Toward Disruption of Disruption

Disruption's a magical buzzword these days, uncritically seized upon wherever you go. Far more than it ever was with new technologies, anyone who raises questions is an obvious counter-revolutionary, a luddite, a fan of the inefficient status quo. There's precious little quality critical thinking around innovations like taxi apps, selling restaurant reservations, and market regulation - most of the discourse is either bandwagon fandom or knee-jerk anti-ism. Lepore, more a cultural than economic historian, seems to get the organizational and economic sociology of disruption and contributes a useful bit of provocation into an otherwise too often one-sided conversation.

From The New Yorker

ANNALS OF ENTERPRISE

THE DISRUPTION MACHINE

What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.

BY JILL LEPOREJUNE 23, 2014

In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. .... We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

...

Porter was interested in how companies succeed. ... Clayton M. Christensen... was interested in why companies fail. In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he argued that, very often, it isn’t because their executives made bad decisions but because they made good decisions, the same kind of good decisions that had made those companies successful for decades. (The “innovator’s dilemma” is that “doing the right thing is the wrong thing.”)

...

In “The Innovative University,” ... Christensen and Eyring wrote, “will allow us to move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for success.” ... Christensen and Eyring’s recommendations for the disruption of the modern university include a “mix of face-to-face and online learning.” The publication ... in 2011, contributed to a frenzy for Massive Open Online Courses.... Shortly afterward, the University of Virginia’s panicked board of trustees attempted to fire the president, charging her with jeopardizing the institution’s future by failing to disruptively innovate with sufficient speed....

Read the entire piece at The New Yorker

See Also

• June, Anna North. 2014. "Arguing About the Truth of Disruption." NYT OpTalk June 18, 2014
• Roose, Kevin. 2014. "The Problem With Profitless Start-ups," New York Magazine, April 11, 2014
• Yglesias, Matthew. 2013 "Stop 'Disrupting' Everything: How a once-useful concept turned into a meaningless buzzword," Slate, May 1, 2013

An Alternative Voice in Higher Education Conversation

In its own words, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE) "is a NEW GRASSROOTS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN to support quality higher education." It was launched in Los Angeles in May 2011 by leaders of faculty organizations from across the US.

CFHE provides a needed counter-balance to the dominant voices in debates about the future of higher education in the US.  It's not less partisan, but it is differently partisan (if you are familiar with AAUP take on things this will ring familiar), and only a bit more transparent than the others, but it's refreshing to see faculty unions in the conversation for a change.  

According to their statement of principles, the organization's principles include

• making education a public good available to all rather than private good available to the few
• making sure education is more than narrow job training
• promoting investment in quality faculty
• encouraging smart incorporation of technology
• distinguishing real efficiencies vs. false economies of cut cut cut
• calling for more public investment
• arguing that educational outcomes cannot be measured by standardized metrics and that we need to avoid
 the 
seduction 
of 
reductionist
 measures
 and 
simplistic 
goals

A Future with Only Ten Universities

"In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them."

Sebastian Thrun

Audrey Watters, who blogs at Hack Education gave a talk titled "A Future With Only 10 Universities" on 14 October at a pre-conference called "Minding the Future"* held at Mary Washington University.  Her spiel is to pose a dystopian future in which there are only 10 universities in the world, to speculate as to what they are, and then to suggest what the path to this future might look like.

I describe an alternative dystopian future in post on Majoring in the 21st Century, arguing that a likely future is one where small colleges become franchises of education conglomerates that are the descendants of companies like Pearson, Kaplan, McGraw-Hill, etc.

To give you a sense of her angle, here is her list:

1. Oxford
2. Cambridge
3. Harvard
4. MIT
5. Stanford
6. Princeton
7. The University of Pearson (acquires Coursera, 2016)
8. The University of Google (acquires Udacity, 2014)
9. The University of Walmart (acquires University of Phoenix, 2017)
10. BYU

Spoiler alert: she doesn't actually think this is an inevitable outcome.  There's a video of the talk on You-Tube (at 1:33:00).

* The conference description from YouTube post of the streamed video: "Across the nation, higher education has seen a recent flood of initiatives that seek to leverage the advantages of the "virtual" domain to improve affordability, degree completion rates, and educational outcomes. Many of these initiatives are being driven by calls to fundamentally change the landscape of higher education as we know it — but is this supported by thorough conversation or vision about what the new landscape should look like?

"To examine this question, the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV), a wide range of Virginia's public higher education institutions, and the Shuttleworth Foundation are sponsoring a two day event that will investigate these calls for disruptive change, and chart a path for Virginia public institutions to navigate the possibilities and challenges in the future.

"On Monday, October 14th, five thought leaders from multiple disciplines and professional domains will examine the issues, in light of the national landscape of higher education. A series of focused talks throughout the afternoon will be capped by a panel discussion dealing specifically with whether or not public institutions have their head in the sand when it comes to topics such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), distance learning, and the 'electronic delivery revolution.'"