Higher Ed Innovation

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn. I'm Jeff Salingo and author of several books on higher education and contributor at the Washington Post and the Atlantic. I'm also a special advisor at Arizona State University, where we are recording from today at ASU's new Washington D.C. center. And thanks to Arizona State for supporting this podcast.

Hi, everyone. I'm Michael Horne. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer for the Entangled Group, which is also helping sponsor this podcast. I'm also the co founder and distinguished Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and like you, Jeff, have written a number of books on education about the future of education. In my case, both K12 and higher education. Excited about this episode because it gets into my bailiwick of innovation. And so for all of you listening, we're going to be having an interview soon, soon with Kathy Davidson, who, among other things, is the founding director of the Futures Initiative at CUNY and then also has recently written a new book, the New Education how to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux. It's going to be a fun conversation from my perspective. But Jeff, what's interesting is I think Kathy has this vision of what higher ed should be and an impatience for it to get there and, and wondering why isn't it innovating fast enough? But you actually recently wrote a paper, the Rise of the Chief Innovation Officer, which talks about how, at least in terms of staffing, colleges and universities around the country are spending more time thinking about this issue of Innovation. Can you give us just an overview of what you found in researching that paper?

Yeah. So I found this fascinating. You know, I think back in 2011, after the big MOOC movement, it kind of worried and scared some colleges and universities. Most colleges had teaching and learning centers. But what we started to see after 2011, we started to see a lot of colleges and universities really be much more deliberate around this idea of innovation. It's such a buzzword in higher education. But what we're now seeing, and as part of this paper I did for Entangled, we looked at the number of job ads, for example, just around innovation officers or the number of people that have that title, innovation, somewhere in their title. And usually it might be a Vice Provost for Innovation or Learning Innovation. Sometimes it's actually a Chief Innovation Officer, it's somewhere in their title. So this is definitely a growing area of interest and concern for colleges and universities. They house a number of initiatives under that, mostly around maybe online education, maybe new credentials, new types of awarding those credentials. So it's a big piece of what they're doing. And we found kind of three different models of these innovation officers or this innovation movement in higher education. And as I describe in the paper, one of them is what I would call the skunk works or the autonomous entity strategy, right? This is where you kind of have an innovation function, and it's usually off

campus, like the Clay Christiansen 101. You need an autonomous entity to innovate when you're really rethinking everything, Right.

And many of these are actually even held off campus, Right? They're separate units. They're even housed physically off campus. We also saw this idea of the internal, what I call the internal consultancy, which really sees itself both as a service partner, where somebody actually comes and says, we need this help. It's internal to the university. It's really. Or a thought partner with somebody in the university. And then the third one is what I call the integrated strategy, which is really usually within a unit within the university, usually sometimes housed either in academic information technology or sometimes even housed in the. In the provost's office.

Is it fair to say that depending on which strategy you pick, sort of gives an indication of your level of readiness to innovate, throw off tradition and try new things, or. Doesn't necessarily correspond.

It doesn't actually necessarily correspond. I think some of it is culture, but I also think some of its size, right? So in the paper, I talked to a number of these innovation officers, including some at big major state universities, including the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland system, and then some even at some very small private colleges. So it thinks a lot more of. It's a function of size, and some of it's a function of culture. For example, at Arizona State University, Ed plus, which is really kind of their innovation unit, is housed off campus at a place called Sky Song in Scottsdale, Arizona. So it's a campus that's a little bit more open to that idea of having the Semper unit. But you even see this at a place like Georgetown University, where they have this thing called the Red House, which is literally a small little red house across the street from campus, where Randy Bass, who's one of their associate provosts, leads their innovation efforts. So I think a lot of it has to do more with culture and. And size than anything else.

And do you expect this to pervade all of higher education in the future? I confess, when I first started hearing these titles pop up, Chief Innovation Officer, I said, oh, yeah, that's just them, you know, paying lip service to the two trustees who are saying, why haven't you done X? Or why haven't you gotten on the MOOC bandwagon? But it seems more substantive than that. Do you think it's going to be everywhere or a certain percentage of higher ed? How should we think about how?

