Stonehenge on December 21, 2025   

In the end, the university’s main value is its intellectuality, the treatment of everything that is with thinking and all its methods. 

 

That was the first line of the post I started drafting on Monday, on the holiday Easter Monday here in Britain. But I was struggling to concentrate.  I thought maybe I needed a rest day: I’d spent a couple of days last week writing a section on AI and the future of jobs for a collaborative report that we’re doing on the crisis of learning worsened by AI, and after devoting another chunk of time to it over the weekend it wound up at 6000 words. It’s not the length, it’s the sense of fighting inevitability from which I’d need a rest.

 

Governor Brown gave his 4th and final inaugural address today and said very little about higher education.  Instead, he focused attention on other issues: K-12 education, criminal justice, the environment, and his favorite issue of all--controlling spending.  It is certainly possible to see his lack of focus as a positive thing for the state's public colleges and universities.  His recent ideas have not been great, and relative neglect might lower the temperature to allow serious thinking on how to raise educational quality in the state's higher education institutions.

Unfortunately, what little he did say is not encouraging.  Here are his comments on higher education:

With respect to education beyond high school, California is blessed with a rich and diverse system. Its many elements serve a vast diversity of talents and interests. While excellence is their business, affordability and timely completion is their imperative. As I’ve said before, I will not make the students of California the default financiers of our colleges and universities. To meet our goals, everyone has to do their part: the state, the students and the professors. Each separate institution cannot be all things to all people, but the system in its breadth and diversity, through real cooperation among its segments, can well provide what Californians need and desire.

Several points stand out here: the displacement of "excellence" (admittedly a vacuous term) by "timely completion"; the implicit opposition to further tuition hikes coupled with a lack of real commitment to address the problem of tuition through state funding; and a belief in the inadequacy of the campus's efforts.  "To meet our goals, he said, "everyone has to do their part: the state, the students, and the professors." Since Gov. Brown has already indicated that he believes the state is doing enough and that students should not be asked to do more,  then what is left? The professors, who must be blocking timely completion and affordability by not teaching enough students and not going online enough. 

Here then is the problem with Brown's approach to higher education: in his mind the problem is not that students do not get enough time to work with faculty; it is that they get too much time. Instead of figuring out a way to fund an educational experience that enables deeper learning and higher skills he wants to speed up the process and make it more Amazon-like than it already is. As many have pointed out, higher education has been using adjuncting and massification to create teaching "efficiencies" for thirty years.  They have reduced degree productivity and quality, and cannot now suddenly increase them.

Dealing with a 1970s-model of educational efficiency will be one challenge for 2015.

Must innovation disrupt everything so that society might have new and better things? Widespread fatigue with this idea inspired a number of headlines last week.  "The Emperor of "Disruption Theory" is Wearing No Clothes," exclaimed one response.  Paul Krugman described a "careful takedown," suggesting that the whole era of innovation might collapse from its own overhype ("Creative Destruction Yada Yada.")  Jonathan Rees referenced an "absolutely devastating takedown."  All three were talking about Jill Lepore's much-discussed New Yorker critique of prominent business consultant Clayton Christensen's theory of "disruptive innovation." Prof. Rees concluded, "Like MacArthur at Inchon, [Prof. Lepore] has landed behind enemy lines and will hopefully force the enemy to pull back and defend ideological territory that they thought they had already conquered."  Obviously something is up when one historian compares an article by another to the "decisive" amphibious assault against the North Korean army early in the Korean War.

What's up is pervasive anger at the corporate and political classes that have used the theory of disruptive innovation to justify an endless procession of company downsizings and closings over the past thirty years (photo credit: Bill Bamberger).  People are also angry at the belief of many advocates that resistance is futile and resisters are losers.  Prof. Lepore spoke for this sense of exclusion when she wrote that in order to avoid actual debate, "disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them with fogyism."  Innovation, she wrote, has become "the idea of progress jammed into a criticism-proof jack-in-the-box."

The stakes of this debate about innovation are high.   Corporate America, health care, manufacturing, and the contemporary university have all tied their reputations to their delivery of innovation. Innovation comes with lots of turmoil, unilateral management decision making, and interference with how people do their jobs.  The critiques of the Lepore article didn't justify disruption as innovation so much as they affirmed that there is a lot of disruption:  responses from Digitopoly, Vox, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal tried to refight the debate to a draw.   In an interview, Prof. Christensen countered some of her examples while describing her piece as a "criminal act of dishonesty--at Harvard of all places!" (He also seemed to invite her over to talk innovation theory.)

I don't want to try to referee the debate through the examples in Prof. Lepore's piece, but to provide a better socio-cultural context for it, in the hope that the debate will continue.  The main point I will make here is that we can't overcome disruptive innovation unless we realize that it isn't a theory of innovation but a theory of governance. "DI" isn't about what people actually do to innovate better, faster, and cheaper, but about what executives must do to control innovative institutions.  Prof. Lepore's work will be wasted unless we can move from disruptive to sustainable innovation, which she argued is better than the disruptive kind.  But we won't get sustainable innovation until we identify its opposition in current managerial culture.

(1) From Schumpeter to Christensen

A little backstory may help here.  Prof. Christensen is now the most prominent heir of Joseph A. Schumpeter's twin definition of capitalism as the source of all meaningful innovation in life, and of innovation as "creative destruction." For both of these thinkers, the entrepreneur is the fountainhead of new value, and capital must be pulled out of less productive uses and allocated to the entrepreneur, who is the privileged source of all future of wealth-creation.  In Schupeter's view, governments, publics, regulations, communities, traditions, habits, faculty senates, teacher's unions, zoning boards, homeowner's groups, professional organizations, and, last but not least, business corporations, do not create value but interfere with its creation. All that is solid must be melted into air for the entrepreneur to be free to innovate and thus transform.  The resulting wreckage and waste is part of progress, and must not be reduced through regulation.  This is true for shuttered factories, and also for high levels of inequality: both are part of liberating the entrepreneur to create the greater wealth of the future.

Although years of reading Prof. Christensen makes me think he's personally humane, his theory is the business world's single most powerful rationalization for disrupting every type of humane condition, such as job security, tax-funded public infrastructure, or carefully nurtured, high-quality product lines.  Prof. Lepore was right to state, "Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror."  Disruption feeds on major and also minor terrors, like being left behind by a change deemed unavoidable, or being excluded from debate about the costs and benefits of undermining entire regional economies by offering tax breaks to companies that offshore production.

One outcome of the theory of disruptive innovation has been the shocking complacency of the U.S. political class about the national devastation wrought by deindustrialization. We have a "rust belt," and ruined cities like Newark and Detroit, and wide areas of social and economic decline amidst enormous wealth, because business and political leaders were taught by consultants like Prof. Christensen that capitalism must destroy in order to advance.  Journalists might come along and chronicle the horrible human costs of the decline of the steel industry in, say, Youngstown, Ohio (see the Tammy Thomas sections in George Packer's The Unwinding (2013). But by the time someone like Mr. Packer arrived, decline has been baked into the regional cake.

