(Re)Building the Resilient University

Part 4 of 4

III. Thinking Outside-the-Box

In this final segment of (Re)Building the Resilient University I offer a few additional ideas which I hope might contribute to institutional resiliency in the Digital Age. I should acknowledge from the outset that these suggestions focus primarily on strategies for Tier 2 and Tier 3 liberal arts colleges, which is the sector of the higher education universe that I know best. These ideas range from the simple to the complex. Some ideas may be worthy of further consideration in specific contexts, others may not be.

Fiscal Discipline

Urging fiscal discipline might initially seem an odd way to open a discussion about unconventional thinking on institutional resiliency in the Digital Age. But the fact is that over the past dozen years or so, quite a bit of “magical thinking” has proliferated in our sector about how institutions are going to balance their budgets. So in a context of prolonged fiscal irresponsibility, arguing for old fashioned financial prudence and fiscal discipline are actually rather novel suggestions.

If you’ve read my previous three installments, you know that I’m urging pretty massive reconsideration of how we organize and run higher education, and I’m suggesting that these major changes are urgently needed because the market is rejecting the obsolete product that we’re currently offering at a very high price point. You also know that it's my contention that over the past quarter century higher education has largely escaped the massive structural, organizational and operational transformations caused by the shift from the late-Industrial Age to the Digital Age, which have affected virtually every other sector of society and the economy. I've argued previously that this sector can no longer evade the necessity of making fundamental changes in how it operates.

Despite the fact that the advent of the Digital Age will necessitate many significant changes in the academy, it’s important to remember that the earth still revolves around the sun, the laws of gravity still apply and fundamental economic principles have not changed. If your budget isn't balanced, you either need to tighten your belt and right size your institution, or prepare a teach-out plan, because you will surely go out of business. The Admissions Office is not going to miraculously deliver that huge class with a low discount rate that you’ve been counting on to save you for years, and Institutional Advancement isn’t holding the winning ticket for the Mega Millions or Power Ball lottery with a $2 billion payoff. News flash: if you go out of business you won’t be transforming anymore lives.

Since the Great Recession of 2008-09, too many institutions have neither undertaken a fundamental reassessment of their business model, nor have they made needed cuts. Perhaps if they had made long overdue cuts earlier they would have realized that something more profound was wrong with their product. My point here is that if there’s a fundamental problem with your product, like it’s obsolete, it probably doesn’t matter how much you lower the price. I’m not suggesting here that just cutting costs would have solved the problem. That most certainly isn’t the case. What I am suggesting here is that had institutions made serious cuts earlier, they would have discovered much sooner that cuts alone are not sufficient to solve the problem of an obsolete offering. Other more profound changes are urgently needed in both the product and in its mode of delivery.

In any market there are only two ways to make money. The first way is to offer your product at the lowest price point. The second is to offer a differentiated product that the market recognizes as a better value – even at a higher price point. Small liberal arts colleges cannot take advantage of economies of scale. They offer a very high-touch personalized experience. It's inherently expensive. They will never be able to offer their product at a low enough price point to beat the competition. Their only alternative is to offer an experience that students and families recognize as exceptional, because the outcomes are reliably superb. If you’re in a market niche which requires you to deliver a differentiated product that people are willing to pay more for, and you find yourself forced to cut budgets year after year, and the market still isn’t responding to your offering, it probably means that there’s something fundamentally wrong with your product. It’s likely not sufficiently differentiated anymore in a way that people think makes it worthwhile at your higher price point.

Instead of facing this reality head-on, too many institutions have in the years since 2008 resorted to a variety of gimmicks and unrealistic strategies in an effort to balance their budgets. Unrealistic promises were made about enrollments or about fundraising as endowments were raided, and leaders were not held accountable for far too long when those promises fell through. Fiscal discipline plays an important role in building resiliency, and institutions making the transition to the Digital Age should embrace it. Markets work. They tell you, with unmistakable clarity, whether you have a good idea or a bad idea. Yes, markets sometimes deliver tough love, but that is essential to helping us distinguish fact from fantasy. Markets are definitely worth paying attention to and understanding.

Embrace Technology

Many institutions, especially liberal arts colleges, have largely ignored technology as a platform for delivering education. In the pre-COVID pandemic era the logic was that online learning was antithetical to everything we stood for. Our business model is based on face-to-face delivery, we told ourselves. What could online learning possibly have to offer us? Some faculty have previously been using elements of online learning, like flipped classrooms, where taped lectures are posted online and classroom time is then freed-up for more discussion or problem solving. But beyond a few examples like this, the use of technology as a mode of delivery was generally pretty limited – especially at small liberal arts colleges. The COVID pandemic forced us all to pivot very quickly to remote instruction. For most of us this experience was profoundly unpleasant if not downright traumatic. For the vast majority of faculty it was a "baptism by fire" introduction to online teaching, which only confirmed preexisting convictions that virtual teaching can’t hold a candle to face-to-face instruction. It would be most unfortunate, however, it that’s the final lesson we take away from this experience. 

