It occurs to me, after sitting in a conference talking about change in universities, that nearly everything in the public discourse about how universities need to change is nonsense.  Well, maybe not nonsense, but at least seriously beside the point.

Here’s the issue.  When you see politicians or consultants or university leaders talk about “where the university/my university needs to go”, they are almost always talking about ends.  The university needs to be more skills/employment-focused.  The university needs to adopt a better tech strategy.  The university needs to be more entrepreneurial.  Whatever.  The goal is always some kind of quantum change in the end state of the university.  It’s no usually phrased quite so crudely as “we should be more like <enter university name, say “MIT” or “Waterloo” or whatever, here>”, but essentially that’s what all these changes are about.

But nearly always missing from these discussions is a theory of change: how do we get from our current state to the desired state?  When the proposal for change comes from outside the Academy, that’s usually because they have no idea how universities actually work and sort of blithely assume that change will happen they way it does in other, more hierarchical organizations – that is, because someone at the top orders change to occur.  But inside the academy, everyone knows perfectly well that’s not how change works.  Even in countries with quite authoritarian cultures, universities are fairly loosely-coupled, consensual organizations because academics – senior ones, at least – retain substantial autonomy to do as they please.  If change happens, it is because there is a change in the culture of the organizations.

Now, culture in academia is very, very tricky to talk about.  Partly that’s because it’s amorphous, and difficult to subject to the kinds of analytic tools that social scientists and managers prefer.  It’s easier to set goals in terms of “number of courses delivered electronically” than in terms of whether the faculty is really engaging with how technology can better enable student learning; easier to talk about number of job placements than whether faculty are embedding more employability skills in the curriculum.  And so that’s what we do, we focus on the superficial rather than the profound (it also happens we tend to hire non-academic staff to handle that stuff, so it’s fundamentally a cause of “administrative bloat” as well).

But in an international context – say, where a poor or middle-income country says it wants to have more “world-class universities” – there’s an added element as well.  The kind of culture these countries want from their top universities is, I would argue, something like that of MIT – technologically-oriented, entrepreneurial, an applied mode of thinking yet with a strong pure science element and no sacrifice of excellence in the humanities and social sciences.  I mean hell, who wouldn’t want to be MIT?

Obviously, one reason almost no one becomes the “next MIT” is money.  MIT is filthy rich and money certainly enables academic quality.  But the bigger barrier is culture; MIT has a very distinct academic culture which “gets” rigour, multidisciplinarity, and knows how to marry those two things to an outward-facing, collaborative spirit, working regularly with businesses and government.  If you just look at academic cultures around the world, you’ll realize exactly how unique it is: marrying academic rigour and entrepreneurialism is incredibly difficult.  Get the balance right, and you’re MIT.  Get the balance wrong and you’re stuck either in a type of academic formalism or mere hucksterism.

Of course, advocating for an “MIT culture” in, say, India, has a certain whiff of colonialism to it.  No matter that the “world-class” university movement substantially originates in developing countries; the fact that the widely-agreed upon solution is to copy the better aspects of old, established, wealthy American private universities cannot help but be troubling.  From a practical perspective, it’s also borderline insane – MIT “culture” took decades to evolve.  It cannot be imported or conjured into existence.  Governments can easily pump money into institutions to make them world-class (or whatever synonym you want to use) – changing their culture is several orders of magnitude more difficult.

It’s not that university culture is immutable.  It can be shifted – slowly.  New hires affect culture at the margin.  So too can institutional policies (responsibility-centred budgeting has been the most consistent culture-changer on Canadian campuses in recent years).  It is precisely the true, if unspoken, task of senior university leaders (particularly Presidents and provosts) to nudge institutional culture in various ways to the institution’s advantage.  Money, of course, lubricates this task – it’s easier to nudge a faculty which has the resources it wants/needs than one which doesn’t – which is why they spend so much of their time on fundraising and budgeting tasks.  But these are means to an end, not ends in themselves.

I know culture is hard to talk about.  But I’m not sure that the whole worthwhile enterprise of improving universities is any easier to achieve by pretending the issue doesn’t exist.  That way lies failure.