Is This Really The Best Way To Do Things?

The past few posts on the nature and role of the university may cause people to ask if this is really the best way to do things. The answer, I believe, is yes! If universities were any more efficient they would be dangerous. In order to explain that outrageous claim, allow me to digress for a moment.

Machiavelli, the author of late Medieval book of real politic called The Prince, provided sage advice for keeping a Prince in power. However, what few people know is that he had second thoughts later in life about the advice that he had given. When you think about it, a monarchy is really the most effective form of government as long as two conditions occur. First, the monarch must understand what it good for the people he or she is governing. And, second, the monarch must be competent enough to achieve what is good for the people. If the monarch is corrupt (or at least does not make the needs of people primary) or if he or she is incompetent, then monarchy is not such a good idea. And therein lies the problem. Given what we know about people and human nature, it is unlikely that these conditions will be met. Hence we need a form of government that does not rely so much on a single person.

In steps democracy. It isn't that democracy is the most effective form of government. It isn't. It is slow, ineffective and often contrary. However, given our understanding of human nature, it is the most likely to be the most effective over time. It is not the most efficient. It is the most risk free. A monarch can use his or her power to very efficiently take a nation in a very wrong direction. If a democracy goes in a wrong direction it does so very slowly with much debate and discussion and many opportunities for correction.

Universities are similar to democracy in that they are slow, inefficient, and often contrary. However, as the guardians of reality, that is exactly what we want. We do not want to go tooling off in the wrong direction with great efficiency. We want to make sure that if we go in a wrong direction we do so slowly with much debate and many opportunities for correction.

Indeed, if you look at the history of universities, this is exactly what happens. It is exactly what we want to have happen. And therefore it is the best way to do things over the long term.

Guardians of Reality

Our perception of reality is in a constant state of flux. I use the phrase "Our perception of" to avoid philosophical arguments although the statement is equally as true without it. What appeared to be real to an ancient Egyptian was very different from what appeared real to an ancient Greek. Different again for a Medieval noble, and different again for scholar during the enlightenment. Our modern view and postmodern views are, again, very different. We can loosely define reality as our perceptions of the physical world, our social structures and values, and our spiritual expressions. It is what we think, believe, feel, experience and so on. And it is constantly changing. The comedian Lily Tomlin once said "What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch" And that is about as serviceable as any philosophical attempt to nail it down any further.

Reality changes because we are changing. We try new things. We learn new things. We reject old idea and accept new idea. We have new experiences and new concepts. If our perception of reality were static, they would, over time, fail to meet our needs. And, at the same time, if they changed too fast we would have a hard time keeping up with it all. So, in order to maintain the stability of reality we need a social institution that is on one hand tasked with advancing reality, and, at the same time responsible for maintaining its stability. And that social institution is the university. A couple easy examples will clearly illustrate this.

First consider the role of the university in education. On one hand the university indoctrinates students into the corpus of existing knowledge. This is a reality maintenance function. On the other hand, university classes encourage students to think for themselves. This is the advancement function. How can you tell students on one hand to learn what you are teaching them and one the other hand to think for themselves? Well, it is just part of the role of the university in maintaining and advancng reality.

Second consider the role of the university in research. On one hand the university generates new ideas. H.L. Mencken once said "There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who believes it". One of the responsibilities of the faculty is to put forth and entertain new ideas. There is no tenet of our worldview that didn't start out as a stupid idea at some point. And yet, there are processes in place to keep stupid ideas from escaping out into the world of real people. There are tenure committees, peer reviews, commentary, viscous fights between differing schools of thought and so on. So the university allows reality to advance by adding new ideas, while keeping that advancement from happening too rapidly.

So when we complain about the vagaries of the university - the teachers who no longer want to teach, the researchers who no longer wish to pursue research, the administrators who came to the university to avoid administration only find them selves in administrative roles - you have ask: is the guardianship of reality important and can you think of any better way to do it?

Academic Service

There is a rich assortment of Academic Service roles within the University which I am going to simplify into two categories: voluntary committee work and paid administrative work. Voluntary committees usually involve some sort of policy making while administrative roles generally involve running something. Neither hold up particularly well to scrutiny.