The theory of disruptive innovation was arguably head baker, for it taught politicians in Youngstown and elsewhere that industries like steel and their unionized employees had been judged by an impartial market to be uncompetitive.  Consultants would routinely opine that the only logical response to falling profits was the mass layoff and/or factory closure. In The Disposable American (2007), Louis Uchitelle pointed out that layoffs were not wars of necessity but wars of choice, and yet to say that deindustrialization expressed a cultural entitlement rather than an economic law was to stick one's finger in the dike.  Slowly but surely, Youngstown and everyplace like it no longer had economies that supported a broad, stable middle class. In addition, like Beckett's Godot, the renewal to which this disruption was to lead never actually showed up.

Thus Prof. Lepore's critique of disruptive innovation tapped into a pervasive, long-term anger about ruin in America and an anger at the corporate and political classes that deemed ruin necessary.

(2) Jill Lepore's Critique

In "The Disruption Machine," Prof. Lepore held Prof. Christensen's theory to rigorous evidentiary conditions for historical claims, and found that "none of these conditions have been met." (Score Humanities 1, B-Schools 0!--there's a disciplinary matchup in her piece that Michael or I will come back to another time.)   She suggested not just that disruptive innovation doesn't work as advertised when transferred from, say, specialty steel manufacturing to educational services, but that it didn't work well even when applied to manufacturing.

Crucially, Prof. Lepore concluded that "sustaining" innovations--which continuously improve a product--are far more successful that Prof. Christensen's theory admits.  Discussing a core Christensen example, the disk-drive industry, Prof. Lepore posited a more accurate history,

In the longer term, victory in the disk-drive industry appears to have gone to the manufacturers that were good at incremental improvements, whether or not they were the first to market the disruptive new format. Companies that were quick to release a new product but not skilled at tinkering have tended to flame out.

In other words, sustainable innovation works as well as or better than disruption, but the U.S., thanks to figures like Prof. Christensen, wasn't allowed to have it.  Americans could have developed advanced skills for advanced manufacturing and services as did Germany, Japan, China, Sweden, et al, but nooo--economists and business theorists taught that it was uneconomical to invest in all the Tammy Thomas's of the country so that they could "tinker" brilliantly for the sustainability of U.S manufacturing and its heartland cities.

I agree with Prof. Lepore's demonstration of Prof. Christensen's fallibility, and with the conclusion that disruption is a false idol.  It has indeed produced neither social progress nor economic success as such. But it's one thing to critique disruptive innovation, and another to change it into sustainability.   Prof. Christensen has and will continue to promise enormous irreversible change in articles like "MOOCs' disruption is only beginning"--and so will American capitalism in general. To disrupt disruption, particularly in a service sector like higher education, we need a better appreciation of the deeper purpose of disruptive innovation I mentioned above.  The history suggests that Prof. Christensen became influential  because he enhanced an top-down kind of innovation management, not because of his insights about innovation as such.

(3) The Revolt Against Managers 

Prof. Lepore juxtaposes Prof. Christensen to Michael Porter's strategy-based model of "comparative advantage." But Prof. Christensen isn't so much the un-Porter as he is the un-Peters--Tom Peters, that is.  In the mid-1990s, the management book to beat was still In Search of Excellence (1982), which Mr. Peters co-authored with Robert H. Waterman. These two management consultants did a particularly good job of facing up to the decline of American manufacturing, particularly in relation to Japan, which had been influentially analyzed in works as different as Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982), Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (1984), Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (1984), and  Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters (1985). By the time David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1991) came along to declare a fundamental change in capitalism's mode of production, prominent business writers had been trying to revive capitalism by exposing the deficiencies of top-down corporate management.

Most famously, Mr. Peters and Mr. Waterman decorously criticized management's selfish cynicism about the capabilities of their employees.  They argued that American executives adhered to an outmoded Theory X, "the assumption of the mediocrity of the masses.” Executives wrongly believed, in the words of Theory X's codifier, the MIT industrial psychologist Douglas McGregor (1960),  that the masses “need to be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment to get them to put forward adequate effort." Theory Y, which Mr. Peters and Mr. Waterman upheld, like McGregor before them,  "assumes . . .  that the expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as in play or rest . . . and the capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population" (emphasis omitted, 95).  (For a discussion of MOOC-based Theory X in higher ed, see "Quality Public Higher Ed: From Udacity to Theory Y.")

In Search of Excellence implied that American management was holding the American worker back.  The way to compete with Japan, Germany, et al was general employee empowerment.  I understand that the only management book to outsell In Search of Excellence in the 1980s was Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which was in a different way also addressing the empowerment needs of the ordinary employee. Extending the argument, Mr. Peters called a later tome "Liberation Management (1992), claiming that a kind of self-organized worker activity would grow the company's bottom line through the creative pursuit of higher quality.   Oddly enough, this kind of  "human relations" management theory surged during the Reagan years. One culmination was Post-Capitalist Society (1993),  in which the dean of management theorists, Peter Drucker, prophesized the replacement of the firm's managerial layers with the "intellectual capital" of knowledge workers, who would use their pension-based ownership of their companies to take capitalism away from passive capitalists and their managerial proxies.

(4) Innovation as Governance

I retell this history to help us avoid interpreting Prof. Lepore's account to suggest that Clay Christensen's rise was based on a series of misreadings  of corporate histories that never got fact-checked by his propagandistic discipline.   To the contrary, Prof. Christensen became a pivotal figure in management history by using innovation to re-empower management.  We can see him, in retrospect, as offering a comprehensive antidote to what American capitalists could only regard as the poison of neo-workplace democracy.  Some 1980s business blockbusters were telling stockholders and executives to share power with a new, insufferably smart-ass "no-collar" generation of knowledge workers, and that only this concession would turn the tables on the Japanese.  Many owners and executives must have felt that this price of recovery was too high.

Prof. Christensen was not working alone, of course: the "shareholders revolt" inspired by another Harvard B-school professor, Michael Jensen, was very important, as were other theories and corporate movements. But Prof. Christensen's role was particularly important in "learning organizations" (the subtitle of a 1990 blockbuster, by Peter M. Senge, that disruptive innovation also eclipsed).   Had the future belonged to the Peters, Druckers, and Senges, universities might by now have subjected financial management to the judgments of the collegium, in Jim Sleeper's term. In a post-capitalist university, administration would execute decisions made by faculty and staff collaborating with students in everyday administration and in strategy. But universities have gone in the opposite direction, with their managers controlling not only the allocation of resources but the composition of teaching staffs while, in the online era, shaping the curriculum and its delivery.   If in the 1970s it made sense for Barbara and John Ehrenreich to speak of a joint "professional-managerial class," by the end of the 1990s, managers had broken away from professionals in healthcare, K-12 education, and academia. Management had the easiest time maintaining its authority when it spoke on behalf of innovation.

