Out of the Silos
On universities and institutional change
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
On YouTube recently I scrolled past a short video that seems to me to capture something essential about the challenges of institutional change in contemporary universities. The title is “How to save someone in a grain silo,” and in a few seconds it depicts a human being trapped in an actual grain silo and the process of extricating them safely. Build an enclosure around the trapped soul and remove the grain from the inside of the enclosure. The pressure trapping the human being is relieved; the human can escape.
That little story speaks simultaneously to two themes that I can only introduce, for now.
The silo is the long-standing metaphor for the organizational and institutional bureaucracies that have come to define so much of the modern university. How to extricate - faculty, students, staff, communities, societies, cultures - from the grip of the silo is something of a cottage industry that informs an enormous amount of the higher education “reform” literature today.
A large chunk of the literature focuses on the character of the silo, and sometimes on the character of faculty (teachers, researchers) within. I haven’t had time yet to dive into John Guillory’s work, but a review of his most recent book by Timothy Aubry captures an central insight that may generalize beyond Guillory’s target - literary criticism. To Aubry, Guillory
describes literary criticism’s development from a family of miscellaneous practices in the late 19th century into a consolidated profession located within the university and governed by protocols, standards, and protections designed to secure its legitimacy and insulate it from market forces. Both books underscore how the position of literary studies within a particular institutional structure constrain what it can accomplish and what impact it can have, thus seeking to curb the more grandiose conceptions of the discipline — as political revolutionary or morally transformative, for instance — frequently advanced by its practitioners.
I have little to say about literary criticism; I want to draw attention to how Guillory, per Aubry, highlights its particular institutional dimensions. Note, of course, that by institutional I (and I think that it’s fair to say, Guillory and Aubry) refer not to the organizational design of a particular university but to the field of practice of relevant professionals. That spans colleges and universities not only in the US but also across any number of countries. All academics know that they inhabit multiple communities of this sort, beyond their home organizations. The silos of academic life are not only departmental; they are disciplinary.
To return to the YouTube video, that implies that if those silos have trapped - who? what? (questions that I have to return to) - then the task of building systems and structures that re-distribute the pressures that they bring to bear is enormously complex. I use “re-distribute” rather than “tear down”; real grain silos are big and powerful and important and useful, not only for storing grain but also for lending some balance to the complex financing that connects farmers to financiers to markets. Academic and intellectual silos have value, too.
What does “re-distribute” look like in the academic world? It’s easy enough for Doc Brown to abandon roads in the future version of “Back to the Future”; it’s far more difficult even to imagine what post-secondary research and teaching might look like if one tried to get rid of the disciplinary foundations of the Chemistry Department or the Business School, let alone English Literature. What would a post-disciplinary or a different-disciplinary model of the university even look like, or do? Why might one want to explore that, even as a thought experiment? But there is nothing natural or given about Chemistry or Business or any of the other bureaucratic dividers in higher education; they are human products of history and need in ways that parallel the development of corporate marketing and human resources departments. Might we start again?
That leads me briefly to a key, related theme: change management and theories of change. If the bureaucracies of disciplines (a phrase I adapt from Andrew Abbott’s magnificent Chaos of Disciplines) holds the current form of the university in place, an equivalent lack of attention to theories of change keeps it from evolving more than incrementally. By 1985, Doc Brown had invented a time machine powered by plutonium. By the magic of Hollywood, filmgoers could skip over what happened during the 30 years between his discovery of the “flux capacitor” and its manifestation in a DeLorean automobile - including the fact that Marty McFly, who apparently had spent an enormous amount of time hanging around Doc Brown, had no idea that the time machine was nearly ready to go. Anyone interested in future versions of the university can’t afford that luxury.
There are plenty of simple versions of change management at hand. Bottom up! Top down! Centralized! Decentralized! Resource-driven. Demand-driven. Pilot, test, pivot, and scale. Find and build around positive deviants (the passionately committed small band, as it were). Assemble a vision and use that to drive emotionally compelling stories that attract adherents - and powerful allies. There is “disruptive” innovation - build from the outside in, rather than from the inside out - the sort of thing that anchored Clay Christensen’s book and later took on all sorts of different, often darker colors. Some of the theory-of-change literature comes from the management world, as Christensen’s does. Some of it comes from the social movement world. Some of it comes from the history of ideas, some from community organizing.
How much of it “works” either in the context of specific universities or specific university practices (say, grading), let alone at the scale of something like “the university”? At Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson recently described a theory of change for academia that is based on a kind of prediction market; his model focuses on pricing the expected future utility of present research and researchers and using that to govern contemporary resource allocation (jobs, funding, other incentives and rewards). It’s a fascinating way to think about the problem, but I worry that he hasn’t depleted the pressure inside the silo - instead, he seems to have assumed it away. To me, that steps around the difficult question. How does one deplete the metaphorical pressure inside academic silos?
I’ll close for now with a Yogi Berra quote: "I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn't my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?"
The modern university is full of bats.