Change Challenge

Roughly 93 years ago, Franklin D. Rosevelt began his inaugural address thus:

“Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”  

Increasingly, I am coming to believe something pretty similar about Canadian universities and their ability to confront the challenges of the next few years. The sector is perfectly capable of remaking universities to make them more resilient, responsive, effective, and efficient. It just lacks the self-confidence to do so.

(See also Jean-Claude Juncker’s “we all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it”, or, Walt Kelly’s more pithy “we have met the enemy and he is us”.  It’s all of a piece, really.)

But I think that a lot of this self-doubt comes from the stories we tell ourselves about change in higher education. There is a narrative of stasis, and it is this narrative, rather than any actual constraints, which defeats any attempt at change even before change is attempted. 

(I am as guilty as anyone of this of course. My favourite higher education joke of all time – apart from the existence of the University of Southern California – is without a doubt “how many universities does it take to change a lightbulb?” “Change!?!” I digress.)

Anyways, my point is I actually think that universities have the ability to get a lot more change through the system than they think they do. So, I want to challenge institutions to try something.

Start by making a list of the things you wish you could change about your institution. Nothing involving money: just – what are the characteristics you wish your institution possessed but does not. For instance, you might say “I wish we could update curricula more quickly”, or “I wish we could make decisions with less time in meetings”, or “I wish we could make better connections with the local community”.

Now, once you have put down a list of say 5-10 things, ask yourself – what’s really holding this institution back from being everything it could be?  And – this is the challenging bit – you have to be brutally honest about the reasons. It’s easy to say things like: “accreditors won’t let us do X”. But is that really true? Go read the accreditation handbook. Check out how many degrees of freedom you really have. Very often, what is seen as a straitjacket is just an ill-fitting suit. Same with “but the collective agreement makes it difficult!” Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Even where it does, maybe it’s something that can be changed through bargaining. Heck, sometimes agreement clauses don’t even work the way they were originally intended or have perverse consequences. If that’s the case for what you want to change, it’s the kind of thing a skillful academic politician could build a case for among staff long before bargaining starts, simply through regular discussion of an issue in instances of collegial governance.

Or – and I know I am getting a little bit cheeky here – what if the real barrier to change is that your institutions’ senior administration is not, on the whole, very good at politics? What if the problem is simply that they aren’t very adept at building the political coalitions for change? Or they aren’t good at giving people in the organization permission to organize and institute change (change from below can be good!). Or maybe they aren’t very good at parliamentary procedure and find it difficult to steer a discussion towards a quick, positive conclusion and instead give too many opportunities for small groups of malcontents to exercise effective vetoes. One of the greatest episodes of institutional change I know of – for instance the re-making of Melbourne University 20 years ago – were due almost entirely to a combination of coalition-building and slick parliamentary operating by its President Glyn Davis.

So, try it. Do it with a friend. Challenge each other when the explanations get too easy. I suspect you’ll find quite a few places where the barriers to change aren’t as intractable as you think they are, and that it might in fact be possible to overcome those barriers with the right combination of gumption, creativity and good old-fashioned coalition-building.