Most academics have some sort of voluntary committee work and the effort required can vary greatly. There are committees that literally never meet and these are considered plum assignments as one can meet their obligations for service without doing anything. Other committees meet frequently and are usually addressing a problem that the committee members feel is important. The two extremes are rare and most committees meet now and then with limited attendance and limited productivity. As far as I can see, committees serve two purposes. First, they engage faculty in the workings of the university and allow faculty to meet other faculty that they might otherwise have no way of knowing. This is a good thing because faculty tend to become rather isolated in their teaching and research. Getting to know other faculty helps develop a sense of community among the faculty. The second is that committees keep faculty engaged in the policies of the university. Again, faculty tend to become rather isolated in their teaching and research. So committees allow them to stay in touch with any changes that may be brewing. People often forget that these are the two primary purposes for committee work and think that committees should be productive; that is, they should get something done. This misses the point and if a committee gets something done, it is a by product of the other two objectives.

Far fewer faculty have paid administrative roles. These roles include running a department, a program, or a school, all the way up to major administrative roles within the university. As I mentioned earlier, most academics prefer life at the university to the administrative life in a corporation. So why do some faculty migrate into these roles. In fairness, I should say that some if not many did it reluctantly. However, may actually pursue these roles. And there are two reasons, as far as I can see why they would do this. First, it needs to be done. That is, somebody has to do it. Faculty are an odd group of people and are reluctant to be led by someone who does not understand what they do. As a practical matter this means another academic. Academia is a culture unto itself. And one of the tenets of that culture is to only accept leaders from within the ranks. The second reason, also touched upon earlier, is that at some point most academics run out of steam for teaching and research. If they wish to remain vital and contributing administrative service roles provide that opportunity.

People looking at the univeristy from the outside often see the inner workings as bizarre, non productive and often neurotic. But, there are good reasons for the university being the way that it is. Universities are the "Guardians of Reality". And that will be the topic for next time.

Service: The Saftey Net of the Dispossessed

One of the great ironies of academic life is that many bright young people pursue academic careers because they find the idea of administrative life in the corporate world to be less than desirable. And, then, they find themselves, after a productive decade or two, in the administrative life of the university. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to sustain your productivity in research over the long term. And it is equally as difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching.

There are three reasons why it is difficult to sustain your productivity in research. First, research requires mental energy. Mental energy declines as one ages and one is unlikely to engage in challenging new research as they get older. Second, research requires enthusiasm. Younger researchers are often driven by a desire to discover and be recognized for that discovery. As you publish paper after paper that few people care about, it is difficult to maintain that idealistic enthusiasm. Finally, the audience for research can be very fickle. What was a hot topic one decade can be a hard sell the next and an impossible sell after that. Since one is unlikely to embark on new avenues of research later in their career, they find that there is simply no audience for what they would like to write papers about.

Similarly, it is difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching. Initially, it is a heady experience standing up in front of an audience of students and telling them things that they want to know or need to know. It is also quite satisfying to adjust over time to their challenges. Further, it is exciting to learn new things and pass them on. However, at some point there are no new challenges in the classroom. You have been asked every conceivable question multiple times. Students fade into one another as you have difficult remembering all the names. And you, some times, dread giving a lecture as you know you may very well bore yourself.

This does not happen to everyone. But it does happen to an overwhelming majority. This is really the point where one should move on to other things. But, if you have been an academic all your life and know nothing else, what can you move on to. The answer, of course is service to the university. There are any number of service roles from voluntary committee work to well paid administrative positions. Next time we will explore the richness of those alternatives.

The Curse of Soft Requirements

I suppose that soft requirements is an oxymoron. If something is required, it is a requirement. If it is not required, then it is not a requirement. However, I think most people would understand the phrase soft requirements as things that you need to do where the exact nature or criteria are unclear. As academics we have two soft requirements: keeping up with the advances in our fields and publishing our own advances in respectable outlets. Both of those soft requirements are worded vaguely on purpose, because in the real life of an academic they are equally as vague.

Keeping up with the field means that as new things happen, you stay on top of them. This, however, can mean many, many different things. Is it keeping up with research, or news events, or technology, or policy changes, or current trends among practitioners? It could be any of those things. In my field of Information Technology, you could spend all your time keeping up with advances in just one area of the technology. This is unusual, however, as most fields do not have as much in the way of evolving and emerging technologies. Most people believe, somewhat naively, that if you are an academic in a specific field that you will be on top of everything happening in that field. This would only be possible, of course, if there were 5000 hours in a day and you had several hundred clones. Nonetheless, people tend to be aware of what comes across their field of vision and unaware of everything that doesn't.

