Darden Business School Rediscovers Its Right Brain

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Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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SCUP Link

Darden finds a solution to teaching innovation and creativity by studying the programs in graphic arts and design schools, and schools of architecture. From Today's Campus:

Design, story, leadership, symphony, play and meaning predominate. Pink says these qualities are the new business literacy, and the MFA is the new MBA . . . Darden chose not to change a reworked MBA to an MFA, but to complement the de rigueur of accounting, finance, labor law and management with a team-based, collaborative search for creativity . . . That makes sense at a university founded by an extraordinary man who – as a horticulturist, philosopher, politician, farmer, architect, archaeologist, paleontologist, inventor, writer and U.S. president – used both sides of his brain quite well.

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SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III

Pursuing Needless Innovations

Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) argues for the value of "traditional" learning and matriculation, and wonders why America's elites don't seem to want the great education they got, for the rest of the population. (Here is the Zephyr Teachout essay that we think is the one he refers to. It's also worth reading. Ekman's essay is here, from University Business:

Most Americans today don’t harbor resentments against their alma maters. Nor is the popular critique of higher education mainly a matter of outrage over high tuition. Rather, the public criticism of colleges is, to a surprising extent, aimed at the educational experience itself.

Discarding the baby with the bathwater, Zephyr Teachout’s widely-circulated essay argues that the traditional classroom-based college will soon be replaced by online education, and that the differences in reputation among colleges will no longer matter. I don’t know where Teachout went to college, but her view—especially that a college’s prestige won’t matter—seems more wishful than realistic.

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• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Spinning Straw Into Gold (at Community Colleges)

Nice - definitely worth a read before it goes behind password protection(!) - Business Officer article by Reagan Romall about how community colleges are innovating, changing, and leveraging existing products and services into better ones, that make more money, too.“

We need to diversify our revenue base. Any business that doesn't do this won't survive,” says Larry Eisenberg, executive director, facilities planning and development, for the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD). “Fortunately, there are lots of opportunities out there that make sense, have low impact on existing resources, and are relatively lucrative.”

AND

As in the rest of Florida, budget cuts keep Polk State College, Winter Haven, seeking solutions to counter the crunch. Peter Elliott, vice president, administration and chief financial officer, says the college has experienced a 10 percent cut in state funding since 2006. That has not discouraged the college's leaders, says Elliott. He sees “hope on a daily basis” when he walks the campus and visits with students and staff. “You have to focus on what's important and talk with people. They have good ideas,” he says.

In fact, seeking ideas from the community has helped Polk State generate substantial funds. Conversations with a local corporate training advisory board, the board of trustees, and local community groups have all yielded revenue-generating ideas. “Being engaged in the community around us has been quite productive,” says Elliott.

Further, he says, “Crisis makes you focus on the central thing your college does; it makes you focus on teaching and learning.” By doing that, Polk State College has come up with some effective ideas to expand the reach of its learning programs to its financial advantage.

Free: The University of the People

Have you been hearing about a "free" university? Perhaps the reference is to Shai Reshef's University of the People. Here's a link to a brief Q&A with Reshef in Campus Technology magazine. Here's a link to the school's website. 

When a student signs up, he or she is grouped with 20 other individuals whom they interact with and learn from via homework assignments, discussion questions, and lectures. Students discuss the questions among themselves and participate in a peer-to-peer learning environment. If at any point a peer can't help--or if a student needs more elaboration on a particular topic--then they can visit the course forum. There they will find all university students who are taking the same course, along with volunteers, professors and graduate students who can help with those issues. At the end of each week, students take a quiz on the material they've learned, turn in their homework and receive a grade. The same system is used for all 40 courses that comprise the program.

Renaming the 'English Department' the "Department of Word Science"

Well, that comment was actually not in this article, it was in the . . . comments to the article. A business coalition, known as the Service Research & Innovation Initiative is campaigning to get Customer Service taught as a science. The comments are fun: "We’ve just decided to rename our English Department the Department of Word Science. The donations are already pouring in!"

Research, Innovation, and Technology Transfer: Maybe We're Not Doing Such a Great Job?

