In an evolving market, the development of sustainable business models is always a challenge but I believe that if we build something great, a whole range of business opportunities could come our way.

Simon Nelson, CEO, FutureLearn, Feb 2013

Over the past year, MOOCs have opened the doors of access to quality education, and have captured the attention of educational leaders and students worldwide. Today, we’re excited to announce the next step in our mission to foster student learning without limits and expand the possibilities that MOOCs and online education can enable.

Coursera blog, May 29 2013

One of these statements is more candid than the other. Even if FutureLearn can’t yet tell us much about their platform, at least they’re clear that business opportunities are their horizon view. They’re also open about their parochialism: FutureLearn is a multi-institutional initiative to promote UK educational businesses in an “evolving market” already dominated by providers from “another continent”, as they put it coyly. It’s a joined-up national effort that’s at slight risk of overpromoting Britishness, but at least FutureLearn is prepared to say that educational globalisation isn’t just corporate social philanthropy on a global scale: it’s a matter of national interest.

Coursera, on the other hand, is still carrying on about the worldwide mission, using the aspirational language of venture philanthropy—all that fostering and expanding and enabling—to alibi their next move, which is equally parochial. After a loss-leading year of facilitating free and not-for-credit access to some signature higher education brands, Coursera is pushing into the market that will be most straightforward for them to monetize at scale: the massive, underresourced and evidently troubled US public education system. The prize is what comes next: being able to cover production costs at home is what enables US producers of anything to offer irresistible pricing to markets abroad. And as Ernst & Young so tactfully remind us, these emerging markets include the rapidly growing Asian middle class who are the gleam in the eye of higher education providers all over the place.

Education is a goldfield for opportunists, and MOOC providers are on it, head-to-head with LMS platforms who are also diversifying into hosted open learning. Both are able to exploit the fact that traditional higher education institutions acting competitively—which seems to be the only way we know how to behave—can only provide services at a scale calibrated to traditional staff-student ratios. And this is why the growth potential in these new markets is still tethered to the resourcing costs of academic labour.

The disruptive intervention by which commercial platforms have secured their startling competitive advantage is simple: they have done away with service labour costs.

That’s it.

Once content is created to be infinitely reusable, once the work of learning is managed by learners, and once assessment can be automated or outsourced to other learners, then normal service labour costs can be stripped back aggressively. Without these shackles, the opportunities for profit-taking in higher education are suddenly formidable again, which is why traditional textbook publishers and content retailers have perked up.

Why have higher education institutions allowed themselves to be so boxed in, that we end up auditioning to be let back in to our own field?  In part, it’s the science of distraction that explains the most basic card tricks. As those institutions, professors and graduate TAs who could best afford to engage in philanthropic volunteering made themselves available for free, so the risks of scarcity, exclusivity and closing opportunity were used to hustle others into joining up. Without having to produce so much as a single standard for quality, MOOC providers harvested the signalling value of their elite partners, and then used this to spin story after story about enhanced global educational equity, making any criticism seem like the wounded howls of the professoriate protecting their turf. Jonathan Rees has been right all along that this is about academic labour—just not that it’s primarily a threat to the tenured. What should really concern us is the astonishing prospect that things can get worse for our local adjunct colleagues, who now face being priced out of work by superprofessors with quizzes.

And now we have the low-frills version of the whole thing—the move that actually makes sense of the past 18 months. As the contractual details for the new product line make clear, after endless talk about quality education, what Coursera actually mean by quality involves video and audio standards and assessments that add up; timeliness of content delivery; and something else called “quality issues observed by Coursera”.

The nearest any of this comes to a definition of quality pedagogy is this:

“Course Criteria” means a rigorously designed Course meeting high academic standards that uses multi-media Content in a coherent, highproduction-value presentation (i.e.,not just simple lecture capture) to provide the End User opportunities for a rich set of interactions and assessment(s) (whether provided by automatic grading technology or by peer-to-peer interaction activities), resulting in a meaningful learning experience that significantly transcends static Content or plain videos.