Prof. Christensen, in short, offered an antidote to an unexpected return of neo-workplace democracy. His work circulated widely in firms who wanted to avoid losing to more "innovative" competitors. But even in those contexts, his work was less about maximizing innovation and more about controlling it.   His theory has rested on three main axioms.

First, as I've noted, he assumed that losing major industrial sectors to other countries is a natural law of capitalism, not a mistake of American management.  This is the meaning of innovation -- it destroys incumbent sectors in the process of creating new ones.  So stop worrying and learn to love the bomb that blew up your (old, less valuable) industries (and communities).

Second, your employees' genuine love of excellence is not the solution: it's the problem.  They will keep making better, higher-quality products (Theory Y is true!).  Meanwhile, disruptive innovation will steal your market share with crappier, lower-quality products at new, low low prices.  Your employees do want to focus on higher quality and smarter technology.  But these are always, in the Christensen model, "sustaining innovations," which are bad for profits.  So a firm needs to lower the quality of goods like photocopying or college teaching.  Prof. Christensen often goaded managers with the inability of great firms with great products to develop worse stuff quickly enough to save themselves. To move downmarket fast enough, they must control their excellence-oriented, highly effective, quality-focused workers, and resubjugate them to the firm's value proposition.

Third, this control must be exerted by management.  It is management that must interpret market requirements, and do so without concern for the human interests at stake and then compel employees to comply with these. In the Christensen antidote to a kind of shared governance with knowledge workers, management had a whole new lease on life and, indirectly, a gigantic claim to company resources. Companies should manage innovation with structures like "heavyweight teams."   Prof. Christensen defined what might have seemed a return of executive Bonapartism as the objective transmission of market signals.  You don't like your product line downgraded or your laboratory closed? Don't blame the messenger! The management team is just transmitting market signals without fear or favor. In the case of university "reform," the management team transmits a preconceived mission: The Innovative University recounts how senior managers at BYU-Idaho pushed through unpopular changes like the elimination of sports teams and summer teaching breaks on the basis of unilateral decision rights--in their case rooted in collaboration with the senior leadership of the LDS Church itself.  (BYU-Idaho has an interesting teaching model that deserves independent analysis: my point here is that it was imposed through top-down managerialism wearing innovation's clothing.)

There's a further aspect of this third feature of the Christensen antidote to knowledge-worker autonomy.   In contrast to professional authority, which is grounded in expertise and expert communities, managerial authority flows from its ties to owners and is formally independent of expertise.  Management obviously needs to be competent, but competence seems no longer to require either substantive expertise with the firm's products or meaningful contact with employees.  The absence of contact with and substantive knowledge of core activities, in managerial culture, function as an operational strength.  In universities, faculty administrators lose effectiveness when they are seen as too close to the faculty to make tough decisions. In the well-known story that Prof. Lepore retold, the head of the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors decided to fire the university president on the grounds that she would not push online tech innovation with the speed recommended by an admired Wall Street Journal article.  The Christensen model does not favor university managers who understand what happens in the classroom and who bring students and faculty into the strategy process.  For employees and customers are exactly the people who want to sustain and improve what they already have, which in disruptive capitalism is a loser's game.

The power of the Christensen script can be seen in the care with which MOOC advocates have been following it since 2012.  They first cast universities as overbuilt incumbents, the kind of places that do indeed hire nonfaculty professionals at ten times the rate of full-time tenured faculty in order to chase high-end customers and avoid the less demanding and underserved masses.  Second, MOOCsters slammed instructional employees as opposed to innovation: articles or books by analysts like Mark C. Taylor, Ann Kirschner, and Richard A. DeMillo heaped scorn on what Dr. DeMillo called "faculty-centered" universities. Third, during the 2012-2013 boom, MOOC entrepreneurs bypassed faculty to connect directly with venture capitalists, politicians, business leaders, and senior university managers.  One triumph of the campaign was the Udacity-San José State contract for three MOOC courses, which must have been the first time in history in which a university's outsourcing contract for one department's remedial curriculum was signed in the presence of the state's governor.  2014's MOOC business plays have continued the outreach to academic managers and the sidelining of teaching professionals (e.g., UC Berkeley, or Udacity's "nano degree").  MOOCs moved in so easy because they fit with the managerial ascendency over the professional authority of professors--the key institutional goal of disruptive innovation.

(5) Towards Sustainable Innovation

Let me steer this discussion back to universities. We need a new era for them, in which they are allowed to find sustainable financing and to support sustaining innovations.  (Something analogous needs to happen for industries that have huge social value, like polymer solar cells, but that can't attract private capital.)   Jill Lepore's critique of Clayton Christensen's historical errors moves us in this direction by discrediting disruption-as-such.  But her effort won't last without broad faculty support for restoring the status of professional knowledge in relation to its decades-long undermining via the theory of disruptive innovation.

One traditional ground of faculty resurgence is to affirm its professional rights and privileges.   This is important, but will not be enough to emerge from a period in which these rights are exactly what disruptive innovation discredited.  The same goes for what I've done here, which is a kind of Foucauldian analysis of innovation as a mode of governmentality.  This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of moving toward post-disruption.

We also need faculty to tie their professional expertise to the university's anti-elitist, pro-democratic social mission. Michael and I have been posting for a while on faculty- and student-centered higher ed, in company with the MOOC-based focus on learning, which, shorn of the medium's imperial pretensions, was all to the good.

Ironically, faculty can also get help from Clay Christensen's work, where a democratic impulse survives its deep managerial bias.  For example, the impetus of the BYU-Idaho experiment in The Innovative University was the democratic goal of higher quality for more students at a reasonable cost (251).  Figuring out which costs are necessary and which can be dumped required, as it always does in Prof. Christensen's work, asking two questions: (1) what job does the "customer" want done ( not what product does the customer want to buy); and (2), what jobs can the university "do uniquely well."

The Innovative University's answer to the first question was this:

the job that students and policymakers need done is the bestowal of the insights and skills necessary not to just make a living but to make the most of life.  A college degree creates its significant wage-earning advantage because it is designed with more than mere economic goals in mind.  Among those extra-economic goals are the jobs of discovery, memory, and mentoring, jobs that traditional colleges and universities perform as few other institutions can. (331)

This is a fairly basic statement, but it grounds even the "disruptive" (cut-rate) university in human development rather than job training.  It also leads to refocusing the university on its core elements: "(1) discovering and disseminating new knowledge, (2) remembering and recalling the achievements of the past, and (3) mentoring the rising generation" (331).  Again, the formulations are not ideal,  and yet even a university that has been businessed by an innovation gang would look, for example, to reduce the administrative bloat that has raised student costs and disempowered educational staff.

