The Innovative University

Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

Clayton M. Christensen, Henry J. Eyring

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118091258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Études supérieures

The Innovative University illustrates how higher education can respond to the forces of disruptive innovation, and offers a nuanced and hopeful analysis of where the traditional university and its traditions have come from and how it needs to change for the future. Through an examination of Harvard and BYU-Idaho as well as other stories of innovation in higher education, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring decipher how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions.

• Offers new ways forward to deal with curriculum, faculty issues, enrollment, retention, graduation rates, campus facility usage, and a host of other urgent issues in higher education
• Discusses a strategic model to ensure economic vitality at the traditional university
• Contains novel insights into the kind of change that is necessary to move institutions of higher education forward in innovative ways

This book uncovers how the traditional university survives by breaking with tradition, but thrives by building on what it's done best.

Part One
Reframing the Higher Education Crisis

Times of terror and deepest misery may be in the offing. But if any happiness at all is to be extracted from that misery, it can only be a spiritual happiness, looking backward toward conservation of the culture of earlier times, looking forward toward serene and stalwart defense of the things of the spirit in an age which otherwise might succumb wholly to material things.¹

Reverend Father Jacobus

The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse

Chapter 1
The Educational Innovator's Dilemma: Threat of Danger, Reasons for Hope

No one could doubt that U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings meant business. In upbraiding the nation's universities and colleges, the 2006 report of her commission on the future of higher education used the language and metaphors of business:

What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise: increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. It is an enterprise that has yet to address the fundamental issues of how academic programs and institutions must be transformed to serve the changing educational needs of a knowledge economy. It has yet to successfully confront the impact of globalization, rapidly evolving technologies, an increasingly diverse and aging population, and an evolving marketplace characterized by new needs and paradigms.

History is littered with examples of industries that, at their peril, failed to respond—or even to notice—changes in the world around them, from railroads to steel manufacturers. Without serious self-examination and reform, institutions of higher education risk falling into the same trap, seeing their market share substantially reduced and their services increasingly characterized by obsolescence.¹

Not surprisingly, such confrontational, business-oriented language provoked controversy. During its drafting, the Spellings Commission report had been described by one of its own members as “flawed” and “hostile.”² Higher education officials and lobbyists agreed when they read the official report. Many saw it as a politically motivated attack that overlooked the fundamental mission and spirit of higher education. The report's comparison of higher learning to railway transportation and steel manufacturing was, at the individual level, an inapt analogy: the process of smelting steel offers little insight into the delicate task of molding a mind. And to speak of universities and colleges as having market share is to imply disregard for higher education's noneconomic role in creating knowledge and promoting social well-being.

Yet it was difficult to rebut many of the Spellings Commission report's most serious indictments—that fewer U.S. adults are completing post-high school degrees; that the costs of attending college are rising faster than inflation; that employers report hiring college graduates unprepared for the workplace.³

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The Glass Bead Game

In his novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), Nobel literature laureate Hermann Hesse describes an isolated community of scholars in fictional Castalia, a political province set apart as a sanctuary for learning, where the scholars run a boarding school for boys.⁴ For the most elite of these scholars, however, the real interest is an abstract intellectual game that rewards individual contemplation. The Glass Bead Game, which takes years of training to master, is said to have existed from time immemorial. Its procedures and rules are described as a strict “secret language.” It forbids “private,” value-based judgments, recognizing only “legitimate,” objective observations. In the words of Hesse's narrator, “Any enrichment of the language of the Game by addition of new content is subject to the strictest possible control by the directorate of the Game.”⁵

Hesse's protagonist, a young student named Joseph Knecht, enjoys the nurturing of scholarly mentors who assume the stature of saints in his eyes; one of the most influential is the kindly, optimistic Father Jacobus. With the help of these mentors, Knecht becomes a master of the Glass Bead Game. It is the highest of intellectual honors. Yet with the passage of time and a growing personal awareness of the turmoil outside of Castalia, Knecht begins to wonder about his institution's role in the world. The questions with which he grapples, and the answers to which he comes, offer insights useful in higher education today. We will revisit Castalia and its Glass Bead Game from time to time throughout this book.

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Voices of Warning from Within

The Spellings Commission was not a lone voice of criticism in 2006. That same year two distinguished academics, Derek Bok and Harry Lewis, both of Harvard, published books critical of higher education. Though eschewing—and, in Lewis's case, rejecting—the business terms and competitive logic of the Spellings Commission report, these seasoned academic administrators were no less vocal about the shortcomings of higher education. Bok, a former president of Harvard University, titled his book Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. Lewis, a forty-year veteran and former dean of Harvard College, the sub-unit of the university that serves undergraduate students, detailed its defects in a work called Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.

Bok's work was the more diplomatic of the two, as befitting a senior Harvard statesman who twice presided over the university. Yet Bok sounded his alarm with language reminiscent of the Spellings Commission's allusions to market forces. Having summarized the growing threat of global competition, he warned:

In view of these developments, neither American students nor our universities, nor the nation itself, can afford to take for granted the quality of higher education and the teaching and learning it provides. To be sure, professors and academic leaders must keep proper perspective. It is especially important to bear in mind all the purposes universities serve and to resist efforts to turn them into instruments preoccupied primarily with helping the economy grow. But resisting commercialization cannot become an excuse for resisting change. Rather, universities need to recognize the risks of complacency and use the emerging worldwide challenge as an occasion for a candid reappraisal to discover whether there are ways to lift the performance of our institutions of higher learning to higher levels.⁶

After exploring the important noneconomic purposes of universities and noting the general satisfaction of students and recent graduates, Bok nonetheless leveled an indictment similar to that of the Spellings Commission:

Despite the favorable opinions of undergraduates and alumni, a closer look at the record…shows that colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should. Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education.⁷

Harry Lewis likewise pulled few punches in Excellence Without a Soul. But in arguing that Harvard had “forgot[ten] education,” Lewis took a different tack than Bok. Rather than warning of the forces of global competition, he accused Harvard and its peers of being driven too much by their own competitive ambitions. In particular, he noted how scholarly activity tends to distance professors from the undergraduate teaching and learning process. At the same time, he argued, the desire to attract and satisfy students as though they are mere customers leads to academic coddling, in the form of easy grades and expensive facilities and entertainments, such as intercollegiate athletic teams. In the process, Lewis concluded:

Universities have forgotten their larger role for college students…. Rarely will you hear more than bromides about personal strength, integrity, kindness, cooperation, compassion, and how to leave the world a better place than you found it. The greater the university, the more intent it is on competitive success in the marketplace of faculty, students, and research money. And the less likely it is to talk seriously to students about their development into people of good character who will know that they owe something to society for the privileged education they have received.⁸

Lewis's prescription for solving this problem was for universities to be less businesslike:

Changing direction requires…leadership that views the university idealistically, as something more than a business and something better than a slave to the logic of economic competition.⁹

Pressures from Without

Ironically, Lewis's call for transcending economic competition sounded on the eve of the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. By 2009, the universities and colleges that the Spellings Commission had characterized as self-satisfied were struggling to fill budget gaps left by dramatic drops in their endowments and state appropriations. Even mighty Harvard was forced to suspend a major construction project and to lay off staff after its endowment, which had been producing one-third of its operating revenues, shrank from $37 billion to $26 billion.¹⁰ The budget crisis was particularly acute for universities modeled after Harvard, with expensive commitments to graduate schools and research activities spanning a wide array of academic disciplines. Unfortunately, few of these schools enjoyed Harvard's financial clout. Endowment losses and decreases in state funding led inevit...