I had a moment in my career where my heart really thrilled in thinking about institutional design in academia.
I loved thinking about possible future colleges built on very different structures or premises than current institutions.
I enjoyed sketching out radically different instructional designs, new configurations of divisions and disciplines, new forms of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary teaching.
I avidly followed news of new institutes, centers and projects at other institutions.
I proposed ideas for similar programs quite seriously and in two cases, got involved in successful launches of new initiatives. And I doodled out program and institute ideas in a more “hey, here’s an idea that’s not going to happen but let me throw it out there just for conversation’s sake” spirit on my blog and elsewhere.
For example, Swarthmore’s Board of Managers called for radical proposals for programs build around environmental studies and climate change and I threw out a wild blueprint for something like a separate “honors program” where students would apply in their sophomore year to join a radically integrative problem-based environmental curriculum that would use college infrastructure and the surrounding community as a lab space and where the instructional faculty would include staff in Facilities, Environmental Services, Dining Services, and Finance, where each class in the program would make a major proposal for infrastructural change and would apprentice with faculty, staff and outside experts and contractors to build and implement the change.
And then I stopped. I didn’t just stop proposing things, I suppressed the desire to propose things, even as a genre of not-really-serious thought experiment. I started feeling stupid and bad every time I even thought about institutional design as a subject. Why?
Some of that change is because I work closely with a number of people whom I respect who find that tendency of mine irritating, distracting or just plain stupid. I talk with people in social media who share that opinion. That’s gotten inside my head; I can’t just blithely throw this stuff out any longer. I already feel stupider and stupider with each passing month: no need to accelerate that feeling.
I wouldn’t let that disapproval sink in if I didn’t see the sense of it. Honestly, in terms of proposing substantial alternatives to the status quo? My experiences have mostly been dissatisfying failures, whether I was seriously intent on pushing a change or just playing around.
What I’ve proposed is often so far off what faculty and administrators and students demonstrably want or seek that people generally can’t even be bothered to oppose or argue with what I’m doodling out in some document or essay. I once suggested a workshop where faculty in disciplines that have fieldwork methodologies meet with professionals in other lines of work who do fieldwork of some kind: market researchers, intelligence analysts, journalists, clinical social workers, police, etc. The academics involved were so puzzled by the basic idea that we couldn’t even talk about it. Why would you want to do that? And I admit I didn’t have much of an answer besides, “It might be interesting”. A lot of my thinking along these lines comes down to that: “Something good might happen! Who knows?”
Which is a failure in this genre, because what you’re pitching if you’re talking institutional design is something other people have to embrace and inhabit. Writing as a lone wolf who is just spitballing ideas is one thing if it’s describing a personal artistic manifesto or just acting in the role of a critic of the work of others. Institutions, on the other hand, are collaborative and collective. If you’re not even on the same page with the people who have to make them come to life and enact their mission, if you’re not starting from what institutions actually are in a tangible and recognizable way, there’s something powerfully futile about what you’re doing.
Or so it has come to seem to me when I catalogue some of the things I’ve tossed out there in public. I can see some of the sense of the ideas still—imagine what the idea would be like and feel that it would be good if it were real—but I can’t imagine that it is worth wasting anybody’s time and attention on those ideas, or distracting from the real business of incremental reform and governance.
Take the idea I had about what a next-generation environmental studies program could look like. I had colleagues who reasonably feared it would take away from focusing on the real resources that our existing program really needed. But also, come on: if anybody really tried to build it up, it would require intervening comprehensively in the baseline professional activities and aspirations of 15-25 staff and faculty. That’s not just a big price tag, it’s a huge responsibility. That’s the thing about most of the most extreme experimental colleges and new designs: anybody trying to build them with any seriousness would have to accept lifelong responsibility for the people who came to work there and committed whole-heartedly to this radical new program. When St. John’s College hires a new faculty member, they have to understand that to really embrace what they’re doing there, the new hire will have to leave other possible professional trajectories behind.
Even in the best case scenario, there’s a kind of narcissism involved in elbowing into a deliberative setting with a willfully improbable idea or proposal. We are all of us too exhausted by simply trying to make our existing assemblages and systems continue to function as well as they can to spend time moosing around with some off-brand blue-sky proposal that everyone can plainly see is impractical as well as conceptually contradictory.
The worst case scenario is when a faculty member or administrative leader is so determined to push a dramatic, far-reaching, transformative proposal through that they accumulate huge amounts of institutional power and resources to do so, and seek to emulate the style of certain corporate executives by retaining personal, individual control over the result in order to keep it tightly leashed to the originating vision. That’s how we end up with billionaire-designed Dormzillas and centers paid for by narrow ideologues, or less noxiously just little shell-programs and initiatives that are an ornament to the ego of a well-known local faculty member, as a minor reward for “entrepreneurial” activity.
