Lamenting the disintegration of elite USA universities

Elite universities in the USA have nurtured and enhanced my whole academic life. In 1983, I moved to the USA as an international student, commenced a Ph.D. at Princeton, and then worked at Northwestern and Ohio State. After I returned to Australia in 1994, I visited the USA every year for several weeks for conferences, collaborations, and university visits. Much of my research was shaped by ideas I got from those trips. This blog started through the influence of I2CAM, a wonderful institution funded by the NSF. My movement into chemical physics was facilitated by attending workshops at the Telluride Science Center. I deeply appreciate my colleagues (and their institutions) for their stimulation, support, interest, encouragement, and hospitality. 

My trips to the USA only ended with COVID-19, retirement, family health issues, and my new general aversion to international travel. Currently I would be too scared to travel to the USA, based on what I read in the Travel Section of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Most importantly, what I have learned and done has been built largely on intellectual foundations laid by people in these elite universities.  Other parts of the world have played a role too, but my focus here is the USA due to current political events leading to the impending disintegration of these universities.

I readily acknowledge that these universities have flaws and need reform. On this blog, I occasionally discussed issues, such as the obsession with money, metrics, management, and marketing. Teaching undergraduates and robust scholarship has sometimes become subsidiary. I have critiqued some of the flaky science published in luxury journals by groups from these universities.

Nevertheless, if something is broken you do not fix it by smashing it. Consider a beautiful ancient vase with a large crack. You do not restore the vase by smashing it and hiring your teenage cousin to make a new one.

Reading about what is happening raises multiple questions. What is really happening? Why is it happening? How significant is it? What might it lead to? How should individuals and institutions respond? 

Today when I was on the UQ campus it was serene and the challenges my colleagues are facing, as formidable and important as they are, seem trifling compared to what I imagine is happening on Ivy campuses right now. In passing, I mention that Australia is not completely immune to what is happening in the USA. Universities here that receive some research grant funding from the USA government have had it paused or cancelled.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be an international student at Princeton right now.

On the one hand, I do not feel qualified to comment on what is happening as I am so distant. On the other hand, I do want to try and express some solidarity with and appreciation of institutions and colleagues that have blessed me and the world. I make a few general observations. This is my advice, for what it is worth, to my younger self.

Protect your mental health. You and your colleagues and your institutional are encountering an existential crisis, perhaps like none encountered before. Don't live in denial. But also don't let this consume you and destroy you as a person or a community. Limit your intake of news and how much you think about it and discuss it. Practise the basics: exercise; eat, drink, and sleep well; get help sooner than later; limit screen time; rest.

Expect the unexpected. Expect more surprises, pain, uncertainty, instability, intra-institutional conflict, and disappointments. 

Get the big picture. This is about a lot more than federal funding for universities. There are broader issues about what a university is actually for. What do you want to preserve and protect? What are you willing to compromise on? Beyond the university, many significant issues are at stake concerning politics, democracy, economics, pluralism, culture, and the law. This is an opportunity, albeit a scary one, to think about and learn about these issues.

Make the effort to have conversations across the divides. Try to  have civil and respectful discussions with people with different perspectives on how individuals and institutions should respond to the current situation. Talk to colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. Talk to those with different political perspectives, both inside and outside the university.

Read widely. History is instructive but not determinative. I recommend two very short books that I think are relevant and helpful.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel, first published in 1978 in the context of living in communist totalitarian Czechoslovakia. I have a Penguin Vintage edition which includes a beautiful introduction by Timothy Snyder, written in 2018, for a 40th Anniversary edition. 

I thank Charles Ringma for bringing both books to my attention.

What do you think? I would love to hear from people in US universities who are living through this.

Straining gnats and swallowing camels on campus

The world is being run by accountants, lawyers, and marketing consultants. They work for corporations, universities, trade unions, and government. Some are "rent seekers" and parasites who project themselves as standing for justice and fairness.

We also live in a world where people are not allowed to make even small mistakes.

These painful realities were highlighted to me this week in an email some colleagues received from the President of their university.

"I am writing to advise staff about the outcome of a pay review initiated in October 2021 and the actions taken as part of this to further strengthen our pay systems and processes. 

The University commenced this external review to ensure our staff are paid accurately and in accordance with our Enterprise Agreement (EA) applicable at the time.

The review took 18 months. How much staff time and money was spent to engage these external consultants on this review? 

While staff were paid for the time they worked, the review identified 2 areas of our EA were not always correctly applied. These relate to the minimum hours of engagement for casual academic and casual professional staff and the use of a different pay rate for casual academic staff with a relevant PhD.

As a result, the University has determined that over a 7-year period (January 2017 to December 2023), an amount of $7.88 million (excluding superannuation and interest) should have been paid to 9743 staff. The median amount to be paid is $243.03.

Note. This corresponds to staff being underpaid by less than one dollar per week! 

I unreservedly apologise to those staff who have been affected by these errors – they should not have happened. I want to assure our community that affected staff will receive all the pay due, including superannuation and interest for the relevant period.

This week, we are writing individually to affected current staff outlining the payment due, with these payments to commence from 14 June.

We will also be writing individually to affected former staff outlining the payment due and the process for remediation.

A comprehensive program is underway to upgrade our systems and processes to further ensure ongoing pay accuracy. Actions being taken include the introduction of a whole-of-Univ timesheet system, compulsory training for managers and staff and additional fortnightly payroll reporting.

Does this mean faculty will now fill out time sheets? 

We are also investing further in our HR systems, with new time and attendance and payroll systems planned.

Sounds like a whole new layer of bureaucracy. 

Throughout this process we have worked closely with the Office of the Fair Work Ombudsman and have advised them of these outcomes.

