Playing
Questions
“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.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
Welcome to subscribers who were steered here by Hollis Robbins, and a public thanks here to Hollis for her generous description of her recent visit to the University of Pittsburgh and to Pittsburgh. I have said for decades that the best stuff to come out of all of my various social media engagements have been the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made, and Hollis proved me right once again.
While I collect my thoughts sufficiently to organize a proper essay here, I’m borrowing from some links I’ve posted to the “Notes” panel in order to signal my current direction(s). This is “What others have to say” about institutions as mostly a stand-alone offering rather than as a segment of a longer post. The pieces below prompted questions, which for now I’ll keep to myself. I am Rosencrantz, or perhaps Guildenstern, not quite sure of the ground that I seem to be standing on.
Rob Nelson at “AI Log,” on understanding Generative AI by looking at stories from the past rather than stories that look forward. “On the use of historical analogies in writing about AI”:
No matter how complex they become, I think it is unlikely that language machines will become completely autonomous anytime soon. That’s because I insist that analogies to the past are more useful to understanding the present than stories about the future. It is also because transformer-based language machines have led me to believe that relations among language, writing, and thinking are far more complex than I had understood.
Joshua Travis Brown at “Leading Edge,” on the roles that teachers play and that they imagine for their students. There is not one story but many. “How to Identify Added Value in Higher Education: The Director, the Curator, and the Virtuoso”:
In the face of all-time-low confidence in the value of a college education, we must focus on identifying and communicating the full value of what students gain from their degree.
I’ve previously highlighted that some institutions have embraced this challenge by blending mission and innovation as “value entrepreneurs” that bring educational access to new groups of students. I want to suggest that another way is to ask members of the university community to specify the added value they offer students.
I encourage senior university leaders—presidents, provosts, vice-presidents, and deans—to walk your campus on a listening tour, asking “What is the one thing a person will learn or gain from you that they will not encounter anywhere else within the university?” Listen for the different voices of your university that add genuine value to a student’s degree. See if you can identify the invaluable skills students might gain by engaging with the talented faculty and staff you employ.
Phil Kirschner at “The Workline,” on looking beyond standard metrics for institutional success - in this case, in corporate life as well as in urbanism and economic development - and borrowing from Robert Putnam’s distinction between “bonding capital” and “bridging capital” to describe how Tulsa, Oklahoma has managed not only to attract new people but also has managed to keep them there, and integrate them into the broader community. How might any of this help other institutions figure out what they’re doing well or doing poorly? “Social Capital Dies in the Silos”:
Early Tulsa Remote created mostly bonding capital. A tight cohort of remote workers who found each other. Powerful, but incomplete.
The economic impact accelerated when Experience Tulsa began systematically engineering bridging capital. Remote tech workers were introduced to longtime Tulsans. Entrepreneurs were paired with civic leaders. They designed environments where cross-sector relationships form by design rather than chance.
(I’ll close that piece by calling back to Hollis Robbins’ provocative argument in favor of academic silos, here.)
My bookshelf
Like a lot of academics, I read a lot. Like a lot of law professors, I read a lot about law and about governance. But I also read a lot of things just for fun and a lot of other things because you never know where interesting ideas might come from.
I have finished Ann Packer’s “Some Bright Nowhere” (Harper Collins, 2025), as long promised, but will hold off on a further comment. That book is sitting with me. I am most of the way through Hermione Lee’s recent, excellent biography of Tom Stoppard, which explains my choice of header image.
Thanks for sticking with me.