5 Qs for Higher Ed Change: Q02--What Processes-Structures for Change?

In the last newsletter, I asked five questions about higher ed change:

1.???? Why change?

2.???? What processes or structures exist to make (or resist) change?

3.???? Who should be involved directly (and indirectly) in making change?

4.???? How should change be organized and what preparations are necessary?

5.???? When should change be made and how should it be sequenced?

In Part 1: Why Change?, we answered the title question with 4 categories of answer: (1) history has overtaken the status quo, (2) effective exemplars have shown a different way, (3) higher authority mandates change, and (4) change is demanded by students, employers, or other “users” of the outcomes of higher ed.?

In this edition of Rebooting Higher Education, we examine the second of these questions: What processes or institutional structures exist to make (or resist) change.? In an earlier 2-part series, we talked about resistance to change from a strategic point of view (here and here ) by invoking imposter syndrome and culture as key reasons why higher ed has such a difficult time changing. Here, we are more tactical, but we keep the latter in mind as the ultimate resistor (and preserver) of change as we survey the tactical landscape.??

Question 02: What Processes or Structures Exist to Make (or Resist) Change?

Universities are ancient institutions dating back to 1088 with the founding of the University of Bologna, and their governance was last updated in the early 1800s using the Humboldt model.? Any way you slice it, higher ed institutions have very well-worn structures and processes to govern their content including the following:

1.???? Departmental, school, and institution-wide curriculum committees.

2.???? Ad-hoc change committees, especially for the creation of new degrees or programs.

3.???? Strategic planning processes at different levels.

Although these structures and processes are put in place to allow for change, they are more often ?methods for resisting major change and preserving the status quo. Let’s briefly review each in turn.

Curriculum Committees: The Locus of Ego-Based Arm Wrestling

Curriculum committees are generally charged with the care and feeding of the curricula of extant units or departments, and as such they are inherently invested in the status quo.? Because they are typically staffed by faculty members with degrees identical to or consistent with the departmental degrees on offer, there is a natural bias toward sticking with the subjects familiar to someone who has been through 10 or more years of training in any particular area.? This isn’t strange or weird, but it is worth pointing out, and it would be odd if such a group of homogeneous individuals regularly did anything particularly novel.?

But the situation is worse than this, because the major dynamic of the usual curriculum committee is what I called, “ego-based arm wrestling” in A Field Manual for a Whole New Education I describe the usual situation in academic departments in which PhDs invested in their personal expertise eschew what otherwise might be a dispassionate discussion of the rational merits of this or that curriculum proposal and instead engage in a struggle between two or more powerful egos. Moreover, what starts as a tussle of egos often devolves into a dysfunctional dynamic with a number the following elements:

·????? Ego-based arm wrestling

·????? Exacerbated by research factions

·????? Resulting in a kind of NIMBY problem (innovation is great, just don’t change my course)

·????? With deliberations performed without facilitation

·????? Ignoring the importance of cultural and emotional shifts

·????? Merely shuffling and tweaking existing course boxes

·????? Ignorant of innovation elsewhere

·????? Oblivious to student, employers, and other stakeholders

More detail is provided in the field manual for those interested, but the end result is that despite a good bit of sturm und drang all that can be expected out of the machinations of the usual curriculum committee is a series of minor tweaks to the status quo, what we at ThreeJoy call curriculum++.

Ad-Hoc Change Committees

From time to time a dean or two gets a bee under his or her bonnet and appoints an ad hoc committee to develop something new.? For example, I recall a time in the 90s when the business and engineering deans at the University of Illinois appointed a committee to create an undergraduate certificate program that gave business students a taste of engineering and engineering students a taste of business.? The resulting program still exists (here ) and there was really a great give and take between the two engineering and two business profs appointed to work out something creative.? I was one of the two engineering profs, the work was a delight, and our proposal was out of the box and offered real prospects for benetfits to both colleges.

The program has been a success as an elective option for both engineering and business students, but the implementation process resulted in a final tussle the two deans as to which school would be “in charge” of the program (high-level ego-based arm wrestling). ?Moreover, as the program was implemented, many of its most creative elements were eliminated by faculty not involved in the planning and the resulting course offerings were more curriculum++ than creative.? We will discuss some of the ways to overcome both the arm-wrestling and the softening in implementation processes in a moment.

Strategic Planning Processes

One way in which presidents, rectors, deans, heads or other academic leaders attempt to bring about change is through formal strategic planning process. ?There have been strong leaders as presidents who have driven change at their universities, using these, but the more common experience of strategic planning is as top-down attempt to get “buy-in” (here ) without true collaboration or bottom-up listening or innovation.? Once the strategic planning report is issued, everyone knows the game.? Put forward all innovations and budget requests in the language of the strategic plan.? In this way, strategic planning may usually be viewed as tick-the-box change as described elsewhere .? ??

Respectful Structured Space for Innovation (RSSI)

This brief survey of structures and processes of higher ed change is pretty depressing.? The usual structures and processes are best at tweaking the status quo and largely inadequate to larger scale change when (as now) universities are out of whack with the zeitgeist.?As we continue to answer the 5 Qs of Higher Ed change, we will come to some of the systems discussed in A Field Manual for a Whole New Education. In particular, the use of what ThreeJoy calls respectful structured space for innovation or RSSI is particularly promising as (1) a place where change can be envisioned, (2) piloted, (3) iterated, and (4) released into "production." The whole idea that unknown changes can be planned and implemented without experimentation, iteration, and thoughtful integration and implementation is itself flawed and requires new types of structures.

Next Up: Who Should be Involved in Change?

In our next newsletter, we examine Q03, who should be engaged in change as well as some of the preparatory steps necessary to getting a change team ready for the rigors of substantive change.? Stay tuned for the next edition of Rebooting Higher Education to examine these important questions.

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DAVID E. GOLDBERG (Dave) is an artificial intelligence pioneer, engineer, entrepreneur, educator, and leadership coach (Georgetown). Author of the widely cited Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning (Addison-Wesley, 1989) and co- founder of ShareThis.com , in 2010, he resigned his tenure and professorship at the University of Illinois to work full time for the improvement of higher education. Dave now gives motivational workshops and talks, consults with educational institutions around the globe, and coaches individual educators and academic leaders to bring about timely, effective, and wholehearted academic change.? Contact Dave at [email protected] .