The hubris underneath all of that is the same that pervades a lot of “design thinking”. It’s what my friend Thomas Malaby identified in his book Making Virtual Worlds, about Linden Labs, the producers of Second Life: that Linden believed that if you designed the underlying structures of a virtual environment properly, then the users of that environment would behave as you wished them to behave. The premise with institutions is often very much the same: if only we had the right structure for departments or curriculum or hiring or retention or diversity, everybody will do as they ought in their work and in their study. That is not just administrative hubris: some faculty and students are prone to it too in their way.
It’s not that design thinking in this sense is entirely wrong, either. The design of physical environments makes a difference: high ceilings and big windows create one kind of social and psychological disposition; featureless small rooms with no windows another. A major which is punishingly difficult and prescriptive for no defensible or articulated reason has all sorts of negative effects; a departmental curriculum that is a wildly eclectic assortment of random electives also has negative effects on many students. All of us are concerned with tinkering with institutional designs, material and infrastructural, for good reason.
And sometimes you find on sketching out a pretty radical vision that already real somewhere else. I doodled up a “21st Century College” in my own head and I put block learning in it, and hey, Colorado College does that already. I made it so students identified a problem that interested them on arriving and built a curriculum around that, and hey, the College of the Atlantic and a few other institutions do that too.
But design thinking at the level of sketching out imaginary programs, imaginary structures, entire non-existent institutions, invites the designer to think of themselves as an observer in a duckblind, an experimenter letting mice loose in a maze, an olympian figure looking down from a great height on scurrying mortals. Aspirant Corbusiers don’t tend to think of themselves as living in what they’re building. When you play SimCity, the basic perspectival starting place is: you don’t live there yourself. You aren’t going to be dealing at a basic everyday level with what you sketch out or build.
I once posted an outline of a course that I thought would be the perfect example of a multidisciplinary liberal arts course taught with a variety of methodologies and tools. I later spotted an actual professor teaching it, to my chagrin, because they didn’t have the range of perspectives needed or an understanding of what I had in mind. Someone picked up an institutional idea that a colleague of mine and I once advocated and they brutally repurposed it in a narrowly instrumental way that missed the entire point. I wished I’d never said anything about it. But that’s the problem: you’ve got an idea in your head that needs to be just so? Either you scheme for the power to force it on people (at which point they’ll all just redesign it and subvert it from the inside) or you persuade people that the just so version is the best in every way—and you can only do that if that version is already in their heads too, already visible to them in some way, already something they wanted and were thinking about. Or you just do it yourself—and if it turns out you also aren’t qualified or capable of doing it, what the hell were you doing designing it for someone else?
There are great projects that add new initiatives and programs at existing institutions. We’ve had quite a few created at Swarthmore since I’ve been here—the Lang Center, the Summer Scholars Program, the Student Academic Mentors (and other peer mentor programs), and yes—immodestly, perhaps—I think that the Aydelotte Foundation is another good addition. Most colleges and universities I know have added programs in this fashion to good effect. It takes a lot to get something like that started, and it adds a lot when it succeeds. People should keep doing that.
That’s about additions around the edges and margins, though. The thing is that we don’t really need innovative, creative, novel, comprehensively alternative designs for the central structures of academic work and academic institutions, however tempting it is to doodle them in the margins of our own professional lives. (And I am still tempted.)
If I’ve stopped indulging that pull, it’s not just because I feel regret for past indulgences of it. It’s because we know what academia really needs in terms of design: it needs better conditions of labor, it needs to end its reliance on adjunctification, it needs to comprehensively reverse the role of credentialism in creating accelerating inequality, it needs new kinds of relationships to surrounding neighborhoods and communities, it needs to revive its own traditions of democratic deliberation and consultative planning. Public universities need to be funded as a major priority of a free and equitable society, and student debt needs to be dramatically reduced.
Those are not priorities that require exotic alternative modes of design thinking. Most of them we already know how to do because we either used to do them or because they are problems of (relatively simple) reallocation of the resources we already have within the institutions we already have built. Design thinking and its not-so-hidden companions—the “disruption” of ed-tech, the construction of new modes of managerial authority, the acceleration of contingency—are often a way of sliding around what ought to be done, what needs to be done, to some appearance of doing something so that leaders and managers seem to be leading and managing.
Image credit: "Unidentified persons and architectural model" by Stanford Medical History Center is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0