepared — with the analytic spirit, the capacity for questioning and for judgment, and the habits of mind your education has given you these past four year.

Of course, Harvard does not have a lock on the categorical imperative---others too seek universal truths. 

• "Seeking solutions. Educating leaders. This is our mission." - Stanford
  
• "... teaching tomorrow's thought leaders to learn to think otherwise, care for others, and create and disseminate knowledge with a public purpose." - Cornell

• "... creating new knowledge and conveying the knowledge we have to the next generation" - Columbia

The above statements are all taken from campaign materials. Campaigns are the time when institutions dust off their missions and apply a bit of modern touch-up paint.

Alas, the 2.0 versions all end up sounding not all that dissimilar from the 17th and 18th century rhetoric: training and sending out an enlightened individuals [clergy, at that time] to espouse their teachings.

They don't call it the ivy league for nothing.

What's missing from these missions is the corporeal nature of knowledge.

Of course, you may predict that I will say engineering, is the missing link. (And I must happily admit my bias.)

At SEAS, after all, we have a dean who likes to say, "We build cool stuff!" 

Robots, cranial drills, novel materials, water filters, quantum dots, cancer vaccines, smart cities, nanowires, solid oxide fuel cells, and even social networks (oh my!).

The same "thing"-ness applies for the design school, as architects aren't just in the planning business, but in the building business.

Yep.That's a lot of engineering "stuff."

GSD Dean Dean Mohsen Mostafavi wrote, "Rethinking the conventions of design practice is, for us, an optimistic and essential project, undertaken with the knowledge that our efforts make a difference in the physical environment."

As much as I would enjoy having design and engineering at the heart of a future campaign, the 'physical environment' and 'cool stuff' applies equally across the Yard---and thus should be reflected in whatever bright-eyed messaging Harvard ends up using.

Here are a few examples:

• Campuses and structures matter (just ask those currently Occupying Harvard.) Ivy, after all, is the physical manifestation of elite education and of higher education in general. With the pending disruption of online, in-your-pajamas education, I think it is important that colleges and universities hold on to their enclaves, celebrate them as a distinct attribute.

• Books and collections are physical. Even now. Famed author John Updike, a Harvard alum, gave his collection to the archives. "Updike had wanted to know that the outward signs of his literary ardor—decades of handwritten drafts, typescripts, galleys, and research files—would survive him."

• The environment and sustainability---whether setting global policies or inspiring 'green' behaviors---are inextricably bound with the earth, sky, and ocean---and those seven billion people "consuming" the planet.

• Economics is the study of stuff (people's stuff). Adam's Smith's pin factory may know make iPods---but the theory remains the same. When we lose sight of the human nature of economics, things like the financial crisis happen, as abstraction replaces common sense (and well, decency).

• Educators, like those trained at the Ed School, end up in cities, towns, and in real live classrooms. The where of learning in such cases, matters almost as much as the what being taught.

Other examples abound.

Thus, even if we do not put engineering and design into the mix, we should not view education and knowledge as primarily ethereal.

Knowledge, even the most abstract, ends up landing somewhere and taking shape. Choices, even the well-educated ones of Harvard's alumni, eventually become manifest.

To build a better Harvard---and dare I say a better world---requires the stuff for dreams.

Are We Reaching: Part 2

Students lit up when they saw the LED t-shirts for Harvard's 375th.

In the last post, we asked how do you reach students?

As written about in earlier posts, often colleges and universities are so caught up in reaching prospective students they forget about the ones they have right in their own hallways.

The up-front lesson worth remembering: current students influence prospective students (far more than we do) and current students go on to be alumni (and they take their experiences with them).

I have heard stories from our own alums to the effect of: "Wow, I really had no idea about all the resources available to me! We had a career office? Really?" Or, something akin to: "Trying to find out what was going on or how to say, do summer research, was nearly impossible."

That's where good communication comes in.

A warning in advance. What follows is one of those lists that many might say, well duh, I already know all of this. If that is the case, then think of it as a check-up. If you are doing all of these things, how might you do them better? Or how might you obtain some analytics to do an assessment? 