Again, I apologise that this has occurred and reaffirm our commitment to ensuring staff are appropriately and accurately paid for the work they do on behalf of the University."

Meanwhile I don't hear of any external reviews or apologies for the treatment by university management of people such as Gerd Shroder-Turk, Drew Pavlou, Paul Frijters, or James Allan, ...

Two thousand years ago the following was written.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. 

You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence."

The relevance of Labor Day to physicists and philosophers

This past Monday, May 8, was a public holiday in Queensland, marking Labor Day. I don't know why we don't celebrate it on May 1, but that does not matter.

In honour of the event, I post two relevant resources. The first resource is a moving video by Sabine Hossenfelder, who has carved out a post-academic income as a populariser of physics. The video is funny and sad, describing her own experience in academia leading to "Death of a Dream".

Sabine has many poignant observations about the dysfunctionalities of physics in academia, from the personal to the intellectual.

I find it sad that people who leave academia because they could not find a permanent job see themselves as a "failure." First,  most of the select few who get permanent jobs do so because they are at the right place at the right time, not because they are so much more brilliant and productive than others. Second, there is so much more to life than professional success. Finally, Sabine has been an incredible success. She has been able to popularise physics far beyond what has been achieved by others with big names and lots of resources. Furthermore, Sabine has made a significant contribution to the physics community by calling out hype and BS.

The second resource to mark Labor Day is an article, 

In Australian Universities, There Is No Such Thing as a Secure Job, by Danny Wardle. 

It puts a specific (alarming) incident in the broader context of the history of how and why the governance and management of Australian universities have been captured by the ideology of neoliberalism. This has been facilitated by the opportunism and vanity of mediocre academics who become "managers" with million-dollar salaries.

Panel on mental health

 In the School of Mathematics and Physics at UQ there is an Early- and Mid-Career Academic group who organise activities to support one another. Today they organised a panel discussion on "Mental Health, Wellness and Resilience".

I commend them for their initiative. Before covid, they organised a single forum which I spoke at and thought was particularly good.

I am one of the panelists. As someone who has struggled with mental health for four decades now, here are a three of the points I want to make.

Practise the basics: eat and drink healthy, sleep, rest, exercise, control screen time, and connect to community.

Get professional help, sooner than later. Be open to medication, counselling, and expertise. 

Live according to your own personal values, rather than those that your boss or university management may want you to have.

One of my fellow panelists, Marissa Edwards, brought to our attention this recent article in The Conversation, Where has the joy of working in Australian universities gone? It is pretty disturbing, but unfortunately not surprising.

If organisations are emergent can they be managed?

 Any organisation is composed of many interacting parts. For example, a university is not just composed of staff and students, but also includes collaborators, donors, employers, suppliers, parents, graduates, and trustees. Their interactions with one another are influenced by structures, such as buildings, committees, and government policy. Furthermore, a university exists in a context: political, economic, historical, and cultural. What emerges from the interactions of all these components may be new states, for good or for ill. Like all emergent phenomena these states are hard to predict. For example, what will lead to high-quality education or a diverse student body? Can desirable outcomes be managed? What is the role of leadership in large organisations? Are there some universal principles of management that are useful for a wide range of organisations, whether corporations, NGOs, universities, or government departments?

Researching, teaching, and writing about "Organisational Development" and "management" is a massive industry; from Business schools in universities to a multitude of popular books for sale in airports. A fascinating paper is

The Dialogic Mindset: Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World by Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak.

It questions the paradigm of the "visionary leader", "command and control", and the "performance mindset" that focuses on instrumental and measurable goal setting and achievement.

To understand the limitations of this management paradigm I find it helpful to reflect on the history and context of how it emerged (!) in the USA after World War II. After the war, veterans who returned to civilian life had experienced a particular leadership and organisational culture of the military: hierarchy, authority, process, discipline, solidarity, male, mono-cultural, ...  And, it worked in the context of war!

Many war veterans, both junior and senior, took this approach and mentality into industry, and it worked well in the American post-war economic boom of assembly-line-based large-scale manufacturing. The automotive industry, centred around Detroit, was representative. Arguably, the success was based on efficiency not innovation, limited competition in a simple market, and a homogeneous workforce. Two important figures who emerged from this Detroit era were Peter Drucker and Robert McNamara. Drucker did a seminal two-year study of General Motors, during WWII, that started his trajectory towards becoming the doyen of management studies. McNamara took his strategic planning experience in the war, and applied it successfully at Ford for 15 years, rising to become President of Ford in 1960. He then became Secretary of Defense for JFK and used the same management approach for the USA's involvement in the Vietnam war. This was an unmitigated disaster, but that did not stop him from using a similar approach when President of the World Bank.

Back to Bushe and Marshak and today's world. They claim that

The “visionary leader” narrative and performance mindset that predominate in theories and practices of “Change Leadership” are no longer effective in an environment of multi-dimensional diversity marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

The prevailing narrative of leadership is based on the assumption that great leaders must [be strategic thinkers], have a vision, and the ability to lead followers to that vision. Leaders, followers, and commentators alike assume that being a visionary is indispensable to organizational leadership.

... a leading voice supporting an alternative paradigm is Heifetz’s (1998) leadership model that indirectly challenges the heroic, visionary orthodoxy. He divides the decision situations leaders face into technical problems, which can be defined and solved through a top-down imposition of technical rationality; and adaptive challenges, which can only be “solved” through the voluntary engagement of the people who will have to change what they do and how they think. 

In Heifetz’s alternative narrative of leadership, adaptive leaders identify challenges but instead of providing solutions, they encourage employees and other stakeholders to propose and act on their own solutions.

