The Scope of Universities

My earlier post on administrative bloat has found some echoes. For example, Niklas Blanchard writes,

Bloat, or creep is the organizational manifestation of this phenomenon. Whereas organisms will die, organizations without active management will stagnate, become bloated and inefficient, and (from the perspective of a product) continue adding features that sound good in an echo chamber, because there is too much gridlock everywhere else to get consumer feedback to product design. From an S-curve analysis perspective, this problem is endemic at the top of the S curve, when a market participant is dominant (or in econospeak, maximally monopolistically competitive).

Here is the problem: universities won’t fail. The threat of failure is the single best way to insure against institutional sclerosis.

Read the whole thing. Also, Matt Kuhns writes,

Instead of the centralized, monolithic single-point-of-failure model for colleges, why not a new concept of a college or university as an ecology? Instead of a single organization, e.g. Iowa State University, you could have a living network of independent organizations, within which a student could experience much if not more of the familiar diversity of ideas and opportunities at various geographic clusters of those organizations, e.g. Ames, Iowa. Replace a centrally-run, hermetic Soviet Science City with Silicon Valley, in other words.

I wonder whether the Claremont Colleges or the college community at Amherst have a had start at this.

1 thought on “The Scope of Universities

  1. Efforts at redefining the entire ecology are what could allow education to exist in freer forms. But where to start? Some of those potential efforts aren’t even really being discussed but say it were possible…think of, first, alternative building component and community infrastructure reform that would also allow mass produced, mobile and highly efficient forms of living and working. Were that in place and people didn’t need to spend a third of their income on living quarters as they do now (think the Industrial Revolution and agriculture here) people also would not need as many traditional educational jobs, say, just to pay the rent. No one gets a “vacation” in the present, robots or not, because no one allowed robots to build their living environments.

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