This isn’t a quality standard, it’s PR. In fact, it’s transcendingly meaningless.

Trying to recover a sense of which way is forwards from here, I’ve been re-reading Richard Hall’s recent pieces on the enclosure of academic labour under austerity. His latest post has really helped me to see what any of this has to do with our students. Reviewing Andy Westwood’s analysis from earlier this month of the UK government’s proposed austerity budgeting, he questions whether we’re right to continue to frame educational participation only in the metaphors created by capitalism. This is really important for Australia, where we keep getting caught up in defending higher education against efficiency by talking about what our graduates do for national productivity. Hall argues—and I think he’s right—that this is a limiting vision for educational participation.

Perhaps the key is in refusing to see those social forces as human capital or means of production. Perhaps what is needed is a critique of the forms of political economy/political debate/politics of austerity that force us to view human lives and society as restricted by the idea of economic value. What is certainly needed is a recognition that the forces of production across capitalist society, which are increasingly restructuring higher education as means of production, are also increasingly ranged asymmetrically against the everyday experiences of young people.

It’s a vision, and it’s tough to operationalise. So here’s the question for those of us still labouring in higher education: in the smallest detail of our everyday working lives, what does it mean to practice this refusal effectively?

Related articles

This important development has been widely covered in the past few days.  Here are those I’ve found particularly helpful.

• In Deals with 10 Public Universities (Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• Coursera contract with U Kentucky
• State Systems Go MOOC (Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed)
• Refactoring Coursera (Mike Caulfield)
• You Can Stop Worrying About MOOCs now (Martin Weller)
• Hack Education Weekly News: MOOC State University (Audrey Watters)
• MOOCs as courseware: Coursera’s big announcement in context (Phil Hill)
• Faculty Surprise (Ry Rivard, Inside Higher Ed)
• This Fabulous Bandwagon (Jonathan Rees)
• Has Coursera Jumped the Shark? (HESA)

and see also this open letter to Coursera, if you missed it:

• Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University? (nplusonemag.com)

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s. … Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

Jon Bell, “McDonalds Theory“

Here’s my theory: the MOOCs we’ve got at the moment really are just a bad idea. This is awkward, because so much money has now been sunk into them, it feels defeating even to imagine their failure. But there’s a bright side: what if MOOCs are the icebreakingly bad idea, whose gift is to inspire us to come up with something better?

MOOCs wouldn’t be the first bad idea to be taken seriously and attract major capital investment, about which people later look back and wonder: what were we thinking?  I once met the man who co-designed the Sinclair C5, an infamous battery-powered vehicle that was expected to transform the way people got around in crowded British cities in the 1980s. The design had been feted on news programs and TV shows, and the project had a major backer with serious money. But then the prototype was tried out on an actual road, and people noticed that the battery didn’t work in the rain and it was disturbing to change lanes on wet roads at 15mph in a low lying tricycle that barely reached the wheel arch of your average road haulage vehicle. Cartoonists had a field day.

Last month, the Sinclair c5 was voted the biggest innovation disaster of all time, topping a list of mostly entertainment technology formats or communication devices that failed, and pizza scissors.

Some of these had enjoyed brief success before being overhauled by a competitor or successor, but the C5 was distinguished by being panned from the moment it showed up on the road, when all the ideas that had seemed so convincing in prototype collided with the realities of scale and use. As Rodney Dale, who has written a loving history of the C5, noted sadly, the “seductive exhilaration which won everyone over to the C5 on the test track quickly evaporated by the feeling of vulnerability among real traffic.”

But the principles and the concerns behind the C5 didn’t evaporate. The problems it was attempting to address—and the commercial opportunity it was attempting to exploit—were real. Since 1984 we’ve found out more and more about the impact of excessive oil consumption on our environment and our global economy, and we’ve continued to explore alternatives to the ways in which we use and fuel private cars. It was a visionary idea, just a really awful design.

