To Research or Not to Research, that is the University Question

I just read this excellent article by Kevin Carey. If anyone works in higher education, it is worth a few minutes of your time to read it. He chronicles the path of higher education that most colleges and universities in the U.S. have taken over the last 100+ years. While IU may not have followed this path exactly as he describes, there are many similiarities. As such, the warnings and issues he raises can be applied to IU, right along the other 150 instutions he refers to.

Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That’s where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn’t have them, a copy would do.

What really grabbed my attention was Carey’s reference to Clayton Christensen, who I have written about before. Carey does a fair job of describing how disruptive innovation can adversely affect established organizations (most research universities) and can favor the newer upstarts (for profit schools).

Clayton Christensen, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and others examine the vulnerability of older institutions-and the very real threat posed by new ones-in a recent report called “Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education,” just published by the Center for American Progress. Christensen sees online higher education, currently used by nearly one-third of all college students and steadily rising, as a potential “disruptive innovation.”

I found the following passage to be the most disconcerting point in the article. We are already seeing the early tremors indicating that the easy money model is starting to come apart. It is not sustainable. Any organization that believes it is will find themselves woefully behind once the tide turns.

The day of reckoning has been delayed in higher education because many of the most obvious disrupter candidates, for-profit colleges, have spent the past decade feeding on the federal student-loan system rather than delivering high-quality courses to students at a low price. But as the raging debate over for-profits shows, the era of easy money and lax regulation is ending. If federal officials do their job right, future for-profits will have to reorient toward high-quality classes and competitive prices. It will be very hard for traditional institutions to respond. (Emphasis added by me)

So, what is the disruptive innovation that is causing all of this? Online courses. How can this be? Well, as I mentioned in my previous post on disruptive innovation, in order for something to truly be disruptive it must have there specific characteristics:

1. they generally make possible the emergence of new markets,
2. they appear to be financially unattractive to existing organizations, and
3. they do not meet current customers needs.

Run that through the research university model filter and I think you will see that it is a perfect fit. Where does that leave those of us in the established institutions? Carey says:

Fortunately, there is no reason that public officials can’t build new, low-cost colleges and universities that aren’t burdened by a century of trying to ape the research university. There is nothing preventing public institutions from doing what for-profit colleges have already done-enroll tens of thousands of students in online courses-but with the goal of service instead of shareholder enrichment.

It is possible to make the transition. The tough part is figuring out how to design, develop, and implement a strategy that will effectively achieve this. I have to admit, I have seen lots of poor attempts at doing this, both at IU and at many other institutions. We are all going to have to ask ourselves some tough questions. We will need to work hard to come up with valid answers. This is a prototypical wicked problem, as described by Rittel and Webber:

the problems of governmental planning — and especially those of social or policy planning — are ill-defined; and they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution. (Not “solution.” Social problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved — over and over again.)

As I was reading Carey’s article, it caused me to consider a question — Is IU a research university or not? I am not going to go into the extensive detail of how this term is defined. Let’s just say that typically research equals PhD. So, yes, IU is a research university. And, no, it is not! There are over 40,000 students enrolled at IU-Bloomington. Only 8,500 of them are graduate students, and most of them are master’s candidates. So it is on this issue that I veer off a little bit from what Carey is saying. While his points may hold true for the schools that still do not have PhD programs, I realize that IU is a hybrid. That has its benefits and its drawbacks.

One of the most important things we need to recognize, and I do not think most administrators think this way right now, is that we are two different types of institutions within one organization. We are a conglomerate. We are the GE of higher ed. It is going to be interesting, to say the least, to see how we navigate these stormy seas of disruptive innovation. There are some very smart people here. They clearly have the talent and resources to pull it off. The key is whether or not they are willing to develop the new concepts that it will take to effect the change or succumb to the “fatal inability to imagine something other than a palace on a hill” as Carey calls it.

Rittel, H. W. J. and M. M. Webber (1973). “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Policy Sciences 4(2): 155–169.

Originally published at https://web.archive.org on February 23, 2011.