 A nice example is how employees shaped strategy at the New York Public Library. 

The problem with the standard narrative is that it overlooks that organisations are emergent entities where cause-effect relations are not understood and outcomes are hard to predict. This challenge is exacerbated today by the fact that any organisation is not an isolated entity but is immersed in a complex and rapidly changing environment. This puts a premium on innovation and adaptability. 

Future posts will explore what this might mean in practice. Can self-organising processes and emergence achieve desired outcomes by "changing the conversation"?

Management is not leadership. II

 Previously, I have argued that being in management is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for showing leadership. I have also discussed how some articles about management, such as in the Harvard Business Review, can be helpful in academic contexts. This is in spite of the fact that I detest the idea that the university is a "business".

Here I bring the two points together. There is a nice short article in the HBR,Three Differences Between Managers and Leaders by Vineet Nayar

Counting value vs Creating value. Only managers count value; some even reduce value by disabling those who add value.

Circles of influence vs Circles of power. Managers have subordinates and leaders have followers. 

Leading people vs Managing work. Management consists of controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal. [Leaders]... influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success. 

The very human side to universities

My wife and I started watching the series The Chair, a comedy about an English department in an affluent liberal arts university in the Northeastern USA. We thought the first episode was a bit too soapy and stopped watching. But then, I read an article claiming that The Chair Is Netflix’s Best Drama in Years: "The near-perfect show elegantly skewers the subject of free speech on campus." So, we kept watching and were glad we did. But, I think it is really about much more than "free speech".

What I appreciate the most is that it brings out just how human (fallible, creative, caring, contradictory, selfish, egotistical, ridiculous, ...) all the players in the university are: students, faculty, administrators, families, ... There is much to laugh at, to groan about, and to celebrate. And, this is why we need the humanities.

For me, the best scene is the disciplinary hearing in the final episode. The embattled English department Chair says:

“Why should [students] trust us? The world is burning and we’re sitting up here worried about our endowment? Our latest ranking on U.S. News & World Report?”

She then asks the Dean, "when did you last teach a class?" [I think all senior managers should be required to do some teaching.]

Nancy Wang Yuen has a nice article in the LA Times, I’m an Asian American woman in academia. Here’s what ‘The Chair’ gets right

One thing I think the series got badly wrong was how engaged the students were. They came to class, had done the required reading, asked questions, and were not on their phones! Oh, to teach a class in Hollywood!

If you have watched the series, what did you think?

Universities are not a business, but ...

 It is no surprise to most readers that I do not believe that "the university is a (billion-dollar) business and so should be run accordingly." I reject the "entrepreneurial model" and think this has been a disaster, particularly for Australian and UK universities. Universities are not a business. Universities are also not a family, a finishing school for wealthy children, a community service organisation, a job training school, or a government department, ... Universities are universities. They are about thinking.

Previously, I have posted that management is not leadership, and how the "full economic cost model" in the UK has been a disaster.

But, having said that it might surprise some readers that it is not unusual for me to look at "business" literature on leadership, project management, and managing employees. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) is a particularly good source of helpful and stimulating ideas. Previously, I have mentioned articles relevant to the evolution of organisations, the role of humility in leadership, and managing people (great managers play chess not checkers).

Articles and ideas about business cannot be applied blindly to university contexts. Ideas presented may not be relevant or need to be adapted.

I have wondered why the "business" literature such as HBR is useful and I don't go elsewhere. There are very few helpful articles I am aware of that specifically address university contexts. I think this is because business is really "big business", i.e. there is an incredibly large market for books, ideas, articles, university degrees, ... about management. Hence, the best material such as HBR articles, are well-researched, well-written, and very accessible. 

The latest article I read carefully may be relevant and helpful to several specific situations in universities that readers may encounter. (Currently, I am interested in similar issues in an NGO context).

1. When a senior professor is running a large research group with many students and postdocs it can be very helpful (for all concerned) if there is a more junior scientist (e.g. a research assistant professor) who takes responsibility for many day-to-day operations, especially when the professor is absent. For particularly large groups the professor may also have a PA/secretary/administrator.

2. Most large research institutes will have something like an operations manager who takes responsibility for administrative matters such as finance, reporting, personnel, organising meetings, and interacting with other administrators.

3. Most university departments now have a department manager or deputy chair who takes responsibility for administrative matters. They report to the department chair.

How do these two people best work together? What are their relative roles and responsibilities? In particular, what are lines of reporting, decision-making authority, and future career options for the second person? 

These are important questions because when these two people work well together it can be a great blessing to all concerned. And, when they go bad, it can be a disaster...

The best analog in business may be the relationship between a CEO and a COO (Chief Operating Officer). There are similarities and differences. The article I found helpful is 

Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer

by Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles

There are seven basic reasons why companies decide to hire a COO... This tremendous variation implies that there is no standard set of great COO attributes... Still, certain common success factors came up consistently in the interviews, the most important being building a high level of trust between CEO and COO. Trust comes from meeting obligations on both sides: The COO must truly support the CEO’s vision; keep ego in check; and exhibit strong execution, coaching, and coordination skills. The CEO must communicate faithfully, grant real authority and decision rights, and not stymie the COO’s career.

What do you think? Feel free to share any relevant experiences from the university context. 

Where might condensed matter physics be heading?

Will there be big new discoveries? Will old problems be solved?  

I have finished my draft of, "An endless frontier" the last chapter of Condensed Matter Physics: A Very Short Introduction.

I aim to give a balanced perspective that is optimistic but realistic. Have I? Obviously, this is highly subjective.

I am interested in general feedback, particularly on whether your aunt or uncle or an eager undergraduate would find this interesting and engaging.