Stephen Quake is a professor at Stanford University and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He writes, in a guest column for The New York Times, about inefficiencies in technology leverage, transfer, and licensing—and says it's broke, let's fix it:

In some quarters of academia there is a deep longing for a return to the ivory tower – that time when the university was disconnected from commercial interests and faculty members were unsoiled by the financial rewards that can be associated with their research.

I must admit that in some respects I share that nostalgia – it would be good for society if there were institutions to turn to for unbiased opinions on the questions that face society. However, it is also true that universities have turned away from the ivory tower model and have embraced a more engaged role in the commercial development of the discoveries of their faculty members.

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Today’s university faculty is a diverse community of ivory tower researchers alongside inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. I will discuss two consequences of this: first, what happens when a faculty member has a financial interest in his research, and second, how faculty inventions are commercialized.

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Although some may still pine for the ivory tower, today’s universities are a swirling cauldron of research that cover the gamut from the esoteric to the applied, and function not only as scholarly institutions but also as engines of innovation. Universities should embrace their role as technology creators and maximize this process by facilitating the efforts of their faculty members. Our country’s economic future could depend on it.

TQM, Blue Ocean Strategy, and More - at Rio Salado CCollege

Rio Salado College is recognized as a leader in many ways. In fact, we included it in an article about innovative business practices written by SCUP leaders for the late summer issue of Community College Journal (unfortunately not available on line). This resource describes some of the ways which Rio plans for and achieves innovation, with an emphasis on staff development processes:

Rio tends to evolve and incorporate business practices through staff development offerings. It is common for the college to use aspects of different business models that can be applied to workplace practices. Laura Helminski, chair of the communications department, explains, “It [the full scope of business models] becomes too rigid for us if we do every piece of a concept. We have found that some of the mechanical and statistical aspects slow us down, so we focus on the softer, people-oriented aspects.” She further states, “It’s not a pure approach, but we think it’s working. People tell us they believe we’re on to something! It feels right for us.”

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Staff development programs provide a means by which community colleges can implement strategic initiatives that center on supporting the effective integration of college vision, mission, purpose, and values. The use of staff development programs to support strategic objectives allows community colleges to develop program offerings based on society’s needs; provide high-quality, flexible, and affordable education to our customers; and support student success in a continued commitment to positive social change.

I Smell the Death of Education Approaching?

This article by Scott Jaschik covers a recent address by Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee to an ACE audience. It's interesting in and of itself, but even more so because of the many interesting comments by readers posted in reaction to it. The first comment starts out, "I smell the death of education approaching," and it gets even more interesting in later comments. From the Jaschik article:

Noting that the United States created land-grant colleges in the middle of the Civil War, E. Gordon Gee told his fellow college presidents Sunday evening that the current economic crisis is no reason not to consider bold and far-reaching reforms of the institutions. “I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge,” Gee said here at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.

The choice for higher education, he said: “reinvention or extinction.”

Gee didn’t dispute the seriousness of the economic crisis facing colleges, calling it an “ever-worsening fiscal quagmire.” But he said that higher education must resist the “first instinct” of such situations, “to hunker down, hide out, take refuge in the fox hole, and wait for the storm to pass.” The situation is sufficiently dire, he said, that colleges need to “reconfigure ourselves,” rather than simply trying to restore lost funds.

Specifically, Gee suggested that colleges abandon their traditional devotion to disciplines, rethink the way faculty members are hired, and embrace a more central role for community colleges in higher education.

The Cost of Innovation: Teaching and Learning and the Bottom Line

We enjoy Richard Ekman's essays in University Business magazine:

Graduates should be expected to demonstrate that they can learn through a variety of formats: lecture, seminar, independent study, internship, guided research, and online course. Lectures aren’t inherently bad, and seminars aren’t inherently good. An education received entirely through any one instruction mode doesn’t prepare students for the many ways in which information is received and must be presented in the postgraduation world.