On a practical level, how do you get the messages (often which are important, exciting, useful) through all the clutter without becoming part of the clutter?

• Email still works. Yes, email---the original killer app for the Internet is still going strong. Good email lists also still matter. Even in the age of spam, people still like being invited to something and knowing about things (even if they have no desire to attend). Be sure to edit and prune the lists constantly. HTML email can be great, but it should be used thoughtfully and not to the detriment of the most vital information. (A personal pet peeve is when dates, times, and locations are nearly impossible to find among all of the graphics and photos.) 
• Formal invitations mean more. While used more rarely these days, as above, folks still like getting invites, especially more exclusive ones (say from the dean, president, or other VIP). Whether it is via Paperless Post or actual paper, don't underestimate the power of old school communication methods.
  
• Posters merit pausing. Yes, the kinds that are stapled, taped, and hung all around campus. Very 1980's for sure. People really do stop and stare for a moment, if not longer. Some of the more attractive posters are even "stolen." (Trust us on this.) There's something about physical reminders and paper in particular that soothes the overactive mind.
  
• Videos can encourage engagement, but may not be worth the investment. If the video is necessary to "show" the nature of the event, provide instructions, the resource of an office, or explain a benefit, then the effort might make sense. If it is yet one more channel, think hard before getting the camera out of the case. I think the promo for Harvard Thinks Big is good example along with course trailers.
  
• Group outings encourage attendance. People like to go to things with other people. People like knowing "who will be there." Finding ways to create and support affinity groups is essential to good attendance or participation in an activity. It's a friendly form of peer pressure. After all, just as no one wants to go to see a bad movie alone, few want to attend an event or visit a new lab without someone else to share in the excitement.
  
• One-on-one marketing connects. Who doesn't enjoy someone taking the time to say, "Hey, I think you might enjoy this. Or have you seen this fantastic opportunity---it would be perfect!" Caring is truly sharing. Folks in communications can facilitate this or suggest that others reach out in person.
  
• If the dean (or president) deems it important, they will come (or submit an application, etc.). While when used in excess you can fall into the trap of always calling wolf, is something is critical or vital to the institution, then pull out the big guns.
  
• Door-to-door soliciting isn't always annoying. I admit to rustling people up prior to an event or activity to ensure attendance. Someones people are so locked into what they are doing they need a jolt to snap out of it and, yes, attend an info session on future careers in aviation.
  
• Web 2.0 technologies are fantastic. And yet, they are simply one more channel, not necessarily a replacement of existing methods or a good indicator of attendance.
  
• Communications cultures vary. At Google, they place daily single page print newsletters with useful information in all of the bathrooms (on the backs of stalls and right above urinals).
• Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Everyone complains about getting too many emails, e-letters, and so on. People complain even more when they don't receive information. 

On a philosophical level, how do you deal with what author Barry Schwartz calls the "paradox of choice."

• Become a human filter. Editors still matter. How you rank activities and choices on a website or even on physical signs sends very powerful messages. Work with fellow administrators (and students!) to figure out what is truly valuable. In addition, use analytics (sometimes on the fly) to drive attention to something that is not gaining visibility or to help determine what is working well.
  
• Use a self-selecting filter. The students in CS50 developed an event calendar that pulls from all calendars across Harvard. http://events.cs50.net/

• Same bat time, same bat channel. When possible, keep a series of talks, activities, open houses, etc. at the same time and location. It makes it easier to remember and also means you have to do less work to remind people. Common hours (or free periods) are also valuable in this regard.
  
• Go to the audience. Consider announcing a new thing or new activity prior to class starting, a large-scale meeting, or in one where you hope those attending will spread the news. I give a lot of credit to the new director of the Harvard Innovation Lab for visiting students directly in their houses (i.e. dorms) to present all of the programs on offer.
  
• Declare a snow day. If an event, activity, or say grand opening of a new building, is mission-critical, then tell everyone that they essentially have the day off for the purpose of attending the activity. In retrospect, as much as the 375th Celebration of Harvard was a wonderfully wet experience, I keep speculating what would have happened if they just would have had it mid-day, cancelled classes and other activities, and just let people hang out and celebrate.