In the company of thousands of educators who've spoken out, Prof. Christensen is right that universities need to recover their educational focus.  It's just not his model of disruptive innovation that will achieve this.  The process cannot be lead by managers and must be lead by faculty and students.  The historical tragedy of the Schumpeter-Christensen model is that it elevated a managerial class that opposed the democratization of invention we now can't do without.  The good news is that there's no reason to make the same mistake twice.

In two recent posts (here and here) Chris made an educational and ethical case for the public research university shifting its attention to increasing educational intensity and to committing itself to a vision of universal capacity rather than its present practice of intensifying pre-existing social inequalities.  There have been, as far as I can tell, two primary responses to his arguments: 1) an enthusiastic agreement with the basic principle and suggestions for ways it could be extended and 2) a resigned gloom rooted in the widespread sense that our institutions are simply not receptive to the notion.

I want to suggest here that both of these responses are apt but that they should lead us not to resignation but to a recognition that thinking outside the normal structures of our institutions is both desirable and necessary in this instance.

The reasons are several:

First  is the serious probability that the public university as we know it is dead.  That isn't to say that it won't continue to function producing knowledge and graduates of various kinds, teaching as it does, etc. But it is winding down. It has become clear over the last decade that the public university is not fulfilling its fundamental social functions in terms of social mobility and mass education. Nor is it clear that it will be able to continue its research funding given the commitment to austerity in both state capitals and Washington D.C.

To a significant extent these issues are financial. In its present form public research universities are caught in what we might call a "low level equilibrium trap." Despite all the rhetoric about how crucial higher education is to the future, the actual visions of the political class is narrowly focused on their perception of today's job demands, a perception which is instrumentalist in teaching and indifferent to research. Comparatively, the state of California still funds a large percentage of UC and CSU's core costs. But the state's political leadership seems willing to accept the system that we have now and slowly reduce it over time (or not so slowly given the problems with the pension system and the uncertainties facing the medical centers).

We all know the obvious signs of this situation. Governor Brown is openly hostile to investing in higher education, and despite some increased funding in his budget he has made it clear that he has no intention of overcoming the years of austerity or aiding the University facing in facing its increasing costs. Given his support for Patrick Callan's latest report, Lieutenant Governor Newsom appears to think that the answer is something akin to Western Governors University.  But the clearest indication of the problem, I think, lies in the Legislature's preference for scholarships over University funding.  By agreeing to increase funding for Cal Grants the state is committing to holding down effective price without increasing funding for universities.   This does not necessarily mean that the state, Jerry Brown aside, is unwilling to support higher education.  It does mean that the State is no longer willing to support the research university in its present form. 

There is a second component to this slow death of the public research university.  As science faculty have pointed out repeatedly, they spend an inordinate amount of their time applying for grants and seeking to raise the funds necessary to support their research.  I do not want to revisit the arguments about the cross-subsidies (in whatever direction) that complicate the issue of indirect cost recovery.  My point here is that the Federal support for scientific research is in decline, that this will only increase pressure on science faculty, and that in the long-run without increased state funding for basic research the scientific enterprise as we know it cannot be sustained.  In today's "the only thing that matters is the next six months" political economy, political and business leaders may not worry about the long decline of research infrastructure but anyone concerned with the research university must be.

Now I don't think that the end of the public research university as we have come to know it is entirely a bad thing.  We are all aware of its overly bureaucratic nature, the unchecked and hidden expansion of administration, the growth of an overly intrusive audit culture, the threats to faculty rights and academic freedom threatened by online contracts and administrative policing of employee speech, its rising financial burdens on students as well as the expanding size of classes.  Even at its finest, it was a high modernist institution that tended to extended and unnecessary hierarchies.  The triumph of finance in the inner circles of the university has only made matters worse.


But are there alternatives?

One way to begin a discussion is to look at the extremely different notions of cost that exist between UC and Sacramento. Sacramento, in particular the LAO, is convinced that CSU and especially UC are inefficient in the way they provide education to students.  They make this claim based on a fairly simple calculation--dividing total core revenues by the numbers of enrolled students and claiming that the result is the real expense per student. Because UC has never been willing to actually figure out how much goes into the instructional program per student, UCOP and the campuses have been unable to challenge this idea effectively.  So long as the universities are unable to demonstrate to legislators and the public that the funding is necessary for instruction and that it will go to instruction, we will be unable to regain support for higher education institutions.  

There are, to be sure, two different sources for this gap in perception: the cost of research and the growth of administration.  To some extent they overlap (the increased oversight demanded of research funding, questions of safety, legal issues, the growth of IT) but not entirely.  And one thing that would need to be done would be to finally get transparency on where the costs lie and which ones are actually necessary for core function

But there is an even larger conceptual issue at stake here.  We can, I think, approach it by thinking about the ideas of "faculty centered" vs. "student centered" universities.  It is possible to look back at the universities of the 1950s and 1960s (during what Christopher Jencks and David Reisman called the "academic revolution") as "faculty centered" universities.  In that moment of institutional expansion (and especially expansion in the importance of graduate education) universities were centered around the interests of growing disciplines and departments.  Although some radical activists were able to compel the creation of new fields of study in the humanities and social sciences, for the most part academic fields were driven by faculty and academic fields shaped student experiences.

This university (and I know I am overstating its practical reality a bit) was quickly displaced by what we might think of as "Student-Centered University I."  In part "student-centered university I" was driven by the desire for improved rankings that took off in the 1970s and by the increasingly dominant notion of consumer choice in the 1980s that turned students into customers.  But the effort to attract customers, in particular, led to an increasing displacement of the classroom in student lives and the growing importance of both material surroundings in the university and the separation of student services from the instructional core.  Although "student centered university I" continues in part, it has  been replaced by "student-centered university II." "Student-centered University II" is marked by dramatically increasing economic inequality within the student body and it means the worst of both possible worlds for many: rising costs needed to pay for administrative services and material upkeep, worsening conditions of the classroom, increased student debt, and the managerial turn to massive numbers of poorly paid instructors with little to no job security or long-range benefits that they can count on..

What we need is the end of "Student-Centered University II."  Instead, and with acknowledgments to Paul Goodman, we need a new "community of scholars." Goodman rightly argued that the core of any university or college worth its name lay in scholarship--understood as both the creation and communication of knowledge and insight through the educational process.   To achieve a new "community of scholars" increasing educational intensity would be central.  Now, I am not trying to claim that the only spaces that matter in a university are the classrooms, laboratories and libraries. But it does seem fair to me to rethink the University as a place where these spaces are the core of the University in more than name only and in which the interplay between faculty and students is the central dynamic of the institution.  

This would entail a widespread reorganization of resources--one in which student services would be reintegrated with instruction, staff moved back into departments, and faculty involved in advising. Administrations would need to provide greater transparency of costs, and undergraduate programs would be more fully integrated with research.   