And this is where we are with higher education. Different systems all around the world are facing different problems, but the problems are real, and the systems we’re using to address them are underpowered and unimaginative. More lectures, bigger lecture theatres, overcrowded tutorials, staffing flexibilities that are appalling euphemisms for sustained and harmful exploitation of the academic precariat, standardised curriculum and unvarying assessment practices, inflexible approaches to student creativity, timed exams, grades and escalating student debt: all of these are the bad ideas we live with and defend. So let’s not romanticise our current situation just because the alternative that’s getting all the attention is an even bigger bad idea.

Where I work we’re now seriously asking the MOOC question: should we? why? with what? for whom? And what are the risks involved in us adapting those that are being made elsewhere?  Wouldn’t it be good to have some Stanfordy things in our curriculum, especially when it comes to the foundational material in the disciplines that genuinely need their students to cover at least some of the same ground no matter where they study? Obviously, the situation’s trickier for the humanities, but don’t the world’s MOOCs give us access to new areas of curriculum that we can’t supply ourselves, in such a small educational economy?

Provided we put aside the daft and insulting conceit that we’re lucky to gain access to the world’s best professors all of whom naturally work at the world’s elite institutions, I think the answer to some of these questions has to be: well, yes. We all benefit when students access new and different curriculum, for the same reason that we gain when those who can afford it travel as part of their study program. And we all have something to share in return.

But first, we need to move beyond the bad bits of the idea: that massive enrolment is a cunning alternative to overcrowding; that volunteer tutoring is sustainable or just; that recorded lectures solve the problem of lectures; that institutional research brand is a guarantee of individual teaching excellence; that timed exams and peer-reviewed short answer papers are anything other than roll call; and that any of these services are going to remain philanthropic once the testing phase is over.

The good ideas trapped behind this wall of nonsense are starting to emerge. This week I had a lovely day sitting about with the people who design our rooms and choose our carpet tiles and light fittings, and make our award-winning outdoor spaces, which really are appreciated by everyone. Talking together we started to imagine how new kinds of campus spaces and educational technologies should work together to support international collaboration among students in ways we haven’t been able to offer before; about facilities where students could meet and create their own digital materials or remix ours; and about the need to reform our outdated business rules in relation to wireless access. It was exciting, and fun, and offered one of the best conversations I’ve listened to on the value of courage in institutional planning.

But a caveat, before we throw open all the doors and windows to the winds of change blowing from the global north: bad ideas don’t always move aside like the Sinclair C5 to make room for the better ones that follow. Here in Australia there’s a lesson from the history of imported innovations that have had long term environmental consequence: the cane toad.  Cane toads were brought here in 1935 from Hawaii, in a well-intentioned effort to reduce crop damage without excessive use of pesticides, and we can recognise those principles as basically good.  The scientist who arranged their introduction to Queensland wasn’t blinded by greed or lacking in awareness. It’s just that, as the Australian Dictionary of Biography puts it with heartbreaking understatement, “the toad proved less useful than had been hoped, and itself became a pest.”

Let’s just keep this in mind: whatever problems we’re trying to solve, and whatever ideas we think are good, we are taking care of a complex and fairly fragile educational ecosystem here. And if a toad doesn’t prove as useful as you hoped, you can’t always get it to go home again.

Abbott says no need for Gonski funding reforms -smh.com.au/opinion/politi… via @smh

— Craig Emerson MP (@CraigEmersonMP) April 21, 2013

No one’s surprised at the news that if elected Tony Abbott will hang on to the cuts made to higher education without passing them on to schools. We’re a risk averse sector with a sharp eye for the unforeseen. And this risk was exceptionally easy to see: it’s the elephant that’s been sitting in our kitchen all week, helping itself to cake. When the Labor government announced cuts to Australian universities in order to save Australian schools without securing the support of the mostly conservative State governments, with all the polls and pundits predicting Tony Abbott as the PM of a new government, our lunch money was gone.