True online learning, unlike the rushed remote teaching that most of us engaged in during the COVID pandemic, is very different from face-to-face teaching. It’s definitely a product of the Digital Age, and it’s here to stay. Good online teaching has its own distinctive pedagogy and it requires a good LMS (learning management system), video content management system, good video conferencing and other important peripheral applications. Both students and faculty also need extensive training in how to benefit from and use online platforms effectively.

If all the right elements are in place, online teaching can be an enormous asset to the traditional face-to-face teaching that most of us do in liberal arts colleges – not only during disruptive events like the COVID pandemics, but anytime. Resilient universities of the Digital Age will understand that in a VUCA world, the COVID pandemic is not going to be the last disruptor, and we need to be able to pivot to online teaching and learning seamlessly whenever the next disruption comes – and it will come. Beyond disruptions, the capacity to successfully deliver online teaching and learning can be a tremendous asset, even for institutions primarily focused on traditional real time face-to-face delivery. Not only can online teaching and learning supplement and enhance the pedagogy of traditional on-campus teaching and learning, it can play a very important role in reducing costs. 

Digital Age institutions that truly embrace good online teaching and learning will also have the ability to reach new markets that they currently can't reach. Southern New Hampshire University and Park University in Missouri both continue to offer small intimate on-campus learning experiences, but they now simultaneously also reach far beyond their traditional campus classrooms to educate vast numbers of students very effectively through innovative online platforms. The choice between being an on-campus or an online university is a false one. Resilient universities of the Digital Age will be able to do both in creative and distinctive ways. These two universities offer useful case studies, and they are definitely worth a close look.

Focus on the Core Mission – Teaching and Learning

It’s essential that each institution remain true to its core mission. For liberal arts colleges, the quality of our offering, and what makes us genuinely distinctive, should be outstanding teaching and sustained personal access to amazing teacher-mentors. We can do this because we work on an intimate scale, and we must never lose that quality. This very special intellectual intimacy is what still gives us a competitive advantage in a complex and diverse higher education market. In fact, I would argue that we need to double down on excellent teaching now more than ever. We need to ensure that we are cultivating highly engaged and totally committed teachers who are equally capable of outstanding teaching in-person and online. We also need to assess intensively whether or not we are genuinely adding value to the particular students whom we serve. We can't just keep telling ourselves that we are great teachers. The outcomes that our students experience will ultimately determine how great we really are.

The vast majority of our faculty come from leading R-1 graduate programs. Almost none of them have been trained to be great teachers. Some of them are naturally gifted, but most are not. They need to learn how to become great teachers, and we need to help them do that. Furthermore, we must recognize that in the Digital Age the nature of how we teach is fundamentally changing. The time of the great “sage on a stage” of the Industrial Age has passed. 

Excellent teachers in the Digital Age find ways of giving students real agency over their own education and they curate dynamic communities of learning. The technological revolution of the Digital Age has given us powerful new resources for achieving this agency, and we haven’t even begun to exploit the full potential of this technology. A really effective teaching and learning center is a worthwhile investment for any institution seeking to distinguishing itself in the highly competitive higher education market through the exceptional quality of its teaching and mentoring. Centers with an educational technologist and instructional designer can work wonders with genuinely committed faculty and help them develop into highly effective Digital Age teachers.

Promotion and annual review processes should be revised to send clear and unambiguous signals to faculty about the central value assigned to truly outstanding teaching. Unfortunately, too many of our faculty are not truly committed to a career of teaching in a small liberal arts college. Too many have accepted our job offers as a regrettable, and hopefully passing, necessity in a tightening job market. These faculty are primarily concerned with their own research and publishing agendas, not with the hard work needed to become outstanding teachers. Many are convinced that if they can just publish enough, they will be "discovered" and offered a “more appropriate” position at a prestigious R-1 institution. A few of them will get such an offer, but most won’t.

In either case, teaching and mentoring students is not their central commitment and never will be. We all know them. These are the folks who always ask for Tuesday/Thursdays teaching schedules (“Not too early or too late please!”), and they never help with heavy lifting in the area of co-curricular and institutional service. When it becomes clear that there’s a poor match between the institution’s core commitment to outstanding teaching and the individual faculty member’s professional objectives, it’s time to cut losses and move on. There are just too many great unemployed teachers out there to tie up scarce resources on people who have other priorities.