Besides your own research area :), are there particular topics that you think are ripe for exploration?

Perhaps, a cartoon about predicting the future. Maybe one of these two?

The 90% University

A helpful starting point for me when considering universities after the pandemic is the cover story of The Economist, from two weeks ago, The 90% Economy. They were reflecting on the world economy will change in the coming years, suggesting three key characteristics.

 1. the economy will be more fragile 
 2. there will be less innovation 
 3. there will be even greater inequality 

The reason that it is called the 90% economy is because in the next few years rather than growing a few percent each year it will decrease in size by about 10%. 
Now on one level that doesn't sound too bad, but the problem is that it is not a uniform decrease across every sector, company, and individual. The changes will be quite heterogeneous. Rather, there will be significant gaps, that because of the interconnectedness of everything there will be problems. 

Just like the economy going back to ``normal'' universities will continue to have students, continue to do teaching, continue to graduate people but things, won't be quite the same, in some quite significant ways. It is not just a matter of possible 10-20 percent budget cuts.

1. Universities will be more fragile

Less stability and predictability is particularly bad for universities. Key ingredients for universities to achieve their real purpose are time and stability. Significant research, teaching, and learning all require time to build up knowledge, explore different possibilities, make mistakes, and not be distracted by crises, whether personal, institutional, or societal. Economic uncertainty is just one of many dimensions to the forthcoming fragility.

2. There will be less innovation in universities

Research is all about innovation, discovering new things, and exploring new ideas.  Drawing on The Economist article. More virtual meetings, less international travel, and fewer face-to-face meetings mean less brainstorming. Less random meetings and informal interactions will mean fewer new ideas. There will also be less money available for discretionary funding for new initiatives and fewer startup funds for new faculty, even if hiring freezes end.
After any crisis, people are more cautious and more risk-averse. A problem before the pandemic was that science was increasingly being done in a very risk-averse manner. People, particularly those without tenure, focus on low-lying fruit, working on problems that they are pretty sure they can solve in a year or less. Even senior people can only get funding if they have a ``track record'' in an area. This means they will just keep doing the same thing and not move into new areas. 
In reviewing his scientific life, Tony Leggett recently made the following comments.

Indeed, when I look back on ... a 60-year career in physics, I think I have been fortunate in many ways. I have had a marvelous constellation of graduate students and postdocs, from all corners of the globe... But if I had to pick out one thing that made all the difference, particularly in the early stages, it would be the tolerant and relaxed environment that I experienced at Sussex when starting there in the late 1960s. When I recall this and then look around at the current environment for people at the postgraduate, postdoc or junior faculty level, I feel quite concerned ... I get the impression that many of them feel that there will be no hope of obtaining the kind of postdoctoral/faculty/tenured position .. unless they have not only published three or four papers but published them in high-impact journals... I fear that one almost ineluctable outcome is that there is a strong temptation to focus all one’s energy on problems that can be reasonably guaranteed to yield results within the relevant time frame, typically two or three years. And almost by definition, these are not the really worthwhile problems! ...  the best advice I can give to any younger colleagues who seek my opinion is deliberately to put aside some fraction (30%, 25%, even 20%) of their research time for problems that they not only are not sure they can solve within the two- or three-year deadline but are not even sure that they (or anyone) can solve at all.

A similar conclusion can be drawn from a brilliant podcast, The Obscure Virus Club, by Malcolm Gladwell.

3. There will be more inequality, both within universities and between universities

This is part of the social tragedy that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, particularly during and after a crisis, such as a pandemic. The poor do not have the resources to adapt and survive. If you live in a slum you can't practice social distancing. If you don't have access to clean running water or disinfectant it is hard to practice personal hygiene.  If you lose your job you can't use your savings to go and get training for a new job. In contrast, if you are wealthy and have significant cash reserves you can wait things out, see your competitors fail, and snap up cheap investments. Similarly, with universities, it's hard for me to believe that institutions such as Harvard with massive endowments won't come out of the pandemic relatively stronger. Weak institutions will fold. Others will really struggle to survive and go through periods of stagnation.

There will also be inequality within institutions related to access, gender, and seniority. Because of the background of an economic downturn it will be harder for students from poorer backgrounds to afford tuition or access scholarships. Furthermore, poor job prospects will make the financial cost and risks of student loans not seem worthwhile. There will also be a push within universities to increase the number of adjunct faculty (i.e. people on short-term teaching contracts with no benefits). People with tenure who are well established will do fine because they also have a good strong social and professional networks. In a more online environment, it's harder to build those professional networks and so disparities may increase. The Economist article mentions a study that found the productivity of female economics faculty, as measured by the production of research papers, fell relatively to male ones, since the pandemic. That's arguably because women are more likely to have to take care of homeschooling and entertainment of bored children during the lockdown.

All this is a bit depressing. However, with a crisis, there are always opportunities. There will be plenty of opportunism (where people exploit a situation without regard to moral considerations and the impact on others). But, there will also be opportunities for the wealthy, powerful, and privileged to do good and facilitate much-needed changes in universities. For example, large philanthropies and wealthy universities can make long-term investments that others won't or can't. Well-established faculty can provide support/cover to junior faculty, students, and postdocs. In the longer term of decades, these will likely be the institutions and individuals at the forefront of what universities really should be about: thinking, writing, teaching, and learning, at the deepest level.

Universities after the pandemic

There is a growing discussion of what changes might result from the pandemic: changes in societies, in institutions, and to us as individuals.

What will happen to universities? Will they change for the better or for the worse?

First, I want to acknowledge that there's a lot of heterogeneity, due to the diversity of institutions and their different contexts. The effect of the pandemic on Harvard, on the University of Queensland, and on a small state university in Sri Lanka, could be vastly different.