And although the government has spent the week downplaying the Efficiency Dividend as a modest speed bump of 2% followed by 1.25%, the detail written in small print is that this is cumulative: 2014 at 2% followed by 2015 at 3.25%; and its impact will extend beyond the two years in which it’s applied by pegging the indexation of our operating grants after that to the lowered rate. In other words, we’ll continue to feel the Efficiency Dividend like shadow limb pain for quite some time.

It’s hard not to see this as an own goal by the current government, a parting gift for their successors. We’re a really small and efficient sector. We’re on track to meet the targets we were given for increased participation overall. We’re a star exporter of services. We’re already floating on a cushion of volunteered time and work. There’s not that much more to cut without suffering pushback from students and industry partners, not to mention our actual partners and families, and Australia’s full-time university workers and managers have been fairly vocal about this. (Do read Tseen Khoo’s post, which is packed with helpful links.)

We’ve said a bit less about the likely impact of the reforms to the ways in which Australian university students are funded. There are two small but significant shifts to the current income-contingent loan system, and although one will hit middle class families harder, both have had to be managed by pretending that student debt is a virtuous and low-risk investment in a very sparkly future. Firstly, there will no longer be a discount rate for those who pay their fees upfront; and secondly, the existing scholarships that help some students meet the set-up costs of participation (especially in terms of textbooks) will now be added to their loans.

Expanding investment in student debt isn’t such a gift to the next government; really, it’s more like the prawn heads left in the curtain rods.  Not only does Australia already have a hefty unpaid bill from Australian graduates who have either left the country or died with their debt intact, but this week we also have compelling evidence from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that young Americans with a history of student debt reacted very negatively to recession after 2008. They retreated from the sectors of the economy they had traditionally been expected to prop up, particularly home ownership. They became slightly less likely to buy cars that required loans. And the overall impact on the consumer economy of their inconfident spending and debt exhaustion is bluntly put:

Despite unprecedented growth in the student loan market, student borrowers appear to have participated fully in the recent consumer deleveraging. This was possible only through a collective retreat from other standard debt markets.

Student debt isn’t just bad for the economy, it’s also bad for students. It’s sold to the electorate with the image of doctors and lawyers who surely owe their fair share; less is said about the fact that those who owe most are those who are slower to reach the income threshholds at which they’re required to repay — those graduates who become parents and then spend a long time in the part-time workforce, for example, or those in remote and regional areas who remain underemployed relative to their qualifications. It’s also one of the only major debts that can be taken on in Australia without the obligation of the lender to counsel the borrower about their fitness to repay. Quite the opposite: universities market the benefit of participation on the promise of a graduate earnings premium, and keep the image of the lender and the future debt nicely vague.

Awkwardly for all concerned, the Grattan Institute has just pointed out that the graduate premium in Australia isn’t as high as it is elsewhere (p.40); and is off-trend in relation to other OECD countries. This is partly because the real growth in jobs and increases in wages has been in unskilled and construction work in the minerals and mining boom, and it might level out. But as the Grattan Institute also point out, it’s precisely by increasing the supply of graduates overall that we are playing our part in keeping the graduate premium low (p.39).

School-leaver students are unlikely to be experienced in risk calculation. This is the first big debt for many, especially those who have never had an car loan or a credit card. Meanwhile academics, who do know about the impact of personal and household debt, are so testy about the suggestion that students are consumers that we turn a blind eye to the fact that they’re actually borrowers. It’s something we rarely discuss, and we certainly don’t encourage them to let debt shape their decisions, just in case this results in attrition.

There’s a lot being said at the moment about how we should innovate and what we should do to achieve efficiency. I agree completely with Richard Hall that these calculations are framed within a far bigger crisis, and that the enclosure of academic labour and hedging of student debt are complexly linked with the deeply scarring patterns of social exclusion upon which capitalism increasingly depends. But while we’re here and making decisions, I think that whatever curriculum we draw up, whatever resourcing or delivery decisions we make, whatever cost savings we attempt and whatever justification we give ourselves, we need to keep in mind throughout it all that university students’ debt is also our debt to them for showing up.

