On administration, vocation, and going over to the dark side

At least since 1977, it has been possible for faculty members to "go over to the dark side."  This phrase is always directed (in jest or in anger) toward former faculty members who have become administrators.  As such, it betrays a great deal about some faculty--that they see administrators as impediments to faculty governance, or as a sign of administrative bloat, or as highly compensated power-seekers, or simply as representatives of the meetings, task forces, committees, reports, studies, regulations, rules, and procedures that are the most visible manifestation of administrative work.

There is undoubtedly some truth (and falsity) in each of these characterizations.  But they miss what is a bigger temptation in administration--that upon going over to the dark side, one will gradually replace belief in something bigger than the institution with loyalty to the institution and the techniques that make it work.

I describe this as a temptation, because it is technique far more than power or regulation that provides pleasure and reward to administrators.  It is the ability to solve problems, to work out conflicts, to find funding, to enroll students, to entice donors, to serve the institution and make its infrastructure stronger that brings satisfaction.  And after a time, a good administrator develops an entire repertoire of tactics that get this stuff done.

Let me be clear--getting this stuff done is good work, and institutions without a good dark side are likely to be short-lived.  But let me be clear also that becoming a technocrat can erode one's sense of vocation, of filling a higher purpose in work.

Vocation erodes for three reasons.  (1) Administrative work is generally non-reflective, and as such one can go very far down a path without thinking about the path's meaning. (Note that I am not saying the path itself is bad, simply that it is unexamined.) (2) Administrative work is busy, and as such it creates an energy, a motivation, that emerges largely from activity, rather than from purpose.  (3) Administrative work lacks a way to act out a sense of vocation, and educational institutions rarely reward vocation in administrators.

Let me say a bit more about point number 3.  Earlier this summer, while taking my first week-long vacation since I became an administrator ten years ago (see points number 1 and 2 above), I read Chris Anderson's Teaching as Believing.  It is an incredible book and wise both about how learning takes place and how the professor's vocation aligns with that learning, even in a secular setting.  Anderson is a Catholic deacon and an English professor at a state university, and his effort to give meaning to academic freedom by bringing his sense of vocation into the classroom was inspiring.

I was hard-pressed, though, to imagine what a book with the same spirit as Anderson's, but written about administration, (call it Administration as Believing) might say.  It is certainly the case that many administrators act ethically because of a set of religious or philosophical commitments to what is right.  And it is true that religious institutions often bring the religion's faith commitments to bear on administrative practices.  But it is also the case that administration rarely feeds one's sense of vocation, which instead gets built outside of work, or through relationships that exist at work, but outside of the real work of the organization.

By saying all of this I mean simply to say that institutions and administrators would be better off if going over to the dark side did not mean slowly losing the sense that one's work was about both earthly things (solving problems, launching initiatives, etc., etc.) and things that have meaning outside and beyond the institution that sponsors it.  Faculty members and students are encouraged to seek that level of vocation.  Administrators ought to as well.

Higher education's impoverished talk about work

In my last post I suggested that higher education has failed to keep its talk (and action) about civic engagement up with the experience and needs of students.

We are similarly laggard in the way we talk about and treat work (I've made this point before).  On one level, this should be surprising, since a tremendous amount of public discussions in the past 5 years have been about the ability (or inability) of colleges to help students get better jobs.  But it is exactly that talk, done almost entirely by people who aren't students, that is the cause of our impoverished talk about work.

When you chat with students about work, this is what you hear:

1. Most of them are working, expect to work through college, and will then continue on in jobs, to be accompanied by periodic bursts of education while they are working.
2. Many of them are skeptical about the future of careers.  They aren't confident that their work lives will continue on a path, or that their jobs will build one on another to some sort of pinnacle of employment.
3. Their skepticism about careers frightens and frees them.  On the one hand, they fear that they will never be able to pay off student loans.  On the other hand, this means that they can select jobs that do not tie them down and that allow them to be creative.
4. Their hope, then, is that this work freedom will lead them to personal freedom.
5. Many hope that their freedom will help them to lead good lives, not lives of corruption and malfeasance, nor lives that are dominated by their jobs.

Put briefly, what students want, then, is not the sort of career guidance we give them (how to network, how to write a resume, how to interview, and access to big-name employers).  Parents want that.  What students want is work that has meaning.

Colleges and universities, especially secular ones, spend precious little time on making work meaningful.  Drop into your career center and you won't see workshops on vocation.  Go to an alumni event and you won't talk about right livelihood. Peruse campus jobs and you will see precious little about learning from work.  Look at the general education curriculum and you will see no guidance about how to think about work, in spite of the fact that we spend half of our waking lives doing it. Look at universities that explicitly serve working adults.  Lots of talk about job placement.  Little talk about the meaning of those jobs.