• Reward (or require) attendance. The carrot and stick model can be effective. I recall having to go to some external talks as part of a course. The professor would say, "Given that we are studying the collapse of the Soviet Union and that the world leading expert on the matter is giving a talk tonight, I require you to go. Yes, it will be on the exam."
  
• What you think is great, they might not think is great. I recently received several frantic phone calls from a colleague wondering why our students and faculty were not rushing to submit proposals for a collaborative research activity. Did I simply not send out the email? I did. I then was quite frank in explaining that the reward (see above) was way too low for people to want to engage---limited funding for projects they were likely already engaged in through other means. Too often universities create centers, initiatives, calls for proposals, etc. that replicate what is already happening on campus. Search for what is already out there before creating something new.
  
• Make it fun. Make it easy. Enough said. In an ideal world with infinite time, people truly would do x or attend y just for the sake of it. These days, a bit of "wow" or pizzazz goes a long way.

I will end with an anecdote.

These posters certainly connected with students.

In the 1990s administrators in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University faced a quandary.

A huge portion of the undergraduate population was majoring in business---to the great aggravation of other academic programs.

To combat the trend, the higher-ups hired a communications firm to create an internal advertising campaign directed at students to let them know about the world beyond Wall Street.

They came up with a tagline---Major In Liberal Arts and Sciences: Think for a Living---and a series of colorful, and often arresting ads.

THES ran an article about the novel campaign:

But rather than being applauded, the advertising campaign was met with scathing criticism inside and outside the school.

Students in other departments complained they were being portrayed as unthinking drones. The college was assailed by academics who sniffed that advertising was "below" it.

Do business majors not dream?

"A student who could be convinced to study arts and sciences because of a catchy slogan on a colourful banner would have to be the most weak-minded undergraduate ever admitted" to the university, said Daniel Pollyea, himself an arts and sciences major.

"There are obvious financial benefits for the college of arts and sciences to take on more students, but the fine line that once separated the academic world from blatant commercial and financial interests has been irreparably smeared."

Philip Gossett, dean of humanities at the University of Chicago, said the ads were slick and funny, but also offensive. "The ads won't fool anyone.

(From The Times Higher Education Supplement, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=145061&sectioncode=26%29)

The ads were quickly discontinued (not before, however, I requested a few of the posters to hang on my wall.)

If you work at a place where everyone does "think for a living" make sure to think very carefully about your approach to reaching your intended student audience.

Are We Reaching? : Part 1

Courtesy of Flickr user daveknapik

How do you reach students?

That sounds like some kind of existential or leading pedagogical question. A question that has been "answered" in movies like Mona Lisa Smile, Dead Poets Society, or the Great Debaters. To reach students just add an inspiring, yet stern lecturer who makes a connection; stand on a table and profess an uncomfortable truth; or in the case of where I work, rip a textbook in half and say, "don't be part of the heard."

(That last bit really happened, as part of a video on innovation at Harvard. A member of the engineering faculty really did cleave a book in two with his bare hands---a trick that was performed earlier at a Harvard Think Big talk by a computer science instructor. I promise, we really do like the printed page.)

On the other hand, watch The Social Network, and well, the solution to getting inside a student's digital soul is right there in the title.

In my line of work the question of how to reach students is, alas, quite literal: as in, how do you get students to find out about a new program in applied computational science, an event with the former president of India, an internship opportunity with Microsoft, or gasp, a policy on the proper use of the school's identity.

How do you get them to stop, drop, and not roll their eyes?

How do you get them to slow down their buzzing brains to let in a nanosecond of new information?

As a communications officer, you are besieged by daily requests to "help get the word out" or to "encourage your students to apply for great opportunity #1,853" or to "get the community to show their spirit and volunteer for marching in a parade!"

My office gets overwhelmed coping with the publicity; I cannot imagine how those on the receiving end of all of these urgent missives feel. Well, actually, part of my job is to try to figure out how to communicate with clarity under such constraints.

Illustration by Mark Todd.