It would also entail a serious engagement with students and parents.  At least one central problem would need to be addressed in terms of the infrastructure of the university: would students and parents accept a materially less rich extra-curricular apparatus in exchange for more resources in instruction and a lower overall price?  If it is possible to offer less expensive higher ed, could it be done outside of the branding race rather than--as people like Gavin Newsom propose--by eliminating the rich intellectual life that could be offered on residential campuses?  And would parents and students buy into that vision?

As even a quick look at the questions that need to be addressed will indicate, such a reorganization of the university cannot be done from the top down.  We already had one version of that in Gould Commission.  If anything could demonstrate that real educational imagination and re-thinking will not come from the top, the Gould Commission, with its rush to accept all the conventional wisdom of educational austerity and its displacement into the fantasy of UConlline, should have done it.  The only way that a new public research university can be created will be from the bottom up, with faculty, students, and parents attempting to create a new public discourse.  

By Lindsay Thomas (Department of English, UCSB)

In June 2013, the American Academy of Arts & Science’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences released “The Heart of the Matter,” a report meant to “advance a dialogue on the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the future of our nation” and to inform policy makers and the general public about how best to support the humanities and social sciences (6).

Unfortunately, the report repeats some familiar tropes about the value of the humanities: tropes that ultimately may do more harm than good in advocating for the value of the humanities.

One trope on which the report spends much of its time is that the humanities are valuable because they teach us useful skills like “skills in communication, interpretation, linking and synthesizing domains of knowledge, and imbuing facts with meaning and value” (35). The report emphasizes that these are the skills employers today want because they are “essential for the inventiveness, insights, [and] career flexibility… of the American people.” (18-19, 33). In this view, the humanities are important primarily because they teach students skills that will be valuable for their future employment in other fields.

Another familiar trope the report repeats is that the humanities are valuable because they are the foundation of our cultural heritage and because learning to appreciate this heritage leads to personal fulfillment. The report claims, for example, that “millions depend on these disciplines in their daily lives as a perpetual source of pleasure and enrichment” (49). This understanding of the value of the humanities is so familiar that the title of the report itself gestures to it: the humanities are “the heart of the matter, the keeper of the republic – a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common” (9). In this view, the humanities are important because they preserve our cultural heritage by teaching students skills of appreciation.

There’s a lot that has been said about the limitations of this narrow understanding of the value of the humanities. There’s also a lot that has been said about the value of instrumentalism in general. However, the problem here isn’t that the report frames the value of the humanities as utilitarian. This is a familiar argument on which many defenders of the humanities have staked their claims for years, and it’s not wrong. The humanities do teach students skills with practical importance, they do teach us to better understand other cultures and ourselves, they do show us how to live more pleasurable lives.

Rather, the problem-- which is by no means limited to this report – is that the humanities in both their employment and heritage forms are framed according to a particular understanding of utilitarianism: the transmission of specific skills. Defining the value of the humanities solely and most emphatically in terms of the skills they can teach empties humanities disciplines of their content. The implication is that the most important thing humanities disciplines can do is to teach such skills, and whatever discipline-specific knowledge they may also transmit along the way is simply a byproduct of teaching this set of skills.

The report’s emphasis on skills over content occurs even when it specifically addresses humanities research, or the production of knowledge, itself. For example, the most sustained definition “The Heart of the Matter” gives of humanities research is that research in the humanities “enables us to see the world from different points of view so that we may better understand ourselves” (38). This definition frames the purpose of humanities research as helping us to broaden our perspective and to understand ourselves better, not as making new discoveries and producing new knowledge about our past and our present. Such a definition, again, reduces the production of complex humanistic knowledge to the transmission of generally applicable skill-sets. This reaffirms one of the major criticisms leveled at the humanities today: that the subjects humanists study are impractical, useless, and unimportant. By defending the value of the humanities on the grounds that the most important thing humanities disciplines do is teach important skills, we concede the point that the specific knowledge humanistic disciplines produce is unimportant.

If we want to defend the humanities as academic disciplines – if we want to defend the university itself as the place where academic research happens – we need to alter this framing of the humanities. What would it look like to defend and advocate for the specific knowledge humanities disciplines produce, for basic research in the humanities? We could take our cue from the sciences, which have been doing this kind of advocacy work for a long time. For example, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has produced a poster that features a list of “29 Breakthroughs” the lab has made possible. These range from basic research like the discovery of dark energy to more applied work like the invention of a faster and cheaper water purifier. Theoretical advances in dark energy are not immediately “useful” in the sense that they aren't currently being used in any applications, but that doesn't mean they don’t have use value. This strategy is effective because it intersperses less immediately practical theoretical advances among more recognizably practical, high-impact work, showing the value of the full range of scientific research. Could we develop something similar for the humanities? Could we develop posters that feature, for example, high-impact or more immediately practical work in the humanities like the discovery of previously unread letters written by Benjamin Franklin or projects like Timeslips, which aims to improve the lives of people with Alzheimer’s through storytelling, alongside more theoretical advances in gender theory or topic modeling?

The humanities teach students valuable skills, yes, but they also produce valuable knowledge about the world, knowledge that is not always immediately “useful” but that has use value nonetheless. It’s time we started advocating for this knowledge itself – and its usefulness for our world – as a cornerstone of what the humanities can teach us and of what humanists do.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a section this week called NEXT: The Future of Higher Education. Last year the future was Massive Open Online Courses. This year the future is something else. The shift can be visualized in this graphic, accompanying a piece by CHE Editor-at-large Jeffrey Selingo on a recent poll of professors and college presidents.

The orange bars represent faculty opinion, and the blue, that of the college presidents.  The opinion of both groups is now overwhelmingly negative towards MOOCs--at least as a mode of college education, and MOOCs will carry on and improve in the wider world. A solid majority of college presidents agree with 2/3rds of faculty that MOOCs are a negative force in higher ed, which is not something that I for one would have predicted even six months ago.

On the other hand, hybrid courses do well with both groups, particularly the presidents.  Adaptive and interactive learning technologies do pretty well too.  At a minimum, this poll suggests that nine of ten faculty feel that adaptive and interactive technologies in a hybrid environment will do no harm.  It shows fairly strong levels of faculty interest in learning innovation.  The 2012 MOOC wave had the virtue of getting instruction back on the agenda of many faculty, in large part by making teaching seem more like a site of research, where new discoveries occur and improvements are put in place. This poll confirms the momentum behind better learning. The first thing we can say about this year's CHE future is that it's focused on student learning.

Mr. Selingo identifies a further condition that would help make learning innovation more sustainable. Noting that large majorities of both faculty and presidents would like to see more change rather than less, he writes,

When it comes to driving change in higher education, faculty members overwhelmingly believe that while they should be leading the discussion, politicians were often the ones pushing the agenda. Somewhat surprisingly, presidents also said faculty members should be driving change, and agreed that it's often politicians who control the conversation.