I am certainly not arguing here that we don’t want faculty to remain active scholars. Great teaching and scholarship are not mutually exclusive. In fact, ideally they should exist in a symbiotic relationship. But when a faculty member’s primary commitment is to publishing, teaching suffers. When department chairs and deans determine that a faculty member is not truly committed to the institution’s core business, they owe it to their institution, and to their students, to cut the ties and fill the position with someone whose priorities are fully aligned with those of the institution.

Explore Creative Alliances

The small size of liberal arts colleges is simultaneously a major source of their strength and their Achilles’ heel. While liberal arts colleges offer unparalleled opportunities for mentoring by great teachers, the relatively small size of their faculties limits the range of courses they can offer. What if we took advantage of the tremendous potential of Digital Age technology to link liberal arts colleges into larger networks? This may be what George Soros had in mind when he announced in late January 2020 at Davos that he was committing $1 billon to the establishment of an Open Society University Network.

Instead of each liberal arts college seeking to be an island unto itself, with its students limited by the courses its own small faculty can offer, what if students could select from a vast array of courses, some offered on their own campus and others offered by other alliance members online? Through such a global network of liberal arts colleges, students could even spend several semesters on different campuses over the course of their undergraduate careers. Faculty from different alliance member institutions could also offer jointly taught courses or collaborate on research projects. Faculty members themselves might also spend semesters teaching on the campuses of other network institutions through a faculty exchange program. Alliance members with strengths in particular fields of study might share those strengths with other alliance members and boost their capacities in areas where their own course offerings are more limited.

Think Global

American higher education is still recognized as the global gold standard. How we transform our institutions to meet the demands of the Digital Age will determine whether or not we can maintain this competitive advantage or not. Liberal arts colleges came late to the party in terms of global recruiting, and it took us some time to explain our value proposition to a global audience. However, once we explained what a liberal education is, we discovered that there is tremendous global interest in what we offer. Fareed Zakaria’s wonderful book, In Defense of Liberal Education, offers eloquent personal testimony through his description of growing up in Mumbai and being amazed by reading a Harvard course catalog his mother brought back to India after taking his elder brother to college. The incredible range and diversity of courses that students can take simultaneously at American liberal arts universities thrilled and enchanted Zakaria. This remarkable system still captivates nearly a million international students a year. 

Although the current administration in Washington has regrettably been busy building walls and discouraging international students from coming to the U.S. to study, this short-sighted policy is an aberration that will pass. A more serious challenge to global recruitment is that too many American institutions have tended to view international students mainly as a cash cow, which is both unethical and unsustainable. International students enrich the diversity of our campuses in many ways, and they should not be financially exploited. As the demographic downturn in the U.S. contracts the domestic market, international students will indeed fill many empty seats, but our motives for recruiting them must be pure. We must genuinely meet the needs of our international students when we welcome them to our campuses, and not just focus on their wallets. 

Reconsider the Calendar

As I mentioned in an earlier segment, the current academic calendar dates back to the Agrarian Age. It’s long past time to reconsider a calendar where institutions lie fallow for nearly half the year. There is no sound educational reason why it should take students four years to graduate. Why can’t universities operate fully throughout the year? Both students and faculty could determine which term they wish to take off. A student might choose to take their annual college break during a fall or spring term and take classes during a summer term. The same holds for faculty. If a student is eager to take classes throughout the year and graduate in less than four years, that too should be possible. The inefficiency of the current academic calendar is a tremendous waste. Through a more flexible calendar, institutions could handle more students over the course of a year and likely hire more faculty. Dormitories and other facilities would not sit idle for five or six months out of twelve.

Conclusion

Hopefully some of the suggestions offered here will be useful as institutions navigate the transition from the late-Industrial Age to the Digital Age. Surely many other and better ideas will occur to people as they begin to rethink what a liberal education looks like in this new age, and how institutions can develop the resiliency needed to survive and thrive in the VUCA world that defines it. The crisis that higher education is facing presently is as serious as any in its history. But I remain bullish on the future prospects for the American model of higher education as a whole, and for small liberal arts colleges in particular. The need for change is profound, but the legacy is certainly worth preserving. In the post-Civil War period universities faced a similar crisis as they transitioned from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age. They successfully navigated that transition and they thrived. I have every confidence that small liberal arts colleges will successfully make this new transition to the Digital Age and thrive once more as they continue to inspire the world and transform lives.