Well, and I'm very careful in the paper to lay out that, you know, you don't need. Need to necessarily create a whole new title of Chief Innovation Officer. And in fact, a lot of people got worried when I started bringing this up because, you know, there's this thing called, you know, administrative creep in higher education. Right. Where we're just having administrators.

Does Arizona State have a Chief Innovation officer?

They do not have a Chief Innovation officer. Right. I think they think everybody, it should be part of everyone's role. I think what you're going to see, though, is that it is going to be somebody's role, right. Where they actually have this as part of their title. So they're not doing it kind of inside of the desk, but it's part of their, their mission and they have some responsibility for it as well. So I think you're going to, you're going to see that in the future. And I think what worries many of these innovation officers is they don't want to be seen. You know, there was a movement about 10 years ago for chief Global officers, there's a movement for chief diversity officers, and they don't want to be kind of put into a corner and said, okay, well, you know, check on innovation, because we have a Chief Innovation Officer. They really want to be included in these, in, in these conversations. And, you know, so, for example, a lot of them told me they don't want to necessarily be a Chief Innovation officer by itself because, for example, chief Technology officers sometimes are not at the table when important decisions are being made about the future of higher education, particularly when it comes to technology.

Yeah, it reminds me a lot of the associations around chief technology officers, both K12 and higher education, actually complaining that they're making all these decisions about curriculum and instructional model and academic model and business model even, and we're not included in this. And yet technology is at the core of a lot of these changes that they're proposing. And the reality, I always would say, is what you got to somehow integrate yourself into the strategy and not think of yourself as just technology for technology's sake, but technology and furtherance of a mission and start to view it as a design problem as opposed to a Technology problem. I think the same thing is true in innovation. You can't just view it as, oh, we've taken care of innovation because we have our person over there. If it becomes a silo, another cog in the bureaucracy, if you will, it'll, it will be lip service, I think, in effect. And it's why Clay's advice For those that don't know Clay Christensen, when he wrote The Innovators Dilemma 97, he said, as he wrote The Innovator Solution five or six years later, he basically said, you know, the solution to the innovator's dilemma is creating this autonomous division that has the freedom, freedom to rethink the resources, processes, priorities of an organization. In essence, what makes it function to launch, maybe what might be a disruptive innovation that the main corpus would reject. And the ability to have that freedom is critical. And I think that's what Arizona State, Southern New Hampshire, many of these universities that have launched successful online programs, lower cost programs and the competency based programs and the like, every single one of them has set up an autonomous division that has the freedom to rethink those tenets of the business model.

Well, and it allows them to do fail a little bit and test things out without being part of the main university. I also found that it really generates and builds momentum for ideas and helps develop this kind of innovative mindset within the campus community. Most important, they develop processes for innovation. Right. So it's not just to let a thousand flowers bloom and figure out what happens, but they have definite processes now for these. It helps them connect with outside partners.

Right.

Because we know there's a lot of philanthropy dollars in this area or even other private equity dollars that could be, that can be part of this. So there's, there's good reasons to have this function within the university. Again, don't get me wrong, it doesn't have to necessarily have the title Chief Innovation Officer, doesn't have to have its own division. I think a couple universities could afford that, but most can. And I think that really where this is in, usually under the provost's office, it's working out pretty well.

Yeah, it's funny that you say that because obviously the sequel from an entangled standpoint is our paper coming out about innovation management and developing processes for managing innovation that Tara Crews, Lauren Dibble and I worked on also will be at Entangled Solutions. And what we found in that paper is really having a controlled way of thinking about all the things coming in the funnel and evaluating like ideas against like ideas as opposed to you know, pitting something that's transformational against something that's incremental and trying to make an investment decision is just insane. We future episode that we can dig in on that perhaps, but having these chief innovation officers sit astride those decisions and really create, process and then manage. You said it right. You still want to be improving the core and not, you know, tipping over the Apple cart of what you're currently doing. But being able to have a safe space to innovate is critical. And being able to manage the flow of resources and processes, what the authors of Dual Transformation call a capabilities exchange, I think is really important. And chief Innovation officers can clearly play that role.