The issues that politicians have driven are preserving access and cutting costs.  This is really one issue: what they want is the same or better access to equal quality at a lower per-student cost.  State politicians have no intention of reversing long-term cuts that left 2012’s (inflation adjusted) per-student appropriations at 70% of what they were in 1987 (Figure 3).   Many know that 1987-level state funding was what enabled the mass access to high quality that built the powerhouse knowledge economy they want to revive.  But they nonetheless can't or won't get to 2007-level public investment, to say nothing of the much higher 1987-levels.  They saw MOOCs as a way getting the quality without the investment.  What we might call the Koller Hypothesis, after the co-founder of Coursera Daphne Koller, was that MOOCs could achieve “a cost of effectively zero dollars marginal cost per student” (“Rebooting Higher Education,” p 3). In our transcript of this event, you can read Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun politely disputing Prof. Koller’s zero-cost hypothesis (p 29), but the idea that online technology could more than make up for all funding declines was firmly embedded in the political consensus--as MOOC business strategy required it to be.

In other words, when universities lose MOOCs as a budget solution, they lose the main source of hope that state politicians had for a free fix of the college cost problem for a less affluent, not wonderfully educated younger generation.  MOOCs were the austerity solution to the mass quality problem.  Without them, tempers will flare, fingers will point, and funding will not be restored. In the meantime, faculty are going to have to lead higher ed innovation anyway, and the good news is that post-MOOC-as-cure-all faculty don't need to focus on the technology to the exclusion of the “human side” of teaching and learning.

The Chronicle’s Next collection has fourteen essays on the subject, and I don't number among the most helpful the one co-authored by innovation guru Clayton Christensen.  His piece focuses on radical cost cutting through goal simplification, while the better pieces, in my view, focus on goal enhancement, which is student development.

But first we need to look at the Christensen innovation baseline. His key insight, in his classic books, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) and The Innovator’s Solution (2003), was that in contemporary capitalism truly “disruptive” innovation comes in the form of worse technology adapted to less sophisticated non-consumers. One of his early examples was Canon wrecking Xerox with its pokey, mediocre, home office copiers, which discovered a new market of people who couldn't use or couldn't afford a real Xerox machine.

The analogy with higher ed is obvious--every college charging $20,000-$50,000 a year is ripe to be picked off by innovative disrupters, except for the Harvard, Swarthmore, and Stanford-style premium brands.  Christensen's cure is always for the incumbent--especially in the middle tiers--to focus on “a critical job to be done” and stick to that. In The Innovative University (2011), the two viable types of college are Harvard and BYU-Idaho: the latter revived itself with a 4-season all-teaching faculty that created shorter, straighter lines to cheaper BA qualifications by dumping peripherals like sports teams, and ending traditional working conditions and teaching schedules to focus on modularized, highly sequenced programs in which all effort and investment is focused on highly programmed goals.

This is a perfectly fine kind of college to have, but it is cheap because teaching-only undergraduate programs with limited courses (and lower-middle intellectual goals) are indeed cheap. As many have pointed out, college doesn't cost so much because standard teaching costs so much: the costs are mostly elsewhere, and only some of them are unjustified in relation to the “critical job.” In reality, the university’s critical job is usually comprised of a complex bundle of jobs, all of which cost money.

If you define your “critical job to be done” as “creativity learning,” as I do for knowledge economies in general, and also as “public good research,” as public research universities must, then the cost savings of radical simplification are simply not available.  “Understanding” is a complex activity that requires a variety of inputs, and what we don’t want is even more stratification than we already have in which only expensive, selective, elite universities are allowed to teach complex thinking with the full range of needed practical implementations, while the children of the ex-middle class are given the mechanisms of lesser capabilities.

Higher ed needs a plurality of innovation modes—Harvard and BYU-Idaho and BYU-Provo and Michigan-Ann Arbor and Michigan Tech, etc., but not where plurality  means two or ten grades of cognitive skills. It also needs honesty about costs—doing research and intensive teaching with many small courses or “flipped classrooms” drive costs up--so that we don’t spend half our time defensively explaining why UNC-Chapel Hill will always cost more than Western Governor’s University.

Prof. Christensen’s theory has been used to say that the 99% need always to scramble downmarket.  In fact, their institutions need differentiation and universal upgrading.  Let’s just say that he and his co-author try to call a truce around disruption, and look at the other articles without trying to force them into the mold of adapting to low-cost disruptors.

When we do, what do we find? Descriptions of all sorts of interesting programs that are student-centered in the best sense, while connecting university work to learning structures in the rest of the world.   The key premise appears in a piece on remaking career centers: a center at Franklin & Marshall College

has moved from the old-fashioned "transactional" model—which focused on helping students complete specific tasks, like writing a résumé—to a developmental model that works with students over time.

Learning is at bottom human development.  It is the most immediately transformative thing that universities (and their partners) can do. One example is the Olin College of Engineering, which offers a curriculum that is historically oriented, project-based, user-focused, and entirely personal.

Before they arrived at the workshop, participants interviewed students from their home campuses to create composite "personas," which described how different types of students approach their education, what they want from it, and where they encounter difficulty. That exercise was an example of how user-centered design could be applied to curriculum planning.

Two possibly-unacknowledged insights of ethnic and feminist studies-- the importance of experience and standpoint-- seem here to have joined with practice-based theories of technological innovation to create an undergraduate curriculum that is not behind, below, and apart from research, but is research itself.  Learning is research as research-learning. The practice of it makes it clear that it can and should be available to students regardless of the price and selectivity of the particular college.

Most of the articles have moments like this: the University of Delaware creating “preceptors” to mediate between lecture and lab and to help individual students create their own intellectual trajectories.  There are the “guide on the side” reversals of questions and answers at Southwestern University, the “start-ups for all” program at RIT that aims to help students author and “self-publish” their career trajectories, and even the rolling chairs that help make Michigan state classroom groups more flexible so that, as part of a complex chain of interactions, students will have better capabilities for “communication and teamwork and problem solving in areas they haven't seen before.”

Only two questions nagged me as I read these testimonials of all the interesting things all sorts of universities have put in place. First, basic research is nearly invisible.  How does that fit in at universities where it is a major focus?
Secondly, all these real innovations cost money. In public universities, our funders wanted free ones.  How will we talk them into the kind that the public will need to pay for?

In response to all of the push-back he has received Senator Steinberg has offered yet another version of his attempt to appear to champion the interests of California's college students.  His latest iteration lightens the direct hand of legislative intrusion into curriculum without solving any of the underlying problems that continue to beset his vision.  Moreover, his continued acceptance of the rhetoric of for-profit online providers blinds him to the real costs of his proposals and to engaging in a serious consideration of alternative ways of improving access in higher education.

Still, Steinberg is proposing significant changes to SB520 and it is important to recognize them.