Again, as with civic engagement, it may be that students have moved well beyond us, and that they don't need our help to do this anymore.  But as with civic engagement, we are failing in our missions if we don't take work seriously. Learning from, through, and about work (or its analogue, discipline)  is, after all, the proper job of educational institutions.  If we aren't committed to it, then we aren't committed to our missions.

Third phase civic engagement and the mission of American higher education

Let me argue that we have entered a third phase of campus civic engagement, one which most campuses are unprepared to face.

Though nearly every type of college or university in the US was born with a civic mission, by the late 1950s, many had abandoned that mission for narrower, more private ones.

Phase one civic engagement emerged with the campus-based rebellions of the late 60s and early 70s.  It grew out of a critique of the higher education of the 1950s. That critique argued that colleges and universities were irrelevant unless they escaped the thrall of the powerful and reactionary. Instead, they should be sources for the creation of a just, egalitarian society. Though phase one grew out of student rebellion, its main supporters were faculty, who through the 70s and 80s built the intellectual apparatus that supports civic engagement--fields of research dedicated to understanding and overturning oppression and pedagogy that favors active or experiential learning.

Phase two adopted the pedagogy and theory of phase one, and adapted it to the civic landscape of the late 80s and 90s.  Its thrust was institutional, and its goal was to build an infrastructure--centers, journals, conferences, and organizations--to embed service-learning and civic engagement into the life of the college.  If phase one had been built on faculty members' desires to bring about radical change in politics, phase two grew out of staff and administrator desires to change students, who in the narrative of phase two civic engagement tended to be traditional full-time students who were disengaged from civic life and from learning.  Service-learning thus became a tool to get students engage in learning by engaging in the community.  Community leaders, who might have blanched at the theoretical radicalism of phase one, found phase two to be wonderful--a source of volunteers, project-doers, supporters of non-profits, and future interns, employees, and citizens.

Most campuses continue to practice a blend of phase one and phase two civic engagement.  Faculty continue to push civic engagement as a tool for political change, staff and administrators continue to see civic engagement as a tool for learning through community-building, and the apparatus that supports these efforts continues.

But while campuses have settled in, students have changed radically.  The proportion of traditional college students--full-time 18-24 year olds living on or near campus and away from their families--is in decline.  So, too, is support for traditional approaches to higher education--approaches which seem to cost too much and lead to too few graduates.  In their place is emerging a new civic context which colleges and universities ought to attend.  Among the characteristics of the new civic context that matter for higher ed are the following:

• Student demographics have changed radically.  There are more students of color, more low-income students, more first-generation students, more returning students--in short, more "non-traditional" students than ever before.
• These students are not disengaged from "the community" to use the language of phase two civic engagement.  Instead, they have never left the community.  Many live at home, and work, and have families, and maintain powerful civic and community commitments.
• These students do not have the time or habits of using phase two's infrastructures.  They are often on campus long after the Center for Civic Engagement has closed, or they are rushing from class to work, without time to stop at the service project.  In fact, group work, partnership building, and the rest of the pedagogical apparatus of active learning is a headache for them because they do not own their time. Learning takes place online as much as in the classroom, and reflection is a natural habit, one supported by facebook, instagram, tumblr, and twitter.
• These students are impatient with the radical politics of phase one, and with the traditional civic engagement efforts of phase two.  The distinctions between school, work, community, and family life don't work for them, since those things do not fall into neat silos in their day-to-day lives.
• Instead, today's students are pragmatic.  They will join coalitions with anyone.  They are all leaders comfortable in leaderless efforts.  They favor social entrepreneurship over traditional non-profit work, and boycotts, protests, petitions, marches, and occupations over voting and political parties.

If I am at all right about the third phase, then colleges and universities have some important questions to ask themselves.  Our tendency will be to jump to the practical ones--How should we use twitter in civic engagement?  Should we keep the Center for Civic Engagement open later?  How can we engage this new demographic of students?

But the more important question is not practical, and it does not have to do with students, but with institutional mission.  If students are richly engaged in communities and only sporadically engaged in college life, and if this trend will continue into the future, how can colleges and universities make use of those changes to fulfill their own civic missions?

Does competency-based education shorten time to graduation?

Over at The Quick and the Ed, Mandy Zatynski reports on a hearing of the House Education and Workforce subcommittee about the cost-effectiveness of higher education.  There, she reports that Teresa Lubbers, Indiana's Commissioner of Higher Ed testified that competency-based education, particularly of the sort offered at Western Governor's University, shortens the time to graduation.