The most effective forms of instruction are sometimes inexpensive, and the least effective are sometimes very expensive. We are all familiar with courses that use internet-based exercises in which the online material is simply a static textbook to be consulted and read online. Except for faster searching, the technology’s capability is not exploited for any of its distinctive features—dynamic capabilities for simulation or modeling, use of images (especially moving images), sound mixed with text, or graphical representation of complex data. A student learns little in these courses that couldn’t be learned equally well from a printed book.

Changing the Game: The Federal Role in Supporting 21st Century Educational Innovation

This item comes from our favorite email newsletter (PDF), the Scout Report:

The Brookings Institution has had a long-standing interest in the American system of education, and this thoughtful 73-page report takes a close look at how the federal government might best intervene in this particular area of American society. The report was released in October 2008, and it was authored by Sara Mead and Andrew J. Rotherham. In their report, the authors suggest that the federal government should create a new federal Office of Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation within the Department of Education. The general premise behind such a policy idea is that such an office would "expand the boundaries of public education by scaling up successful education entrepreneurs, seeding transformative educational innovations, and building a stronger culture to support these activities throughout the public sector." The report contains eight chapters, an executive summary, and a set of conclusions. [KMG]

Copyright 2009 Internet Scout Project - http://scout.wisc.edu

'Public Purpose' Mag Looks at Important Research Issues

Public Purpose is the magazine of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU). Its November–December 2008 issue presents several thoughtful reads on important issues regarding college and university research, from the perspective of top, decision-making leadership, including: The Ethical Imperative (PDF), subtitled "Nine Reminders for Presidents About Compliance and Ethics"; Innovation and Economic Development Spark New Collaborations on AASCU Campuses (PDF), "Because of the greater amounts of land required, as well as higher property costs and related expenses, many of the newer projects on AASCU campuses take the form of business incubators, accelerators or other spaces more modest than traditional research parks"; and Presidents and Chancellors Name Top Research Priorities (PDF), "One hundred and fifty of the chief executive officers at AASCU-member institutions completed the survey, a response that speaks to the importance of research development on the campuses."

Thinking: The Missing Responsibility

We sometimes bemoan the lack of time for reflection. Jerry D. Campbell calls it "thinking," or at least we think it's the same thing:

Unfortunately, in failing to emphasize thinking in the workplace, we risk losing its potential. Thinking must be nurtured and facilitated. It is not so easy sometimes to get into the thinking mode. Those “to do” lists in our Blackberries are always stalking us. We feel like we are wasting time if we are not doing something tangible: making calls, answering e-mails, starting the next assignment or project. Nonetheless, it is critically important to develop the discipline of turning off the ringer, putting away the Blackberry, moving aside the laptop, and turning mentally to the challenges in our work.

But again, this is hard to do. Without institutional encouragement, we start to feel guilty, like we’re wasting time. Just sitting and thinking—isn’t there something “real” we should be doing? And even with encouragement, making the time to think takes practice, especially for those of us who have been out of school for a while. Thinking—especially useful, creative thinking—must be cultivated.

Stifling Initiative: 10 Simple Rules to Crush Innovation and Maintain a Culture of Inertia

An amusing and insightful article. We especially like the description of how one can use a requirement for a "formal written proposal" following specific administrative guidelines to quash a new idea:

[P]eople hate change. It causes the status quo to become unsettled and the familiar starts to go away, replaced with uncertainty. Our comfort zone is demolished and we have to try to resettle into uncharted territory.

If we've learned a routine and it seems to work, there is absolutely no reason to have to do it differently. After all, the experts will agree that there is nothing new under the sun. So-called innovations are only the status quo in a rehashed, repackaged format that looks new. Honestly, who believes that just because a proposal will generate a slick exterior that the same functional beast doesn't lurk within?

Unfortunately, there are always those who just don't get it. You know-those who think organizations need to adapt to remain competitive, that change is good and results in greater efficiencies, that failure to adapt to "modernalities" is evil and counterproductive. Since they usually mean well and truly believe they are trying to improve our situation, we don't want to cull them from the herd (besides, who wants the hassle of trying to break in the newbie?). It usually suffices to discourage these people to the point that they fall in line and stop agitating. How do we get them to stop? How do we encourage the status quo without driving them to leave?