Because with both sides of government now treating us all with equal contempt, we’re really in this together.

* The longer version: Minister for Trade & Competitiveness, Minister Assisting PM on Asian Century Policy, Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science & Research.

(Thanks to Andrew Vann for much explaining of the sums.)

From a purely technical point of view, a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings.

Max Weber, weirdly enough, in the Australian Government “Report of the Review of the Measures of Agency Efficiency“, March 2011

Whether it was efficient or inefficient, I’ll leave it to you to decide, but I think you’ll agree that only death is truly efficient. Life is very inefficient and not cost-effective at all, from a health-care efficiency point of view.

Victoria Sweet, God’s Hotel

Higher education’s in the headlights in Australia this weekend, as the Federal government has announced plans to fund its schools upgrade by applying significant savings measures to universities, university students and their families.

Cunningly, the proposition was announced in a note slipped to the media on a Saturday when, as one television commentator put it this morning, “everyone’s watching the football.” (Which just goes to show that neither government nor media have any idea how higher education workers spend their weekends.)

People have commented on the logic of cutting support to one part of the educational ecosystem in order to fund another, especially in a village economy like ours. And it’s proving a first rate opportunity to watch apparently progressive, socially-aware policy being communicated awkwardly.

I’m an Australian higher education worker and I have three children in three different public schools. I understand conflict of interest, and I also get that this strategy is an important play for a left-facing government taking a very long run up to an election. There are more votes in the education of my children than there are in the wellbeing and fair treatment of my colleagues.

Still, I’m not convinced by a communications strategy based on the message that higher education has been enjoying government largesse to such an extent that this tiny setback shouldn’t disturb us at all. This is patronising. It underestimates the pragmatism, social conviction and resilience of the higher education sector, and obscures the details of the proposal that deserve careful, constructive thought.

Here’s the part that interests me. $900m of savings will come from the application of a two-year Efficiency Dividend to universities. The Efficiency Dividend has been operating in Australian government for over 20 years, and from certain angles it does come across as a standover tactic, particularly when applied to agencies irrespective of size–indifferent to whether or not they can actually tighten their belts further without passing out. It derives from the belief that public sector organisations in general lack incentive to achieve savings because they’re not profit driven, unlike businesses who offer performance-based dividends back to their investors. Public sector organisations, the thinking goes, plough any savings they make from efficiency back into improving the quality of their outputs.

The problem is that we can’t readily measure the Efficiency Dividend this way as it’s almost as hard to measure quality as it is to measure efficiency. How do we account for the transformation of individuals from one state of capability to another as a direct result of their educational participation? Typically we turn to outputs measured quantitatively (numbers of graduates employed, measurable salary benefit of being a graduate etc.), and inputs measured in terms of standards and risk minimisation (numbers of staff employed per student, level of staff qualification, fiscal and operating sustainability). Then we further apply proxies of reported satisfaction to the complexity of experience (student exit surveys), and finally we submit the whole fruit cake of institutional data to the show judge in the hope of ranking well.

And this is why we end up with plan B: efficiency troped as cost cutting. Like Mark Dapin, I grew up in Britain under Thatcherism, and I remember how strongly the case was made for improving public sector efficiency on the basis of accusations and assumptions about what other people would do if left to their own devices. What we got was socially bad policy ineptly disguised in political euphemism. The long-term result was Billy Bragg, and significant harm to the capacity of government, media and citizens in the UK to work together on more or less any topic.

So as we look at the mess Thatcherism made of the efficiency project, maybe this is a moment for those of us who work in Australian universities to try to tackle efficiency doctrine more purposefully, especially where we have the expertise to know that a blunt instrument approach will not produce good results. In fairness to everyone who will have to make this work, we need to generate both evidence and constructive suggestions, so that we can avoid the almost magnetic lure of false economy that Efficiency Dividend planning represents.

