The Paris of Higher Education
On looking backward and forward
“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.
The word of the day, friends, is “discontinuity.” Not in a physics sense, or an electrical sense, or a literary sense, but in a social systems sense. What a lot of people have learned to characterize as organizational or sector-related “disruption,” originally per Christensen and Schumpeter, I’ll label “discontinuity.” As in: organizations and institutions change along two overlapping dimensions. One is continuous change; the second is discontinuous change.
If you’ve been reading here for a few weeks, you may recall that I have slowly laid out a framework for thinking about the futures of colleges and universities, my favorite institutional illustration, that builds on handful of key dimensions: bundling and unbundling the intellectual content of the institution; knowledge stewardship and labor production as key institutional drivers; hierarchy and community; centralization and decentralization.
Those dimensions came in 2x2 matrices. Today’s third and final installment offers just one added key dimension - continuity and discontinuity - and one further layer: scale. At different levels, in different forms, and from different sources, change sometimes happens gradually and sometimes suddenly. The scale of the change may be dramatic - typically, we associate dramatic change with sudden change - or modest, even incremental - typically, we associate incremental change with gradual change.
(I’ll pause to note the conceptual overlaps between my emphasis on “continuity” and “discontinuity” and other, similar rhetorical framings: normal science v paradigm shifts (history of science); “phase shifts” v “phase differences" (electronics); “punctuated equilibrium” v “gradualism” (evolutionary biology). I also see affinities between my uses of continuity and discontinuity and the Rogers diffusion curve, for technology innovations.)
That gives me one last 2x2 matrix, which I’ve populated with possibly helpful illustrations of each of the four boxes:
The careful reader will note that I have not included in the matrix the giant changes to the structure and system of higher education proposed in the context of the current Presidential administration’s efforts to cap the rate at which NIH grantees receive “indirect cost” funding, or to tax “excess” endowments held by universities and other nonprofits, or anything else. Those challenges are dramatic and potentially hugely disruptive, and they have the full attention of university administrators, faculty, and partners all over the world, not just in the US. As they should.
But I started this series of Substack posts before those proposals materialized. And it’s worth noting that generally speaking, the response to them, within higher education, has been some combination of two things. One, we have to preserve what we’re doing, and pay for it as we have done, because what we’re doing is fundamentally important, amazing, and not replicable in any other institutional environment of equivalent strength and scope. Two, at the margins, and as is always the case, here and there we could be sharper and more careful and more nimble in how we deploy the money that we receive via public subsidy - either directly (NIH and other federal research sponsors) or indirectly (tax-exempt endowments and their philanthropic benefactors).
My point, instead, is to draw attention to the many ways in which higher education leadership pays too little attention to the probabilities that discontinuous, dramatic change will happen, too much attention to processes of continuous, incremental change in the here and now, and never enough attention to figuring out whether a given phenomenon - emanating from internal pressures (labor economics inside the university, for example) or external ones (the political sphere, community and culture, changes to technology, or otherwise) - ought to be framed in one way rather than any other. The language of “disruption” is often inadequate in seeing the real character of what’s happening, because rhetorically, at least, “disruption” implies “smooth and steady sailing.” The odds of truly discontinuous disruptive change may be low, but they are not non-existent. Universities are castles of a sort (my own university features a “Cathedral”). Castles are often made of stone; they are sometimes made of sand. And even the ones made of stone can be brought down by dragons.
Game of Thrones references aside, sailing is rarely smooth, except in our collective imaginations. Rick and Ilsa, in “Casablanca,” can hold on to their idealized past - “Paris” - as the Nazis close in, Ilsa escapes, and Rick moves on to join the Resistance. To less romantic effect, in “Men in Black,” K gets to the point: "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they do not know about it!"
Rick’s and K’s contrast among past, present, and future was on my mind when I read Hollis Robbins’s latest Substack post, “It’s Later Than You Think.”
The usual, comfortable rhetoric about “irreplaceable” human elements of education—mentorship, hands-on learning, community building, and critical thinking—might suffice for a four-year social networking summer camp, and some parents may still value that. But in the AGI era, the only defensible reason for universities to remain in operation is to offer students an opportunity to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses current AI. Nothing else makes sense.
I had K on my mind when I read this, at Forbes:
The CSU [California State University] system, which serves nearly 500,000 students across 23 campuses, has announced plans to integrate ChatGPT Edu, an education-focused version of OpenAI’s chatbot, into its curriculum and operations.
Will we really always have Paris, in the academy?
I know a fair amount about what’s happening and what’s planned around Generative AI at my own university, about conversations about GenAI between my university and big-time tech players, and about conversations about GenAI between my university and other universities. As always when we’re talking about technology contributions to education and research, the processes and products are apt to be blends of awful and amazing, and it’s really difficult to know which is which at any given point in time. Remember how everyone did their level best to keep Wikipedia out of our students’ hands? The odds of the results being discontinuous in an institutional sense - both for individual universities and for the sector as a whole - may be low but are, I think, far greater than anyone imagines.
Because I also had K in mind when I read William Deresiewicz’s recent paean to old-school humanism, a tale of extended, deep, patient, human-scaled interaction among committed individuals and a specific text, leaning about oneself in the course of exploring the meanings of meaning. It’s exactly the sort of project that I imagine getting lost in, in a great way, both in the moment and as part of a new institutional order. If we need to maintain universities today, as institutions of knowledge governance, then we (collectively) need to make the affirmative case for them, for who populates them, for what they do, and for who pays for it all, in both the short term and the long term. Maybe there’s a new case for the current order. Maybe the order changes, to adapt to the possibilities of the case. Relying on the glories of universities past - even their comparatively recent past - will not be sufficient, politically, culturally, or economically, to sustain the current institutional design. “Paris,” metaphorically, gave Rick and Ilsa a trajectory into their next lives but didn’t solve any of their real problems, even if those didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
Getting to any new order, though, let alone staying the current course, requires an imagination that grasps the discontinuities of the moment - whether those are AI-motivated or otherwise - and builds around them.
I’ll be back.