1) Steinberg has moved from putting into place a structured "framework" to drive the segments into relation with online providers to creating a system of "grant programs" for intensifying reliance on online programs and providers.  You will recall that in April he sought to establish "a statutorily enacted, quality-first, faculty-led framework that increases partnerships between faculty and online course technology providers aimed at allowing students in strategically selected lower division areas to take online courses for credit at the UC, CSU, and CCC systems."  Now, according to his latest amendments, he has shifted to legislating "incentive grant programs" (one in each segement) to help "faculty and individual campuses within the UC, CSU, and CCC systems to provide students increased opportunities to take strategically selected lower division courses online."

With this change, Steinberg has shifted his rhetoric from creating the "California Online Student Access Platform" to creating the "California Online Student Access Incentive Grant programs."  Under his new proposal, the state will provide funding to faculty for the purpose of increasing the numbers of lower-division online courses that will allegedly move students move more quickly either within a segment or between segments.  The heads of the Systems, "in consultation" with their Senates of course, will disburse incentive grants to individual faculty or groups of faculty. 

2) Despite changing his approach from the stick to the carrot, Steinberg is actually increasing the demands placed on the system.  Whereas in April he had required the segments "jointly" to identify up to 50 courses that served as important bottlenecks for students, he is now instructing "each segment" to identify up to 20 "high-demand lower division courses" and for up to 15 of those courses provide "incentive grants" to faculty to encourage them to enter into "15 appropriate partnerships" either within the segments or with "online course technology providers" to "significantly increase online options for matriculated students and high school pupils for the fall terms of the 2014-15 academic year."

3) Although Steinberg continues to insist that all courses created with incentive grant funding be put in the California Virtual Campus, he has softened his language on the State's direct claim to online intellectual property.   Whereas in April he declared that "the state shall retain all appropriate rights to intellectual property it creates or develops in the implementation of this section" he is now placing the question of intellectual property back within the systems themselves by insisting that "intellectual property created or developed by a segment in the implementation of this act shall be owned and managed by that segment according to its existing policies pursuant to applicable provisions of this code." 

These are clearly genuine changes in his approach.  But the question remains whether they can overcome the fundamental flaws of his earlier version?  And do they truly point out a way to an educationally desirable solution to the genuine problems of access?  The answer to both questions is no.

For one thing, as much as Steinberg may wish not to confront it, his proposals do entail a decision to spend money in one way rather than another.  None of this will be free and the funds spend through the incentive grants and the platform is money that could be spent elsewhere (say on faculty).  As the Senate Appropriations Committee Staff Analysis of Steinberg's April Version indicated, these costs are considerable.  The Staff pointed out that the CCC estimated initial course creation costs from $50,000 to $100,000 with costs higher at CSU and UC, considerable staff time and costs "to develop and approve them." Each year the costs of providing the accompanying services and administering the courses could range into the millions (although the Staff was analyzing the costs of the Online Platform its elimination will not get rid of the costs but simply transfer them directly onto the Segments).  To make the system work through the California Virtual Campus, the staff predicted that there would be the need for a common Learning Management System for the CCC alone would be $13M in the first year and over $7M in each subsequent year.  If the other systems are involved the costs would be much greater.  Steinberg is proposing to impose upon the three segments millions of dollars of new costs.  Even if the State does provide funding for these costs that money could be spent in other less speculative ways.  Far more likely is that the Segments will be driven into partnerships with online providers so as to share the upfront costs of meeting Steinberg's timetable.

These costs lead to the another problem of Steinberg's (revised) framework: the relationship between faculty intellectual property and venture capital.   Steinberg's devices to assure that neither public funding nor faculty intellectual property are diverted to "any private aspect" of alliances with for-profit online providers are weak tea indeed.  In concrete terms they do not exist.  Once placed within the California Virtual Campus it is difficult to see how faculty will retain any control over the use of their course materials or the marketing and distribution of the courses.  Steinberg's concern, understandably,  is to ensure that no student matriculated in any of the three segments or a California High School not be denied course credit for one of his online courses.  He is not concerned to control the reuse of the materials beyond the CVC without permission of faculty.  In fact there is no limitation placed on that at all.  Moreover, as anyone familiar with the debates going on within UC over defining intellectual property rights in UC sponsored online courses can attest, the property interests of the segments and those of the faculty are not necessarily aligned.

Nor is there any means set up to assure that no public funds are spent on private interests.  Should the segments enter into partnerships with the online providers, they will likely contract out services and use public funds to pay for them.  Despite the rhetoric of social justice, venture capital will demand a profitable return on its investments.  Moreover, as the for-profit MOOC providers have demonstrated, their business is information and they claim that the information they gather on students is their property.  I see no way around the notion that public funds will indeed be diverted to "private aspects" of the partnerships.

Ultimately, the drive to push through SB520 is a drive to avoid a serious discussion about reinvesting in California's educational system.  Pursuing the will o' wisp of technophilia allows the Legislature (and the Governor in his own way) to appear to be solving problems of their own making without engaging in a serious public debate over the future educational needs of the state (from K-16).  They won't overcome the pressing educational challenges facing California.

This morning I found myself on KQED's Forum with Michael Krassny program to discuss online education with San Jose State President Mo Qayoumi, Udacity's Sebastian Thrun, and (unfortunately too briefly) Student Regent Jonathan Stein.   You can find the audio here.  Although a variety of topics came up let me point to just a few of the points that became clear over the course of the hour.

First, the discourse around education online remains hopelessly muddled.   As Bob Samuels just pointed out the official line coming from the Regents, the Governor, and the MOOC-makers is that higher education has been frozen in a glacier for decades only now being thawed in the brilliant sunlight of Coursera, Udacity, and EDx.  In this framing, faculty are cast as luddites opposed to the inevitable progress of humanity.  Ironically, the only person who dissented from this in any significant way was Chris Edley who, in trying to get his desire for a virtual campus back on the table, conceded that there have been ongoing experiments on all the campuses to include digital tools and to restructure specific courses when online or digital will enrich the course experience.  The Governor's framing of online depends on a serious misreading of history. 

But today's discussion revealed an even deeper level of confusion.  One of the interesting things about today's program was that it sought to combine two extremely different problem situations: a discussion of the recent contract between SJSU and Udacity to create experimental courses designed to help CSU and high school students who need remedial teaching to thrive in college and a discussion of the direction that UCOP and the Regents want to take in expanding online courses at UC.   But while the conversation did point to several points of agreement (the continuing importance of the residential experience for college; the importance of using online resources to provide things that are different from what goes on in face to face teaching; the concern to make certain that education was not debased in the pursuit of cost savings; worries about maintaining the teaching function) what is clear is that online education is being treated as a solution to a wide range of problems without actually asking if it was really the most appropriate solution or seriously considering what other solutions were possible.