Any change produces both challenges and opportunities. There are many immediate questions: which universities will survive financially? How many staff will be sacked?  To what extent will universities move to online learning, or to some hybrid? A few years from now will we be back to largely face-to-face teaching?

Although important, we should also ask be asking bigger questions.

An epidemic provides a mirror on society: its values, its strengths, and its weaknesses. This idea is emphasized by Frank Snowden, a historian at Yale University. Last year he published “Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present,” and there is an insightful interview with him in The New Yorker.
David Brooks in the New York Times also picks up on this idea.

Thus, it's worth thinking about how universities respond to the pandemic may tell us something about them. What do you think?

The Chronicle of Higher Education had an interesting series, How will the pandemic change higher education? (in the USA). They asked about a dozen different faculty, administrators, and analysts. It's worth looking at the article as they present a range of perspectives on a range of issues, some pessimistic and some optimistic. One scary suggestion is that the crisis will be used by managers as a pretext for various cost-savings, such as moving to more online learning and an even greater increase of adjunct faculty (i.e. in the USA this means faculty on short-term and part-time contracts and with few benefits). Will the humanities die or experience a resurgence? Will grades be abandoned? Will research become less esoteric? Will students' personal needs be better addressed? Will universities give up on risky expansion plans and expensive fancy buildings?

I would welcome responses to some of these articles.

There are questions about the mechanics of universities such as financial sustainability, modes of teaching, and virtual graduation ceremonies. These are important. However, these mechanics are really means to an end. One can do all the mechanics: recruiting, enrolling students, offering courses, assessment, and graduation, without actually achieving anything. Doing these things does not mean students actually get an education.

 I would like to see more discussion of big questions about what universities are actually for and how can they do those things better, not just in the next few years but also in the longer term. We need to keep coming back to what universities are all about: thinking! Teaching is about students learning how to think and the discipline of learning to think in the manner of certain disciplines. Learning to think like an economist, learning to think like a historian, or learning to think like a physicist or an engineer. Secondly, universities are about research. Again this means thinking, discovering new things, and synthesizing ideas.

What do you think might be significant changes that will occur in the coming years in your own context?

Marks of an excellent PhD thesis

As years go by the PhD thesis in science and engineering is less and less of a ``thesis'' and more just a box to tick. There was a time when the thesis was largely the work of the student and tackled one serious problem. Decades ago at the University of Chicago, students were meant to write a single author paper that was based on their thesis.
At some universities, including my own, students can now staple several papers together, write an introductory chapter, and submit that as a thesis. One obvious problem with that system is the question of how large was the contribution of the student multi-author papers, both in terms of the writing and doing the experiments or calculations.

Previously I have argued that A PhD is more than a thesis, a PhD should involve scholarship, and a thesis should suggest future directions and be self-critical. In some sense these posts were negative, focusing on what may be missing. Here I just want to highlight several positive things I recently saw in a thesis.

A coherent story
The thesis should be largely about one thing looked at from several angles. It should not be ``several random topics that my advisor got excited about in the past 3 years.''

Meticulous detail
This should cover existing literature. More importantly, there should be enough detail that the next student can use the thesis as a reference to learn all the background to take the topic further.

Significant contributions from the student
A colleague once said that a student is ready to submit the thesis when they know more about the thesis topic than their advisor.

The situation in the humanities is quite different. Students largely work on their own and write a thesis that they hope will eventually become a book.

I think the decline of the thesis reflects a significant shift in the values of the university as a result of neoliberalism. The purpose of PhDs is no longer the education of the student, but rather to have low-paid research assistants for faculty to produce papers in luxury journals that will attract research income and boost university rankings.

What do you think are the marks of an excellent PhD thesis?

The global massification of universities

A recent issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the massive expansion in higher education, both private and public, in Africa.
The thing I found most surprising and interesting is the graphic below.

It compares the percentage of the population within 5 years of secondary school graduation are enrolled in higher education, in 2000 and 2017. In almost all parts of the world the percentage enrollment has doubled in just 17 years!
I knew there was rapid expansion in China and Africa, but did not realise it is such a global phenomenon.

Is this expansion good, bad, or neutral?
It is helpful to consider the iron triangle of access, cost, and quality. You cannot change one without changing at least one of the others.

I think that this expansion is based on parents, students, governments, and philanthropies holding the following implicit beliefs uncritically. Based on the history of universities until about the 1970s. Prior to that universities were fewer, smaller, more selective, had greater autonomy (both in governance, curriculum, and research).

1. Most students who graduated from elite institutions went on to successful/prosperous careers in business, government, education, ...

2. Research universities produced research that formed the foundation for amazing advances in technology and medicine, and gave profound new insights into the cosmos, from DNA to the Big Bang.

Caution: the first point does not imply that a university education was crucial to the graduates' success. Correlation and causality are not the same thing. The success of graduates may be just a matter of signaling.  Elite institutions carefully selected highly gifted and motivated individuals who were destined for success. The university just certified that the graduates were ``hard-working, smart, and conformist.''

But the key point is these two observations (beliefs) concern the past and not the present. Universities are different.  Massification and the stranglehold of neoliberalism (money, marketing, management, and metrics) mean that universities are fundamentally different, from the student experience to the nature of research.

According to Wikipedia,

Massification is a strategy that some luxury companies use in order to attain growth in the sales of product. Some luxury brands have taken and used the concept of massification to allow their brands to grow to accommodate a broader market.

What do you think?
Are these the key assumptions?
Will massification and neoliberalism undermine them?

Ideas worth throwing out?