And I think it's also part about having some buy in from the, from the faculty. I mean, one of the reasons I like these being housed in the, in the provost office is that they have an academic bent to them. I think part of the problem with information technology on many campuses is that they're seen as kind of a technology service unit. You go to them when you have a problem. They're not seen as somebody you go to right from the beginning and you want to put your course online or you want to do more active learning in your courses or use technology enabled work in your courses. And so as a result, they're seen as the service unit. And that's why many of them are not at the table when important decisions are being made. When this is under the pressure. Provost's office, I think that there is more buy in from faculty. Some of these chief innovation officers I met or those people that have that in their title came up through the academic ranks. Many of them were professors themselves and kind of got into this again after the 2011 MOOC movement where they felt that innovation was kind of struggling on their campuses. I think the question now is how much momentum is there going to be for this going forward? Forward. Right. So as you said earlier, you know, I think a lot of this came about when somebody at a board meeting said, hey, what are we doing about X, Y or Z? I just read about it in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or, or wherever. And so this was the response to that. And then, you know, a couple projects come out from it. And the question is, what happens five years from now or 10 years? How do you kind of keep that momentum going? Because I think part of the problem in higher ed, and I even see this at asu, which, you know, I still consider one of the more innovative universities, is that the, the culture, the, the culture will Always try to pull you back.

Yeah, the definition, right?

Yeah. And so how do you kind of keep that pressure? How do you kind of keep that pressure on, I think is the question.

So if I'm a college president right now, listening to this, how do I find that person that can be my chief Innovation officer? I know it depends upon what structure and culture that I want, but you said some of these folks are coming up through academia themselves. But what are the schools of experience that I want this person to have had to say, yeah, you're the person to shepherd innovation for my campus.

So I think that they've either had to have been doing it internally. Right. So they're usually the person a dean in a school taps for new projects and they've been able to navigate the institution from the inside, or they have some academic experience and they've been doing it from the outside. So some of these people have been, for example, consultants that I met, but they have deep academic experiences as well. And thus we're able to kind of come into the academic experience. So I think a combination of somebody who's been able to project, manage or shepherd projects through and have some sort of academic experience, I think those people make the best.

The best ones perfect. I think that gives us a good feel for how we start to staff up against innovation. And it's going to lead perfectly, I think, in the conversation we're about to dive into with Kathy where we talk about what should this innovation look like and how do we make it happen faster? I think is going to be on top of mind for her. Yes.

And she'll be with us as soon as we get back from the short break. This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. For more information and to apply to our next cohort, go to Georgetown asu. Edu this episode was also made possible with support from the Entangled Group, where innovation meets operations. Entangled is a venture studio focused on helping the education ecosystem transition to support the knowledge economy. We build companies and non profits that support higher education institutions as they innovate to carry out their critical missions for society in the 21st century.

Welcome back to Future youe. I'm Michael Horne joined here with Jeff Salingo. And Jeff joined by an exciting guest today.

Yeah, I'M really excited. We have Kathy Davidson with us today. She's the founding director of the Futures Initiative and a distinguished professor in the PhD program in English at the Graduate center at CUNY, the City University of New York. Of course, Kathy is also the co founding director and now co director of hastack, which is the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology alliance, the world's first and oldest academic social network. She also previously taught at Duke University for more than two decades. Currently, her scholarship focuses on the future of higher education, which is perfect for this broadcast of Future U and the best ways to transform higher ed while yet supporting its crucial educational and social mission. She's an author of a book, of course, because everybody's an author of a book these days. And that's the new how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux. So, Kathy, great to have you on this episode of Future youe. And again, perfect for what we're talking about, which is about what's next in higher ed. So we asked this question of a lot of our guests. How did you get into thinking about higher education? Right. You obviously are teaching in higher ed, but there's a lot of professors in higher ed who are so focused on their own disciplines, they don't really necessarily think about what's happening in the larger universe of academia and higher education. How did you become interested in what's happening in higher ed?