Publishing in respectable outlets is also a bit squishy. In an ideal world, it would mean respected peer reviewed journals published in paper form. However, the world is not ideal. Peer reviewed journals often have a long lag in publication and focus on concerns largely of interest only to academics. This makes their relevance questionable. If you are in a hard core academic discipline, this is not a problem. But in a professional school it is. On the other hand, if you go to web based publication or widely read practitioner publications, it is considered to be lacking in rigor. So, you can't win.

That should be the mantra of academics. You can't win. And that is the curse of soft requirements. No matter what you do, there will be a few who think it is great and many who think it is a silly waste of time. So, you can work long hours only to find that others think you are just wasting your time. And this causes many academic to simply not work long hours. It is a rational response. You can work like a fool and face criticism or you can do nothing a face criticism. As Mark Twain would say, the wages are the same and one way is a lot easier.

After a while you find that academics who are productive can't help being productive and academics who can help it stop wasting their time. But what do they do instead? They have to do something and most turn to service, the homeless shelter for the academically dispossessed. And that will be the topic for next time.

Blessings and Curses

Now and then I like to provide some insight into life as an academic. And since I don't have a better topic on my mind this morning I thought I would write about one of the greatest blessings of my academic professional life. And that is that I have an enormous amount of control over my time. The things that I have to do are limited. I have to meet with my classes and when it gets down to it that is probably about it. If you don't show up for your classes the university could terminate your tenure. So that can be thought of as a hard requirement.

There are also firm requirements. I need to prepare for my classes. While I actually spend an enormous amount of time preparing for my classes, there is a wide variation in how much time academics spend in general. I spend a lot of time for several reasons. First, I am interested in the material that I teach so broadening and deepen my knowledge is something I enjoy doing. Second, I like teaching so I am constantly looking for ways to improve the delivery. Third, my field of Information Technology is constantly changing so just keeping up with what is going on requires time (in fact, a LOT of time). It would not be unrealistic to say that I spend two to four hours in preparation for each hour I teach. However, I think I am at an extreme end of the spectrum. It is easily conceivable that once one has their lectures nailed down they may spend very little, if any, time in preparation. But, clearly, if one puts in no preparation time for their classes, it will eventually show up on course evaluations. So, it is best to be prepared. This is a firm requirement because you have some wiggle room in how you pursue it. But, if it gets bad enough you can be pulled out of the classroom with dire consequences.

If one were to think about this in terms of hours per week, the hard and firm requirements could translate into as few as four hours a week (two 2 hours classes with no preparation time) and as many as 22 1/2 hours per week (three 2 1/2 hour classes with two hours of preparation for each hour of class) .

One of my colleagues once joked that the nice thing about being an academic is the flexibility - you can work any 80 hours a week that you choose. But how did we get from a range of 2 to 20 hours of hard and firm requirements to 80 hours a week? The answer is that the flexibility which is a blessing is also a curse. And as we get into the soft requirements next time that curse will become more obvious.

Power, Wealth and Fame

I listened to a book on CD last week entitled 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. It provided 48 laws (actually conflicting pieces of advice) on how to become powerful or more powerful. It was worth listening to and most of the advice was fairly sound although it would still take a fair amount of thought and reflection to apply it to the greatest advantage. Many of the reviews of the book on Amazon were offended by the Machiavellian tone of the book and this got me to thinking about power and related goals such as wealth or fame.

Aristotle said that happiness is the only goal that we seek as an end in itself. We want to be happy simply because we want to be happy. However, other goals, such as power, wealth or fame, we want because we think they will make us happy. I think the thing that offended the reviewers on Amazon was that this book provided rules to make yourself more powerful without asking if you wanted to be powerful, how much power you really wanted or whether you wanted to pursue power as an end in itself.

We actually know a fair amount about how to achieve power, wealth and fame. The problem is that most people are unwilling to do what it takes to achieve them. Why is that? I think the problem is that these are not end goals in themselves. They are sub goals in the pursuit of happiness. If we have to do something that makes us unhappy in the pursuit of happiness then we have defeated our attempts. But, let us say for the sake of argument that we can pursue these goals without doing anything unpleasant. Is there still a problem?

Yes, there is. The problem is conversion. Money itselfs does not make one happy. It is the things one can do with money that increases happiness. Power does not make one happy. Again it is the things one can do with power that may increase their happiness. If one acquires a large amount of money, power or fame and has not figured out how to convert them into happiness then the whole exercise has been pointless. There is nothing inherently wrong with the pursuit of power, wealth or fame as long as it is done in the context of a meaningful and satisfying life.