Unfortunately, like many universities, UQ has become a construction site in the rush to build shiny new buildings, particularly to accommodate the ever increasing expansion of senior management and nice facilities to ``enhance the student experience.''
An extra floor was added to the physics building for the Office of the Executive Dean of Science.
Faculty and grad student offices are being shuffled around campus to accommodate this construction. I am now making my third move in less than eighteen months. I took this opportunity to downsize and toss a lot of old files. While filling a dumpster I saw something I thought was pretty ironic and funny.

Some hypotheses about universities

In the next month, I have been asked to give a talk and to write an article about universities in two different forums. What are universities for? How do they promote human flourishing?

Before I get too carried away I thought I would float a few ideas/claims/hypotheses that will be central to my argument that there needs to be a greater debate about fundamental issues and about the history of universities.

Some of the claims are interconnected.
In future posts, I may expand on some of these claims.

Universities are currently having a crisis of identity, mission, and purpose.

This crisis arises because there is a multitude of competing and conflicting visions from a range of "stakeholders".

This crisis and the degree of conflict is far greater and deeper than those faced by other institutions: government, schools, hospitals, business, charities, ...

Over time universities have been one of the most successful human institutions for promoting human flourishing (broadly defined) in many different ways: training leaders, science that produces useful technology, enriching cultural life, ...

Universities are a victim of their success.
Their current struggles follow the natural evolution of successful and growing organisations. 
Success increases the size, complexity, and cost of the organisation. Success also attracts "hangers on" who want a piece of the action: money, power, and social status. They do not have the same vision as the founders and first few generations of builders of the organisation. Their focus is more on their own agenda and interests than on the "common good" that the organisation originally sought to serve. This is a large part of the origin of the competing and conflicting visions.
Success also leads to the iron triangle of cost, access, and quality.

Here I expand on the first few claims.

Universities are currently having a crisis of identity, mission, and purpose.
I have written about this before. I think it is nicely illustrated by the diverse voices that claim this.

Universities on the Defensive 
Hunter Rawlings, a former President of Cornell, and currently the President of the Association of American Universities, a consortium of 60 of the leading North American universities.

The Slow Death of the University
Terry Eagleton, a distinguished literary critic, former Oxford Professor, and Marxist.

Higher Education is Drowning in BS,
by Christian Smith, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame.



The crisis is not just about research universities in Western countries but also smaller teaching institutions and large state universities in the Majority World. Last year I was involved in a range of consultations run by a global NGO, identifying big issues in universities, and it was surprising how often this question, ``What is a university for?" came up.

This crisis arises because there is a multitude of competing and conflicting visions from a diverse range of "stakeholders".
The latter includes faculty, administrators, students, parents, alumni, future employers, politicians, taxpayers, funding agencies, donors, ...
The conflicting visions include neoliberalism, job training, a finishing school for the privileged, nation building, sectarian religious, social critique, scholarship, social transformation....

This crisis and the degree of conflict is far greater and deeper than those faced by other institutions.
One might argue that many public institutions (government, schools, hospitals, business, charities, ...) are currently in turmoil. However, most of these conflicts are about funding, governance, internal codes of conduct, and how to respond to rapid social and technological change. They are not conflicts about the primary purpose of the institution. One might also claim that as societies have become more multi-cultural, more politically divided, and complex this crisis just reflects, the many competing voices in the public square at large.
However, I would contend that universities are one of the most contested public institutions in society today. There are comparable debates about funding and access to health care. However, everyone agrees on the mission of hospitals: to help cure sick people. There is little debate about the goal, about the methodologies, or about the relative importance of different sub-fields of medicine. In contrast, in universities, there is significant contention about what the actual primary mission is and of the relative importance of different academic disciplines. No one proposes a large hospital without a pathology or oncology department. However, there are people who think humanities now have little to contribute to universities.

What do you think?
Which of my claims do you disagree with?

Big changes in universities?

I was recently asked to give a talk to an NGO about how universities are changing.
There is no doubt that there are rapid changes, many for the worse, happening. For me the biggest change has been the rising influence of neoliberalism (free market ideology) in the values, goals, and decision making within universities. But that is another story...
In the past few weeks some relevant articles "came across my desk" [through my web browser...].

I would be particularly interested to hear readers comments on the first one.
My wife sent me this New York Times piece to read and I really despaired
The iGen Shift: Colleges Are Changing to Reach the Next Generation 
The newest students are transforming the way schools serve and educate them, including sending presidents and deans to Instagram and Twitter.

Why do I despair?
I believe a university education should largely be about two things. The first goal is explicit and the second is implicit.

The first and primary goal of university education is to help students to learn to think: to think about specific disciplines, and to think about anything. Deep and valuable thinking does not come easily. It takes time, concentration, perseverance, and freedom from distractions. It a student is constantly checking their phone or just skimming the first material that comes up on a Google search or in the Twitter (for twits!) feed for their course, it is highly unlikely they are going to do much deep thinking.

Second, a university education is about helping students "grow up":  to move towards adulthood, to learn to be responsible and independent, to create an identity that is more independent of their parents and their peers, to have a sense of direction and purpose, and a desire to be good citizens.
Unfortunately, too many students think "growing up" means getting really drunk and throwing up...
However, too many of the initiatives described in the article seem to be pandering to students (customers) and "hand holding" them through their university experience. For example, at some point in life students are going to have to learn to seek and find relevant information, regardless of whether it is nicely packaged in some cool app with great graphics and lots of "likes".