I am a fan of competency-based education. Westminster offers three degree programs, a Bachelor's of Business Administration, an MBA, and a soon-to-be Masters in Strategic Communication, that are all competency-based.  Student learning in these programs is phenomenal.  Students feel like they have learned deeply, and that what they learned is more relevant to their lives than what they would have learned in the traditional classroom. And where we have been able to measure learning outcomes side-by-side with traditional programs, students in our competency-based program learn at least as much as students in our traditional programs. But these programs do not, by their nature, lead students to graduate more quickly.  


The same is true for Western Governor's University.  Their IPEDS data is quite clear on this point. Only 18% of students who entered in 2005-2006 had graduated in six years, and only 25% had transferred elsewhere.  No matter how you look at it, at WGU, competency-based education  does not lead to quicker graduation, regardless of what Teresa Lubbers says.


This isn't surprising, given the students who enroll at WGU.  All courses are taught on-line, and most students are non-traditional.  Many stop and start, or take more time to complete classes because of work, family, etc.  This is WGU's market, and based on the students I know who attend there, the approach to learning matches their lives.


The take home is simple.  WGU fills a niche.  Their academic programs are well-designed; their organizational structure innovative.  But if you want to improve time-to-graduation, you've got to look elsewhere.

Why cities need higher education strategies

In the United States, almost all colleges are either state schools--that is, sponsored by a state government with the help of federal funding--or private schools.  Both state schools and private schools have geography problems, in that their masters (state governments and boards of trustees) and their locations (actual physical communities) do not align.

This is an obvious point.  But when coupled with another obvious point--that cities, not states or nations--are becoming the most important political geographic units on the planet, that obvious point needs a response.

The response is this: cities need higher education strategies.  Some cities (New York, and for a while longer San Francisco) sponsor universities.  But few cities have a bona fide plan that says: "Our city needs educated people in these fields to create a good society, and support civic life, and build our economy.  Therefore, we will be active in higher education in these ways..." One that has moved in that direction is Mesa, Arizona, which is inviting private non-profit colleges to set up shop within its boundaries. 

Benjamin Barber will be arguing in his new book that mayors should be much more important political figures than they are.  To that let me add this simple point: one of the most important thing a mayor of any city or town can do if s/he wants to live out the significance of the office, is develop a strategy for higher education.

The tension between the goals of families and the goals of colleges

A couple of weeks ago,  30 Latina 15-year olds and their parents came to Westminster for a days-worth of workshops about getting to and succeeding in college. (The event was co-sponsored by El Observador, the spanish-language publication of the Deseret News. Thanks to them for encouraging college attendance.)

It fell to me to welcome the parents, and to say a few words about the value of a college education, particularly a college education at Westminster. I told them about how connection was at the heart of learning, and how Westminster is built to foster those connections.  And I told the stories of my two daughters, both of whom have made some connections at Westminster that have helped them be better students and better people.  I talked about how Amelia had left Pepperdine because, for all its beauty and quality, she didn't fit there, and how she has found something of a place at Westminster with the  women's lacrosse team.  I showed them her picture from Facebook and told them about how she's spending the summer working in an orphanage in Huehuetenango, Guatemala.  And I shared Lucy's picture as well, surrounded by the friends she has made from China while living on campus, and about her dream to create a major that combines Political Science and Cognitive Neuroscience and her hope to become a diplomat.

I could see in the response of the parents in the audience that they hoped for similar experiences for their daughters, because they loved their daughters, and because access to those experiences would improve the prospects for their families.  This point bears making more clearly.  As the demographics of college students changes; as there are more students of color, and more first-generation students, a college degree is more important not just for students but for their families as well.

In telling the stories about my daughters I was torn. As a father I felt proud. As an administrator I felt also the tension between what higher education thinks is important and what we, as parents, think is essential.  The tension is, in fact, built into the idea of connection.  For it is connection that both makes learning possible and makes families work.  But colleges have failed to take advantage of this continuity.  They have preferred instead to try to weaken one connection (to the family) and replace it with another (to a future that grows out of a college education and relies on the connections of the college, not the family, to succeed).

The idea of weakening one connection and strengthening another has, of course, long been part of the purpose of higher ed.  It became particularly strong in the second half of the 20th century, and is thus the main mode of thought among the people who were socialized during that time in those places.  Many of those people lead colleges today. It is behind the effort to build community in residence halls, to talk about campuses as communities, and to suggest to parents (as campuses sometimes do) that their students will do things at college that they don't want to know about.