In terms of the bit I know, I believe we should treat both online education and casualisation as efficiency bait that we’d be wise to circle around for a while. Online education in particular isn’t in its infancy, but massively open courses are quite new. They’re soup du jour in efficiency circles because they suggest that content developed and delivered entirely on someone else’s dollar could help us lower the cost of teaching our own students. But we haven’t yet figured out how this would shape the way we develop locally relevant curriculum, or maintain capacity in our own sector; we haven’t confronted the long-term risk they represent to Australia in terms of import dependency. I’ve heard a number of people over the last week say that we’ll always have higher education because we’ll always have cinemas; it seems to me that if this is your view, you need to look much more closely at the economics of cinema in Australia.

So at the end of this odd weekend of TV celebrity for Australian higher education, we need not to panic or simply complain. We have been asked to step back in favour of another part of the education system. Done. But that being the case, we now need to speak up in precise and evidence-based ways about the opportunity cost of applying the Efficiency Dividend to something as complex and socially diverse as Australian higher education. The risks are serious, and can’t be addressed indirectly by fixing the separate, upstream problems of our school system.

For weeks, I’ve been reading Victoria Sweet’s account of her 20 years working as a doctor in the last almshouse in San Francisco, in her book God’s Hotel. The Lagunda Honda hospital was repeatedly subjected to efficiency audit during her time there, and repeatedly found to be in breach of the standards applied. But somehow, doctors and nursing staff working together had achieved extraordinary results in terms of patient care, restoring individuals to life who really had no business living. This continued until the application of measures applied by highly paid consultants to reduce staffing and increase compliance, that had the additional impact of increasing dependency on forms and reporting. Laguna Honda’s auditors lacked the experience to judge the value of the procedures they observed, and misread many.

Care diminished, workers were harmed, and patients lost out. But efficiency increased.

Related articles

• Government cuts university funding to pay for Gonski (abc.net.au)
• Uni funds cut to pay for school reforms (news.smh.com.au)
• University sector to be hit in Gonski reforms (theage.com.au)
• Funding cuts will hurt unis: peak body (news.com.au)
• Govt cuts uni funding to pay for Gonski (bigpondnews.com)
• Measuring Bowen and Baumol Effects in Public Research Universities (Martin & Hill, 2013)
• False Economies: decoding efficiency (Christopher Stone, Centre for Policy Development Public Service Program)
• Beyond the Blunt Instrument: the efficiency dividend and its alternatives (Jennifer Doggett, Centre for Policy Development)

What gets you into it is a love of books and idealising wisdom. What keeps you there is exhaustion and rank fear. … The academy has become the circus.

“annamac”, comment,  There Are No Academic Jobs and Getting a PhD Will Make You Into a Horrible Person, Slate magazine

I’ve been thinking about what it feels like to be working in a university at the moment, particularly one that’s focused on change. Change is an easy project to pursue, and it always feels good to be proposing to achieve it.

But there’s another conversation about change within universities, that has everything to do with Rebecca Schuman’s sad, important, strategically naive article in Slate on the US job market in the humanities. This is where I found “annamac”, generously sharing the journey she took from believing in university work as “a life devoted to finding the truth” to “the reality – petty rivalries, forced writing about nothing, unreasonable expectations, and the disregard of you as a thinker.”

How well do we support people to weather the changes that are occurring in universities, as well as the changes in their own hopes and expectations? Universities are filled with people who have good ideas about achieving small-scale change to their everyday work practices, that together really would make a difference, but who have no confidence that their ideas will be appreciated or encouraged. This leaves them with few options for changing the situation that they’re in, other than by leaving, and for this reason it discourages even self-reflection as a form of waste. Why reflect, when you aren’t entitled or empowered to act?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’m off to a professional development opportunity that has come at an awkward time, given my own ambivalence. Professional development is an expensive exercise for which the return on investment is an employee who has been developed to become a more useful part of the system in which they work, rather than someone who is more unconvinced.