Oh, the Humanities! 
New data on college majors confirms an old trend. Technocracy is crushing the life out of humanism.
Ross Douhat (NYT op-ed columnist)

The third article is more controversial and political, and raises questions about whether one purported change is as big or significant as often claimed (particularly in the right-wing press)
The free speech panic: how the right concocted a crisis
Snowflake students have become the target of a new rightwing crusade. But exaggerated claims of censorship reveal a deeper anxiety at the core of modern conservatism.
William Davies (A Long Read in The Guardian)
For balance here is a counter-view that there is a problem
The Problem of Hyper-liberalism
John Gray (Times Literary Supplement)

Comments welcome.

Different phases of growth and change in human organisations

When reflecting on the current state of an organisation (whether a university, a research group, an NGO, a funding agency, a state government department, a business, ...) it is natural to consider two questions.

How did it get to where it is today? In particular, what is the origin of its current positive and negative properties?

What can be done to move it in a positive direction in the future?

Human organisations are complex and diverse, yet their evolution as they grow seem to exhibit certain universal features, that transcend both the purpose and the relative size of the organisation.
There is a classic article, Evolution and Revolution as Organizations, by Larry E. Greiner, originally published by the Harvard Business Review in 1972.

The article is summarised in the figure below.

Greiner was solely concerned with businesses. However, this model has since been applied to other types of organisations.
Aside: His article contains no data or references! Perhaps, his excuse is that he wrote the article in a Swiss ski resort (long before the internet) while recovering from a skiing injury!

I will illustrate the model by considering how it might describe the evolution of a scientific research group. It starts with a young faculty member and ends being part of a large research institute.

Phase 1: Creativity.
A young assistant professor (PI) starts a new research group with start-up funds and two graduate students. They are attracted to work with her because of her passion and the excitement of working on a new technique from the ground up. Lots of different things are tried to get the technique to work. Indeed the original technique does not work but a new one is discovered. Everyone works long hours in the lab. The future is uncertain. She may not get funding or tenure. There is frequent and informal communication within the group. Thus, there is really no need for formal group meetings or policies. After about five years things start to change. Papers are published. Grant applications are successful. More grad students and a postdoc join the group. Tenure is granted. But some frustrations grow as the informality no longer works. The leader spends less time in the lab, travels more, and is less available to students. This leads to the next phase.

Phase 2: Direction.
There is a need for consolidation and organisation. The new technique is now well established. The goal is now to use it as much as possible on a suite of materials. The focus is on fine tuning the technique not on making big new discoveries. Creativity is valued less. There are now weekly group meetings. Each student has a weekly meeting with the PI. Communication becomes more formal and the relationships more distant. The group is now producing a steady stream of papers attracting more grants, and is now joined by undergraduates, visiting faculty, and more grad students and postdocs. There are now formal policies about lab use. People now join the group for different reasons than before. Some are attracted by stability or reputation. Frustrations are present and conflicts associated with competition for resources, whether concerning access to instruments, time with the PI, or author order on papers. The success of the group leads to it attracting more resources. But, this comes with the cost of increased accountability and the associated administrative load. The PI now spends more time communicating with funding agencies, university management, and collaborators, than with people in the group. The PI is rarely seen in the lab, and enjoys her job less.

Phase 3: Delegation.
The PI now delegates supervision of graduate students to postdocs. A technical officer is hired to manage the lab. A group secretary (or PA) takes care of many administrative matters and schedules meetings between group members and the PI. A theory postdoc is hired to do in-house theory. The department hires a new junior faculty member to work in a research area that has some overlap with this well-established group. As the group grows into new areas it becomes divided by research topic or technique. Competition between sub-groups emerge for resources and attention. The PI has lost control over the whole operation and there is a lack of co-ordination between sub-groups.

Phase 4: Co-ordination.
Part of the research group moves into new labs in a new institute building on campus, with a newly hired director. He works with his business manager to impose co-ordination between research groups. The original PI often receives attractive job offers and finally moves to a different university, partly in frustration. The institute director uses this as an opportunity to "reorganise" the different groups in the institute with the goal to make them co-ordinate better about use of instruments, grant applications, and collaborations. He also puts pressure on each group to be self-sustaining financially.
Things have now become quite impersonal and bureaucratic. Some graduate students now join the group because they are impressed by the shiny new building and all the expensive instruments in the lab. But some, older graduate students and postdocs resent the "managers" who they consider have little experience at the "coal face" of research. There is not much innovation or creativity happening. This all leads to the "red-tape" crisis.

Phase 5: Collaboration.
Greiner claims:

The last observable phase emphasizes strong interpersonal collaboration in an attempt to overcome the red-tape crisis. Where Phase 4 was managed through formal systems and procedures, Phase 5 emphasizes spontaneity in management action through teams and the skillful confrontation of interpersonal differences. Social control and self-discipline replace formal control. This transition is especially difficult for the experts who created the coordination systems as well as for the line managers who relied on formal methods for answers.

I remain to be convinced whether this actually ever happens. It is certainly what is desirable, but the obstacles to it happening seem formidable.

Greiner claims that each phase of growth produces problems that lead to a revolution.
But, in each phase of growth the solutions implemented in the previous revolution inevitably produce problems that lead to a new crisis and revolution.
Ironically, for a business professor this determinist perspective (inevitability) is a somewhat Marxist view of history!

A second important claim is that the type of managers or leaders required at the different phases have quite different personalities, strengths, skills, values, and training. Consequently, each revolution is associated with a time of conflict within the organisation.

Why am I interested in all of this? How is it relevant to universities?
There are two ideas that I think are particularly important.

