[Book Notes] from "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education"

What to do when your institutional structure has become a Gordian Knot, and how this relates to the political science degree and NYC governance

I recently finished Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. If you’re wondering what it’s about, the title is pretty self-explanatory. This post is a sketch of ideas and quotes that I found interesting from the book, rather than a typical book review. I hope you buy the book and read it.

Quick highlights

Honest talk from a practitioner. The author, Brian Rosenberg, is president emeritus of Macalester College and a current “President in Residence” at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. He’s been all around higher education, but he has no axe to grind. He describes the nature of higher ed in frank terms that take no one’s “side,” and he exhibits extreme self-awareness that is both reassuring as a reader, and bold as an author: “The other reason I draw on personal experience is that this book is as much confession as criticism. There is hardly an error in judgment, an act of self-interest, or a stubborn refusal to change discussed here of which I have not, at some point, been guilty of myself.” (xii)

The problems are primarily structural. Many people have observed that American universities are broken in fundamental ways. It can be easy, and possibly fun, to attribute this to some cabal of evil people. But this book places the origin of their problems primarily in institutional structure, changing society, and concomitant personal incentives. The largest structural failing is that too many people can say “no,” and not enough people have the power to say “yes.” Status quo bias strikes again.

A good use of your time. It’s 165 pages long, and information dense. This isn’t one of those books that needlessly balloons past its reasonable size. You get what you came for, and you don’t have to expend extra effort to separate wheat from chaff.

Why I personally liked the book

I want to reform part of higher ed, the political science degree. Maximum New York’s mission is to change the way that people learn about government. In most instances, that means they need to start learning about it in the first place. One place where they should learn about it, but don’t, is college. I wrote about broken political science degrees, including what we can do (and I am actively doing) to fix them. Rosenberg’s descriptions of university dysfunction largely describe the dynamics that prevent change in political science too.

Political Science Degrees Must End

Universities have become a vetocracy, and so have many parts of American government. Both are large, collective decision-making institutions that are extremely cross-pressured. Both need to grow and evolve, but both are politically and procedurally strangled by NIMBYs who block any such process—academic or otherwise. Those who want to change higher ed, and those who want to make our government function more smoothly, can learn a lot of from one another.

University dysfunction causes government dysfunction (and vice versa). To pull together the two points above: we have a university system that churns out people who, despite having political science (and related) degrees, don’t know anything about government. This has disastrous effects on civic and governmental efficacy, the least of which is it takes years for people to learn on the job what they could have learned in their degree programs—but many never do. The whole engine is slower. Fixing universities, at least the political science parts, would go a long way to help America self govern. The two projects are related.

Big ideas I took away from the book

First thing’s first, know how it works

Since I started a civics school, people often ask me questions about government and politics. More often than not, they already have a strong opinion on the question they’re asking—and they don’t know how the government works at all. In my Foundations of New York class, the first thing we do every session is draw a map of the government together on a white board. If you don’t even know the government’s basic constituent parts and how they relate, you’ll be hard-pressed to layer on more advanced knowledge correctly.

Rosenberg expresses a similar sentiment here:

There is a difference between being a theorist or external observer and being a practitioner. Far too many of higher education’s fiercest critics have never or rarely worked within higher education, which does not render their views invalid but often renders both their criticisms and their proposed remedies imperfectly informed or unrealistic. (xi)

His book is filled with detailed descriptions of “in the room” moments of university governance and administration, and chapters like “The Disciplines” and “Shared Governance” shed light on the basic structural components of any college or university one would need to know about. One thing I would love to see added in a subsequent edition or a freestanding post on the internet: an example diagram of a real university’s basic governing structure.¹

It’s all about structure and incentives, baby

As is often the case in critiques of higher education, there is a tendency to blame individuals for problems or failures that are in fact structural and systemic. My answer to a question posed in the Boston Globe—”College presidents are leaders, but why not innovators?”—is simple: because in reality, job descriptions notwithstanding, they are not actually hired to be innovators and are not provided with the conditions within which to innovate. (55)

Any group of people, and any large institution, will have to make collective decisions. The structures and culture they set up to make these decisions determine not just what decisions are made, but whether decisions are made. In the case of universities, they tend to avoid making decisions. The go-to move is to copy someone else, have a years-long listening campaign, or re-up what you did last year.² What structural features contribute to these behaviors?

Shared governance. Shared governance between the governing board, the president, and the faculty. As you can imagine, they all have different ideas about how to run things, and their power-sharing isn’t well structured. For example: “One can see in this description the seeds of many of today’s presidential challenges, since solving problems of obsolescence in a system of shared governance often requires the faculty to agree that something is obsolete.” (96) This is a tough sell when it’s faculty work or methods that become obsolete.

Shared ownership.

One of the distinctive, and distinctively complicating, features of higher education is the number and variety of the constituencies that believe they have some right to “ownership” of the institution. Boards of trustees, administrators, faculty members, students, parents, and alumni all in some sense consider a college or university to be “theirs.” For public institutions, legislatures, governors, and even taxpayers can be added to the list. Each of these groups has little power to create change on its own but considerable power to impede it. (52)

In the chapter “Incentives,” Rosenberg describes all of these would-be owners in a fundamentally similar way: proponents of the status quo, at best.

Departments and disciplines.

Very few if any other industries are chopped into as many different, highly specialized pieces as higher education. Very few have so few interchangeable parts and so little organizational flexibility. Very few, as a result, are so agonizingly difficult to change.

The estimable Clark Kerr, first chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, famously described the American university as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” (72-73)

As Rosenberg describes it, faculty feel a connection to their department and their field, but not really to their university—or to an integrated program of learning for their students. This creates larger problems when faculty prioritize specialized research to the detriment of general, cross-disciplinary learning.