Sebastian Thrun and President Qayoumi were quite clear that they were conducting an inquiry with outside evaluation to address a specific problem.  And it does seem to be a fascinating experiment.  But as one caller pointed out, rather than turning to private providers to provide remedial education shouldn't the state  engagie with K-12 teachers to ensure that students are provided the knowledge and tools they need.  And while this experiment has gained a great deal of publicity (and one assumes will enable Udacity to monetize its program) there seems to be an unquestioned assumption that if this specific experiment works it demonstrates the wider applicability of this sort of partnership throughout higher ed.  I was reminded of the old saying that if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.

This enthusiasm merges into a second point:  it has become even clearer over the past few days that technology is being seen as a replacement for actual political debate and social investment. Although Krassny seemed quite interested when I pointed out the actual funding history of Higher Ed in California and the Governor's efforts to naturalize political decisions that he and his immediate predecessors had made, none of the other guests engaged the question.  In this silence, I could hear echoes of yesterday's Regents meeting.

The mantra of innovation and online courses as a solution for the problems facing students (student debt, time to degree, decline in face to face teaching, issues of access) allows the political and educational establishment (and the online start-ups) to avoid the question of social priorities.   Insofar as online is not being designed to replace face to face instruction but to enrich it (in which case it is unlikely to provide cost savings) then it is being used to paper over a political decision to de-emphasize the training of mass creativity so and instead expand mass incarceration and increase inequality. 

But before Jerry presses everyone to love his iPhone or Regent Pattiz convinces us to think of courses as Mp3 downloads it is important to insist that online planning be linked far more carefully to specific aims and goals.  What specific tasks are online efforts trying to accomplish? Which specific problems do they aim to solve?  How will online courses factor into larger questions of academic programs for both undergraduate and graduate students?  And what alternatives are being pushed aside in the rush to online?   Faculty have shown that you can enrich education with properly thought through digital tools and the for-profits have cut educational costs (if not prices) if you are willing to sacrifice quality.  But here is the question:  where is the evidence that you can do both at once?   

I was only able to listen to a portion of the Regent's session on Online Education (I caught the last 45 minutes of the UCOP discussion and the presentation by the MOOC providers).  But even in that period two extremely important points were made although it is unclear that the Regents or UCOP really understood their importance.  But faculty must.

The first was made by Jonathan Stein (the "student" regent).  Stein pointed out quite forcefully that in his dealing with students he found no groundswell of support for online education--despite the shibboleth that since young people today are raised on technology they must prefer digital approaches.  As Stein stressed, most UC students are paying a great deal of money, expect and want a residential environment and the possibility of real rather than virtual contact with peers and professors.  Given the National Bureau of Economic Research's recent study on the importance of real versus virtual friends for one's happiness this is no great surprise for those who take the time to think about it.  But we might want to listen to digital natives like Stein; they may understand the limits of these platforms better than UCOE does.

The power of this point was brought home by the panic stricken responses of President Yudof and Regent Lansing that no one,  really no one, not a soul, was even contemplating moving all of UC online or requiring students to take courses online.  But we should press them on this point.  If UCOP and the Regents end up trying to use the expansion of online courses--rather than say the increase in the number of faculty--as a way to overcome so-called "bottleneck" courses, and if they use online courses as the primary means to allow community college students to meet their lower-division requirements then, as a practical matter, students will be compelled to take online courses even if they are not officially required.  Faculty need to take Stein's argument seriously: but in order to do so we need to re-articulate the ecology of the residential campus and the connections between different parts of students' experiences.  It is not seeking to block innovation to recognize that there is a fundamental value to many students (especially younger students) to the residential experience and the face to face interaction with teachers and peers.  

The second point--in some ways even more far-reaching--was made by Sebastian Thrun founder of Udacity.  As Thrun insisted, online courses will not offer educational advantages if they simply try to transfer the classroom experience into a digital form.  Putting faculty in front of cameras and simply recording their lectures will only dehumanize the process of learning and serve to debase the practice of teaching.  Online will be an advantage only when it can be put together to do exercises that cannot easily be done in a classroom (and not simply in the sense that you can get more people to see a lecture) and when those exercises can be combined with a renewed attention to person to person pedagogical contact.

To be sure, Thrun's comments were directed, at least in part, towards justifying why campuses needed to hand control over course construction to his course designers.   But that is not its only significance.  Instead its greater significance lies in the reality that if online offerings are going to be used to enrich the possibilities offered in California higher ed they must be designed in ways that enrich the goals of different academic programs by either offering a different set of challenges for students or else by supplementing the face-to-face teaching already being done (the purpose of the so-called flipped course).  The first question that needs to be asked of any online endeavor is what educational value does this enable me to do that I cannot do in a more traditional format.

I wish that there was evidence that the Regents understood this point.  But judging by the close there was none.  Regent Pattiz continues to think of online as if higher ed is the music business where you purchase a download of a discrete chunk of content rather than--as Thrun and others tried to convey--an ongoing process of directed learning.  Regent Reiss, not showing the sort of attentive learning one might wish, trotted out the tired cliche about the end of the "sage on a stage" not realizing that the implications of the presentations by EDx, Coursera, and Udacity was that the teacher as director (and not as "guide on the side") becomes even more important in these models.

If the capacity of digital tools is that it may enable more possibilities for learning through questions and problems it is worth remembering that that model goes back even further than the much abused modern lecture in a classroom and that it was tied to a sage.  Because what Thrun was talking about was the reinvention of Socratic dialogue and not the download of an mp3 file.  It has been the austerity policies of the last twelve years--not the invention of new technologies or the alleged conservatism of the faculty--that has driven the dialogue and the seminar to the margins of the university.  If we are serious about the quality of education then returning the dialogue and the seminar to the center is the task facing education going forward--whether digital or not,

By AnonStaff

My understanding is that Shared Services will be based on the Research Enterprise Services model.  Many of the time-consuming functions are to be taken out of departments, including some of those that, due to their complexity, are least efficiently done at a local level.  But SS will still need the same kind of information and reassurances; they will also have the same opportunity to misread our needs, postpone our processing when they get overwhelmed, etc.

Much is being made of the term “service level agreement” in OE presentations.  OE wishes to assure “customers” that they will continue to receive the level of service that they need, promptly and efficiently.  I have been envisioning this in the form of a business contract: SS would handle the hiring needs of a mid-sized academic department, processing an estimated number of transactions per year, within the specified amount of time.  An agreement would be drawn up between a department and a mid-level SS manager who has access to metrics and knows how many hiring transactions should be completed by one staff member in one day/week.  Once the agreement is made, the pressure would be on the processing staff to get it done.  If you learn to be efficient under pressure, hypothetically you will get your evenings and weekends back.  Of course, in real offices things happen: people get fired, people go on maternity leave, and important systems go down.  Stuff happens!  But I envision that the service level agreement would remain, and the pressure would be on the mid-level managers to see that the work gets done to the customer’s satisfaction.