The first idea, is that different phases of growth attract quite different types of people to the organisation. The first phase tends to attract creative people who are driven by passion for thinking, learning, and research. They are independent thinkers who tend to dislike formality and structure.
In contrast, success and growth leads to attracting people who may be more motivated by money, power, or social status. Furthermore, they may be more passionate about organisation, procedures, and structures, than the actual original "core business." In fact, they would be just as happy working in HR, finance, or management in a soft drinks company, a large NGO, as in a university. These differences inevitably lead to conflicts of values. I think this is actually one of the major problems of research universities today. They have become so "successful", large, wealthy, and complex, that they now attract the "wrong" type of people to leadership and management. Passion for transformative education of undergraduates and for creative diligent scholarship is just not present.

The second idea, is the incredible challenge of going from phase 4 to phase 5. In a complex and large organisation how do you create a culture and structures that use the massive resources of the large organisation to actually foster the creativity, entrepreneurship, flexibility, and passion of "grass roots" activities that were present at stage 1, and are essential for the long-term viability and relevance of the organisation.

What do think about Greiner's growth model?
How is it relevant, whether to research groups, departments, or universities?

Metric madness outside the university

Universities are going off the rails because of the blind use of metrics. Unfortunately, this reflects what is also happening in wider society, due to the rise of neoliberalism.
Australia has recently been rocked by scandals involving large banks, leading to the resignation of CEO's, Board chairs, lawyers, ...

This stimulated the following column, by Ross Gittins, the Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. It is worth reading in full, but I reproduce a few choice extracts.
Banks' misbehaviour shows power of KPIs

... though the financial services industry must surely be the most egregious instance of the misuse of performance indicators and performance pay, let’s not forget “metrics” is one of the great curses of modern times.
It’s about computers, of course. They’ve made it much easier and cheaper to measure, record and look up the various dimensions of a big organisation’s performance, as well as generating far more measurable data about many dimensions of that performance. 

Which gave someone the bright idea that all this measurement could be used as an easy and simple way to manage big organisations and motivate people to improve their performance. Setting people targets for particular aspects of their performance does that. And attaching the achievement of those targets to monetary rewards hyper-charges them. Hence all the slogans about “what gets measured gets done” and “anything that can be measured can be improved”. 

Thus have metrics been used to attempt to improve the performance of almost all the major institutions in our lives: not just big businesses, but primary, secondary and higher education, medicine and hospitals, policing, the public service – the Tax Office and Centrelink, for instance. Trouble is, whenever we discover new and exciting ways of minimising mental effort, we run a great risk that, while we’re giving our brains a breather, the show will run off the rails in some unexpected way. .... 

I’ve long harboured doubts about the metric mania, but it’s all laid out in a new book, The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Muller, a history professor at the Catholic University of America, in Washington DC....

Universities are not holiday resorts for undergraduates!

In different words, No College Kid Needs a Water Park to Study
This is a disturbing New York Times opinion piece by James V Koch, who has been president of two universities in the USA.

Unfortunately, this rush to spend public money (and/or student tuition) by university managers appears to be global. In the UK, there is an article in the Financial Times Magazine
University challenge: the race for money, students and status.

From Swansea to Sheffield and Southampton to Strathclyde, universities are now engaged in a spending spree: renovating campuses and building lecture theatres, laboratories, libraries and halls of residence. “What we know is that students and their parents, when they go on open days, they are impressed by shiny buildings,” says Nick Hillman, an adviser to the universities minister David Willetts from 2010 to 2013 who now runs the Higher Education Policy Institute, a think-tank.  

But as cranes dominate campus skylines, debts are mounting on vice-chancellors’ ledgers.....

It is happening in Australia too. The picture below is the new building for the Faculty of Business and Law at the University of Newcastle, which was relocated from the suburbs to prime real estate in the city to increase "profile". A faculty member told me that the office space and opportunities to interact with students are much worse than in their old building.

At UQ all the occupants of one floor of the physics building have been forced to vacate their offices so a Dean can build a new office suite on top of the building. The university is planning to spend $150 million on a new student union and fitness centre. This is to "enhance the undergraduate student experience." They seem to be trying to keep up with the Australian National University, whose ambitious plans have already lead to legal action and recently almost got "washed away".

We should not lose sight of a basic truth. The quality of an education is not determined by the "quality" of the buildings on campus but rather by the quality of the people inside the buildings. It is just like how the quality of a scientific paper is not determined by the journal in which it is published in but rather by the contents of the paper. I like the following thought experiment. Suppose you took all of the Harvard faculty and relocated them to the Mediocre Australian University campus, and relocated all the MAU faculty to the Harvard campus. After 3 years where will MAU and Harvard have moved to in the "rankings"?

Again, a lot of this relates to what your vision is for university education and what you believe the mission of the university should be.

The emergence of BS in universities

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent (but depressing) article, Higher Education is Drowning in BS, by Christian Smith.

In both scope and eloquence, this article goes far beyond my post, The rise of BS in science and academia. Furthermore, as a sociologist, Smith argues that one of the challenges, is to the think about the problem in collective (dare I say emergent!) terms, rather than just individualistic terms.

Essential to realize in all of this is that most of the BS is produced not by pernicious individuals, but instead by complex dysfunctions in institutional systems. It is easy to be a really good academic or administrator and still actively contribute to the BS. So we need to think not individualistically, but systemically, about culture, institutions, and political economies. Pointing fingers at individual schools and people is not helpful here. Sociological analysis of systems and their consequences is.

Smith also spells out the broader moral and political implications of the problems.

In the end, a key issue, central to the problem, is there are many competing ideas and interests concerning what a university is actually for.  That ultimately comes from different values and world views, leading to different ethical, moral, and political perspectives. Nevertheless, the core mission should be clear: it is thinking about the world and training students to think.

I agree with Smith,

BS is the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the "practical" enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.

Aside: One interesting feature of the comments on the article, is how much the problem of students using cell phones in class gets discussed.

I thank Mike Karim for bringing the article to my attention.