Step one in this case has been to answer a survey on the values that I practice when I’m leading a team, which has generated a fancy visualisation. I’m happy to answer these generic psychometric questions, and I’m sure they’re based on compelling research, but they’re not the questions I’m asking myself. These have much more to do with the way my job fits into my overall values as a person, the way I live in my family and my community, and in particular the way that the irregular and unregulated nature of academic work means continually failing to be present with my children, who will be leaving home by the time I get to inbox zero.

There’s no other way to say it: just keeping up with an academic job means that I habitually shortchange the people that I really love, and I’ve made very little contribution to the community where I live, even on things that are important to me. Half a kilometre from my house is a community garden; right under my nose is a mountain of email, grading, a wildly overdue book contract and administration. Take a guess.

I’m not an exception in this. Looking around me I see colleagues figuring out how much work they can secretly do while their kids are watching TV, how many emails they can answer or papers they can grade at the soccer game, how many family occasions they can miss or somehow multitask, whether or not they really have time to go to the gym. Then there are quieter conversations about alcohol, fatigue, shame and depression.

I also hear colleagues celebrating the way that technology has made it easier for them to work “when it suits”, arranging with each other to “do this over the weekend on email”, without looking at the personal, health or community impact of “when it suits” meaning “all the time”. And community impact is one of the most insidious: how many university workers, trained at public cost, make good neighbours to the elderly, or give up whole weekends to volunteering?

It’s not just academic staff. The sense that something really needs to change about the way we work is increasingly shared by many administrative and professional colleagues who are getting stuck in rigidly defined career silos, hemmed in by performance planning, reporting obligations and timekeeping systems that actively prohibit their capacity to create change, except for the changes that were proposed as actions in the last strategic plan.

Students are also trudging through their enrolment without hope of being able to ask for change, other than by filling out the zillionth survey or feedback form. A while back I ran a workshop for first year students to reflect on the choice they had made to come to university, and the choice they were continuing to make by staying. As I expected, most had thought about quitting. What surprised me was that so many had actively prepared to leave, but had then stalled because they were more afraid of not graduating than they were of boredom, for which high school had prepared them exceptionally well. So instead of figuring out either how to change their lives by leaving, or change the university by staying, they were readying themselves to buckle down, converting curiosity and optimism into minimum-effort pragmatism.

These students were facing a dilemma I recognise. There’s a sustainable familiar situation that will persist if you do nothing, and there’s the potential to take risks and strike out for some kind of unknown. The familiarity of the sustainable situation weighs heavily, especially if others depend on you, but the devil-you-know calculation includes a hidden risk that the gradient you’re on will continue its subtle decline: the unhappy relationship becomes unbearable; the job that bores you starts to make you sick; disappointment hardens into bitterness and anger.

So where there was a simple problem that was external, now you’ve entered into a contractual relationship with the problem, and your decisions—even decisions to do nothing but plod on—are feeding it.

Universities that are serious about creating change and not just reacting to it could listen with a more open mind to the stories and experiences of their own employees and students who have ideas for changing the way we work. We so love to measure things; let’s measure how effectively we support those who come up with ideas for working differently—rather than just filtering them through preset beliefs about successful types and failures, or generic assumptions about the right remedies, offsets, or incentives to improve their performance.

(for C.B.)

Related articles

• The Disposable Academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (economist.com)
• Post-PhD Life: The Darkened Road (caledoniyya.com)
• There are no academic jobs and getting a Ph.D. will make you into a horrible person: A jeremiad. – Slate Magazine (joshuakeiter.com)

And the best piece I’ve read on the original Slate article:

• Blanket “Don’t Go To Graduate School!” Advice Ignores Race and Reality? (Tressie McMillan Cottom)