Yet, wait. Aren't these the kind of multitasking, socially networked, over-programmed kids who can process ad infinitum? Can't they juggle knives and knowledge without being cut? Don't they drink from the fire hose of veritas?

In the New York Times, alum and book publisher James Atlas called them the Super People.

"It’s a select group to begin with, but even so, there doesn’t seem to be anyone on this list who hasn’t mastered at least one musical instrument; helped build a school or hospital in some foreign land; excelled at a sport; attained fluency in two or more languages; had both a major and a minor, sometimes two, usually in unrelated fields (philosophy and molecular science, mathematics and medieval literature); and yet found time — how do they have any? — to enjoy such arduous hobbies as mountain biking and white-water kayaking."

Of course, Atlas is describing a Super Person's ability to walk, talk, chew gum, and save the world all at the same time.

Such parallel processing also implies that these students can attend to vast amounts of information and well, attend lots of events---without reverting to information overload (as in the funny commercials for the Bing search engine.)



So what's one more thing? As I have mentioned in prior posts, an amazing aspect of Harvard (or any university for that matter) is its convening power.

In a given week we have more activities that any one person could even read about let alone show up for---even if aided by Hermione's Time Turner (a magical device that allows her to be in two place at once, primarily so she can take additional academic courses).

The activities are both internal (hosted by a school like ours), university-wide (like the 375h birthday party), or external (as in visits by heads of state). Moreover, for most students, all of these activities are in addition to their classes, clubs, and athletic activities.

I recall a late, great applied physics faculty member extolling my office for "putting out far too many event announcements"---as in, why do we possibly need to host so many colloquia given that there's no way to attend them all. He conflated our publicizing the events with us actually producing them.

In fact, at Harvard, every time you turn around you see yet another great lecture series on topic x. Every center, de facto, has its own series. Every department has several. Every school has hundreds if not thousands. And if you miss it, don't worry, you can watch it later online.

In addition to lecture series, each entity also now seems to have some kind of academic program even if they are not actually a school or have no way to grant a degree (a consortium, concentration, short-course, or a fellowship); a grants or awards program; and often an opportunity to tackle a given problem by just signing up!

Harvard, like many institutions of higher learning, reflects the Super People mindset. Some might say that such places, through the ever-increasing competitive admissions race, may have helped create the very Super People it now supports, and thus, is perpetuating the over-programming. In short, the snake bites its own tail again and again.

SEAS paraders at the 375th. Photo courtesy of Harvard Magazine.

For the 375th celebration of Harvard, for example, various deans and faculty were invited to multiple special events all at the same time (and often quite far apart, phyiscally). The response for how to deal with this dilemma was to, I kid you not, "think of it as a kind of pub crawl".

Our dean (and many others from what I heard) found this exasperating. Keep in mind, these are the kind of leaders that, by virtue of their roles, are inevitably overbooked.

I get the sense from the students that, each day, they face a very similar challenge of how to map out their days and nights.

As communications offices are, in part, there to help organize the chaos into something coherent for their various audiences, how can we become the best executive secretaries we can be and help ease the selection process or narrow down the choices?

I view this as a two-pronged issue.

• On a practical level, how do you get the messages (often which are important, exciting, useful) through all the clutter without becoming part of the clutter? In my day, we had a weekly printed publication of all of the events and activities at the college (all rendered in eye-harming 8 point type). If it wasn't in that publication, it wasn't happening on campus (or at least the students didn't want the administration know that it was happening.)
  
  
• On a philosophical level, how do you deal with what author Barry Schwartz calls the "paradox of choice." Too many choices is often worse than fewer ones, if not paralyzing. In a related book by Johah Leher, How We Decide, the author describes a scenario where he was so overwhelmed by the overwhelming selection of supermarket cereals that he clammed up and stood frozen in the isle for several minutes.

In my next posting, I will present some solutions.

In the meantime, if you want to feel dizzy, just check out the University calendar. I mean, wow. It's overwhelming in that cool kind of way---so much is happening all at once, all within a relatively concentrated space.

Maybe Harvard should borrow a popular tagline and apply it it itself: "To infinity and beyond."