Is it real? Can we win? Is it worth doing?

Originally posted 16 June 2017

I saw the best minds of my institution distracted by madness, meeting endlessly in vain, poring themselves over balance sheets all day looking for the do-able fix...

I've watched and listened for the last several years as my institution thrashed and muttered things about reinventing itself and formulating a new business model and becoming financially sustainable.

Most disturbing has been what strikes me as an almost fanatic commitment to not running the college like a business because of a fear of "running the college like a business."

What I mean by that is that people who are rightfully concerned about those who would turn education into a financialized commodity, an institution that serves corporate overlords, and all the rest chased away ordinary business and organizational management sense driving higher education toward amateurish and disastrous practices.

I've spent the last few years looking for translatable lessons that might be useful for those of us who actually understand education to build our institutions into robust, successful, and sustainable enterprises so that we can hold off the small-minded interests that would be delighted to take advantage of our incompetence.

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In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article George Day describes a powerful method for assessing risk and reward tradeoffs in innovation. I think Day's ideas can be adapted to the situation of a small college like ours and I a lot of the decisions and discussions that have occurred over the last several years, and especially in the last few months, demonstrate the pathology of an organization behaving in precisely the opposite direction from these ideas.

Day is writing about how an organization should evaluate innovation opportunities. He advocates for any potential innovation to be evaluated by asking "Is it real? Can we win? Is it worth doing?"

 These questions can be adapted to an evaluation of both ongoing operations, innovations, and remedial moves taken in response to emergency conditions.

Let's start with "is it real?"

The question refers both to products and markets. In our case the two are closely related but should be assessed separately.

When we say "product" we mainly mean the programs we offer – majors, degrees, courses, credentials. When we say "market" we mean both the market of people who want to buy our product – enroll – and a post-graduation market for people with the credentials we offer.

Is the product real? In industry this means "does the technology to build this thing actually exist?" In higher education we have to ask whether there are courses, or whether courses could be designed, that would add up to some credential or program we ponder.  We have to ask is this the kind of thing that one can do in four years or two years or alongside the rest of one's education? Is it coherent? Legible?

Is the market real? Is there actually a desire/need for what we are thinking of doing?  Can the student for whom it is perfect actually purchase it?  Is the size of the market big enough for us to be able to get this off the ground?  WILL the potential "customer" buy it (at the price at which we will need to ask)?

Can we win?

Again, the question has two sides: the "product" and the "company."

Can the product win? Is this thing we want to offer better than the alternatives? How established are the alternatives?  If the people who would want our thing are currently using something else, why would they switch? Can we survive expected responses from the competition?

Can the organization win?  Do we have superior faculty and staff who can work on this? Do we have the necessary experience and skills to do this well at the necessary scale and over the necessary time frame?  Are there effective internal champions to create and sustain interest and enthusiasm?  Do we really understand the market and have the capacity to listen to its signals?

Is it worth doing? 

Is this move likely to be profitable? "Profitable" is a simple idea - do returns exceed expenses - but we need to think carefully about what goes into this. When are we going to have to invest how much capital?  What marketing expenditures are necessary to give the idea a chance? What future development and revision will starting this commit us to?  What are we doing now that we will do less of as we divert personnel and resources to this new endeavor?

Does this project make strategic sense? Does this new program or change fit with our organizational growth strategy? Or is it taking us off in a direction that will distract us from what we are trying to do?

An extremely important part of thinking about whether something makes strategic sense is whether the project will generate a platform on which other things can be built. Does the initiative allow us to develop policies and practices that can be used for other things? Are we building up skills and experiences among our faculty and staff that we can use to build and enhance other programs?

The "is-it-real-can-we-win-is-it-worth-doing" filter is not a magic bullet, but it is an example of some adaptable wisdom that could make a gigantic difference in the ways faculty and administrators think about change and renewal.

Take "writing across the curriculum" seriously and reduce messy GE subsidies

Imagine an institution in which the English department offers each year 13 or so sections of a "rhetoric and composition" course enrolling about 200 students for a 1.25 semester credits. These credits are covered exclusively by adjuncts. Suppose this represents about 18% of the department's total credit production and it is produced by about 12% of its FTE. Having guaranteed enrollment and deploying only adjunct labor to teach it might amount to a "GE subsidy" that is messy in that it might allow departments to appear artificially more efficient.

The institution currently believes it is experiencing an "under deployment" of its tenured and tenure track faculty. This is perceived to be especially true in a few departments.

The institution has for many years flirted with variations on "writing across the curriculum," but has never seriously implemented a program based on that idea for beginning students.

Proposal: all introductory rhetoric and composition classes will be taught by tenured and tenure track faculty in departments across the college. The college will make the fact that "freshman comp" is taught exclusively by full time faculty one pillar of its brand.

Benefits:

• Since instructors will inevitably draw on their own discipline and the majors they teach in, the first year comp course will effect broad liberal arts exposure for all first year students, can serve as a second gateway to possible majors in addition to intro courses. 
• Having instructors of these courses spend a little time together will yield the elusive cross-program collaboration that will almost certainly have healthy knock-on effects. 
• The program undercuts the tendency of students to think of writing as something associated with English courses but not others. 
• Majors could permit inclusion of the writing class as an elective reducing the need to staff electives. 

The FTE deployment will be managed and incentivized by a fair algorithm that favorably adjusts departmental credit hour production expectations to account for the size limits on composition classes.

NOTE: technically, this move INCREASES the cost of staffing first year composition since TTT faculty are more expensive. But if the perception that these faculty are currently under-utilized, then this can be a cost effective solution.

1. Essentials of liberal arts

1. What are the essential components of a quality liberal arts education, and how can we ensure that we remain, first and foremost, a first-rate liberal arts college in the midst of change?

2. Can we restructure and still be liberal arts?

2. Are there ways we can restructure ourselves that will still allow us to deliver what we deem to be an essential liberal arts curriculum? 
1.  Could we, for example, think about majors and/or graduate programs with fewer requirements? Majors vary from 10 credits to 16 or 17 — can this discrepancy be reduced?
2. In smaller departments, are there still ways that we can combine smaller classes, have them offered less often, combine senior seminars, or the like?

3. Can interdisciplinary work be the key?

3. Are there ways that interdisciplinary work can help us achieve both goals? That is, to ensure students access to a high quality liberal arts education with coverage of a sufficiently broad and deep curriculum, while also ensuring that the college is on sound financial footing?

4. Can the white paper help? New programs? Revenue growth possibilities?

4. Can the White Paper help us to think about this: Are there other ideas for programs, collaborations with other colleges, etc. that can help us ensure that we remain true to our mission and values while we do this restructuring work?
1. Are there new programs, majors, collaborations, etc. — noted in the White Paper or not — that folks would like to work on developing? Short term? Medium and long term?
2. Where do we reasonably see revenue growth possibilities in the next year? The next 2-3 years?

5. Other conversations we need to have?

5. What other conversations do we feel the faculty and board need to be having about how to address these budget concerns?
   
   For example: How can we carry out our goals of shared governance during a time with looming budget cuts?
   
   What else?