It is true, though, that the future promised by the connections of colleges is less certain today than in several generations. It is also true that as college costs rise, more parents will be paying for their children's educations for a longer time than ever before. And so the shift from family networks to college networks, that seemed so rational not long ago, seems more suspect to students and parents than it once did.  Colleges have been slow to realize that, and so we have done less well than we ought at keeping families strong while expanding the opportunities available to families because of the education of their children.

As with the subjects of many posts, I don't know how to resolve these tensions.  I suspect that some of the resolution will be natural, as an increasing number of students will live at home while in school (and in the years after), and figure out one by one how to balance family ties and college ties. Some of it will be attitudinal, as colleges change the way they talk about transitions into college.  (It need not be the case that a move to college means a move away from family ties, or that we should be sanguine about the notion that students will behave worse with classmates than they do with families, or that the only phrase in our lexicon about parents is "helicopter parents"). Some of it will be conceptual, as we stop drawing distinctions between family and college networks. And some of it will be opportunistic, as colleges understand that working with families from the time their children are young is the best way to ensure that those children will be able to afford, attend, and graduate from that college.

Why legibility is better than transparency

In the political sphere, transparency is a hallmark on democracy.  But in education, transparency, or making all possible information available to all possible users, confuses as often as it helps. For students legibility, or making it  possible for them to read where they are and where they go next, is more valuable than transparency.

Consider these hallmarks of educational transparency--the campus map, the course catalog, and the tuition and fees list.  Colleges and universities place maps showing all buildings on their websites and at key points on campus.  But students, parents, and visitors are constantly lost.  Why? Because the map provides too much information.  No one really needs to know where all buildings on campus are located.  Instead, they need to know how to get from where they are to where they are going, something that maps do only with difficulty.

Similarly, the course catalog aims to encapsulate all information about a campus' curriculum and graduation requirements.  But students consistently make poor choices, misunderstand policy, and emerge from the catalog more confused than less.

And tuition and fees lists aim to make students and their families aware of all potential costs of attending an institution.  But those tables are generally ignored, in lieu of parents asking a straight-up question--"How much will it cost to attend your school."  To that question we have few good answers, since costs of attendance are variable and odd, given the way that schools rarely charge round figures for anything.

Forbes journalist Patrick Spenner gets it right in his recent blog post, "Forget Engagement, Consumers Want Simplicity." There, he argues that marketers who aim to engage potential customers in too many ways--social media, frequent campaigns, personal contacts--instead trip them up.  I find this increasingly true in student recruitment, where improved marketing tools allow us to contact prospective students dozens of times over the three years prior to enrolling as freshmen.  Some students love the attention, but most ignore much of the interaction, or worse, disconnect early in the process.  (Enrollment managers talk increasingly of stealth applicants--students who apply to the college without us knowing about them.  But the truth is that there are few stealth applicants.  There are instead students who were in the recruiting pool at the outset, but disconnected until they ultimately applied.  They are "simplicity seekers" not stealth applicants.)

The best example I've seen recently of legibility (or in Spenner's terms "simplicity") is at Utah Valley University.  At UVU, all major educational buildings are linked, so that you can walk indoors from one building to any other.  UVU has made huge improvements in helping students and visitors get around--not by posting more campus maps, but by simply posting signs hanging from the ceiling at any juncture between buildings.  Those signs include simple information--the name of the next buildings down any possible path, and an arrow showing which hallway to follow.  The boundaries between buildings are simply marked by the purpose of the building ("business' or "liberal arts" for example) being spelled out in the carpet.

Anyone can get around UVU's campus, then, if they simply know three things--that all buildings are connected, that you can find your way by reading signs, and the name of your final destination.

Not all campuses are designed the way UVU's is.  But you can take their principles of legibility and apply them elsewhere by building educational systems with three questions in mind:

1. What is the campus' approach to the educational experience?
2. Where are the critical junctures where signs need to be placed?
3. What is the student's end goal?

It is disappointing but not surprising that few campuses have simple and clear answers to these key questions.  Each school has all sorts of approaches to education--some majors are lockstep, others aren't, some require a thesis, others don't, some place students in internships, others don't.  We have too many critical junctures--between semesters, and years, and when changing majors, and all sorts of application deadlines.  And we aren't very good at knowing what a student wants to major in, let alone his/her overarching educational goals.  Given our complexity, we resort to putting all possible information out there, and hoping that students can find their ways or build a relationship with a wise mentor who will guide them through.  Or in other words, we default to transparency because our educational systems are illegible.