Tenure. It promotes viewpoint conformity, as non-tenured academics seek the approval of their tenure-having colleagues, and it makes necessary departmental reorganizations an impossible task.

To an even greater extent than shared governance, tenure is expressly designed to prevent change: change in individual positions, change in departments, change in colleges and universities. If the goal is preserva­tion and very slow, very incremental evolution, tenure is a tool of enor­mous value. Once tenured, faculty members in particular disciplines with particular specializations and particular ways of teaching are frozen in place for as long as they choose to be. (132)

When it comes to institutional as opposed to individual power, tenure mostly confers the ability to say no: no confidence in a president, no to a change in governance structure, no to almost any mandatory training program. It is far better suited to preventing than inventing. Tenure makes it next to impossible to add new disciplinary or interdisciplinary programs without taking many years or adding to the size of the faculty. In a period of growth this might have seemed feasible. Today, for most institutions, it is not. (133)

Money. Colleges need it to run, but a lot of people get squirrely when it comes down to brass tacks. The societal reality is that the number of incoming college students is shrinking,³ while colleges also contend with inflated costs driven by the structural factors above.

This is a wicked double bind, and it often makes them risk-averse. No one wants to try to implement radical change—that might bankrupt the university! The problem: many of them are already at that juncture. They will literally die before they innovate.

And thus the questions at the heart of this book: What is it about the structures, practices, and culture within higher education that has for so long prevented transformational change in an industry that, by most measures, is under enormous pressure and failing to deliver fully on its promise? Why do even institutions on life support fail to go in radically new directions? And is there anything that can be done about this? (5)

The tribes get it wrong

Rosenberg has a point of view in his book, and it will make almost everyone upset at various intervals. To this I say: good. I want to read a point of view, not fluff. The quote below gives you a good example of how he views governmental actions against, and related, to universities:

The ideas of governors and legislators in states like Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Idaho—in fact in virtually every Republican-led state—are generally ill-formed and antithetical to free inquiry, but the motivation is absolutely clear: to get elected. Higher education in these states has become a frequent and visible punching bag not because it is among the most pressing problems in the state but because it is among the most inviting targets. For a party that has become increasingly reliant on the support of noncollege-educated voters, attacking college is a relatively low-risk, high-reward move—and higher education has been much less adept and courageous in responding to these attacks than have leaders in areas like reproductive rights, anti-racism, and gender equality. Democratic politi­cians, while far less aggressive and less threatening to academic freedom, are not above basing policy proposals on electoral calculations: the rush by many to support the forgiveness of student loans is less about the fairness or economic sense of such proposals than about the desire to appeal to voters in a particular demographic. The unwillingness of higher education seriously to address from within issues including rising costs, post-tenure review, and viewpoint diversity has left it particularly vulnerable to inter­ference from without. (67)

It’s a Gordian Knot

If you’ve gotten this far in the book notes, the problems that many universities face seem like a classic impasse: everyone agrees there are terrible problems, but no one knows how to fix them, and no one is stepping up to try:

Allude in any room filled with college employees to the resistance to change and you’ll get lots of head nods and smiles of recognition. Still, that resistance persists, as if it is a condition that is forever unalterable. (xi)

There’s a similar phenomenon in New York City civics and governance too:

New York City has a lot of curious problems. Despite being America’s preeminent city, possibly the world’s, it continues to lose the ability to course correct and do fundamental things. For example: it uses sidewalks as garbage bins, it can’t build subway lines (and hasn’t in about 80 years), and it can’t build housing.

In the face of these truly extraordinary circumstances, the vast majority of New Yorkers, especially those with intellect, money, and time to spare, do nothing. They don’t try to learn the source of the problems, and they assume they’d be unable to fix the source if they discovered it. They just vaguely blame city hall, take the punches on the chin, and move along. Why is that? I think it’s profoundly strange behavior. (from Atlantis on the Hudson)

So what do you do in these kinds of situations? How can higher ed be fixed? Throughout Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, Rosenberg provides a lot of discrete ideas (for example, replacing tenure with a series of time-bound contracts). The last chapter, “The Path to Change,” even compares university norms and structure between the U.S. and Africa.

But ultimately, when you’re faced with a Gordian Knot type of problem, there’s really one essential thing you need.

Have courage, march forth

Gordian Knots require someone with patience, endurance, and intelligent politesse. But, fundamentally, they require courage. You must not only go against prevailing structures, you must say aloud what no one else is saying. You must declare that the emperor is naked. You must part from the herd.

You must be willing to think, “I can be the one to fix the problem no one else could.”

There are, of course, better and worse ways to do this. But you have to be willing to find the affordance that no one else has tried, or was too timid to try, and pursue it.

“I hold out hope that somewhere there are educational leaders who, when presented with the opportunity and the risk of challenging orthodoxies and changing for the better, will decide—unlike the version of me with which I began this narrative—that yes, it is worth it.” (165)

As in higher education, so in New York City governance.

Excelsior.

Alexander the Great cuts the Gordian Knot by Jean-Simon Berthélemy (1743–1811)

1. I’m working on a public “map of the NYC government” that I plan to publish in Q1 of 2024. It’s been a larger project than I initially expected, but it’s on the way!

2. Here’s Rosenberg on the Williams College strategic planning process:

“This deliberate approach,” we are assured, “allowed time to invite participation by a generous cross section of the Williams community, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, families and area residents. Our eight working groups and three strategic academic initiatives all together held more than 120 campus outreach meetings with departments, offices and student and staff groups" (inclusion of all voices, the creation of many committees, and the scheduling of hundreds of meetings: check, check, and check). (102)

3. Many institutions that track undergrad enrollment have pretty rosy future projections though, if “doesn’t plummet and holds the line” counts as rosy.