Well, that's a complex question, but one of the answers is that I am probably unusual among professors and that I really, really studied pedagogy. I'm dyslexic myself, so I learn in a very, very unconventional way. I'm either a slow reader or can read, I guess you would say, photographically and very, very rapidly. And because I was eccentric in the way I learned, I really wanted to learn about learning. So I really have made that an avocation, really, since the beginning of my teaching career. I got my PhD very young, and I've always been reading new books on pedagogy. And then in 1998, I had this amazing opportunity where Nan Kohan, the president of Duke, invented a job and said, I want you to be the first vice provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, and was the first one at Duke or anywhere. And the job description was, quote, unquote, to break things and make things and basically to make alliances happen across programs and other things happen across the university where the structures and the silos seem to make those programs impossible. So I have this interest in pedagogy. I worked as an administrator doing Impossible things. It was a fabulous and interesting job. But when I came back to teaching, I thought, what's the connection between those two? What are the things that are hard to learn that make teaching and learning difficult, and how is that related to institutional formations? And so I wrote a book. My last book was on cognition and learning and focused on K through 12, as well as college and lifelong learning. And then this one, I really looked more specifically. The new education is on the infrastructures of those silos and how they actually impede learning in the world we're in now.

So let's dive into that book that you just wrote, the New Education, and more broadly, or perhaps synonymously, it's in your vision for what higher education should and must be in the future. Can you sort of give us a summary of the book and your vision for where this should go?

Sure. One, I think that much of what we've inherited was already fully in place in 1925 and really didn't exist before about 1918, 1860, or 1865. And that's the whole infrastructure of majors, minors, graduate school, professional school grades, credentialing, admissions, exams. There's all the apparatus we live with today. It was there in 1925, and it's gotten more and more solidified and rigid since then. And I don't think it serves anyone well. I've been to about 40 universities since it came out in September. And I always start by saying, if you love everything at your university, you can leave because you don't need to change. But if you have things that you feel are impeding you from actually your mission as an educator or your university or college's mission, let's talk about that. And I don't think there's a one size fits all prescription. What I do think is, for many, maybe even most, maybe even all educators now, there's a big difference between the structures we have to work within and our own mission and ambitions and ideals and goals for higher education. How to make those more aligned is what I think is crucial for faculty and even more crucial for students.

So, Kathy, what should then a college education look like, in your opinion, from a curricular perspective?

So from a curricular perspective, I love the idea of rebundling. For a while, there was this thing called unbundling, where people were going to just take the weed of the university and get rid of the chaff. And unfortunately, the chaff was humanities, social science, African American studies program, women's studies program, ethics programs, anything that didn't seem like a traditional discipline. Well, Most brilliant work that's happening now in research is happening across disciplines and not within disciplines. And I would say that actually most of those traditional disciplines don't really map very well on the kinds of issues that we have to deal with now. So I think the new education is partly about taking all of the incredible assets of a university and rebundling them in ways that aren't respectful, aren't necessarily bound to the inherited structures, but that look at how you can take these assets and use them to deal with really complicated problems that industry can't. So, for example, at Arizona State, Xiaowei Bin has this program on art design and engineering. He directs it and sets his introductory students a big complicated question every year. And one year it was, what will life be like in Phoenix when there's no more water? Well, that could be tomorrow that there's no more water in Phoenix. And this is a problem every student is grappling with. And I love that problem because it makes it clear you can't make a disjunction between science and ethics and human values and social justice and business and law. To solve that problem, you have to think about all of those together. And that doesn't mean everybody has to know everything. It means everybody has to find ways to work productively with people who know things you don't know and combine those into something that's an equitable and good solution.

It sounds like that that would actually have implications for how you designed high school as well, from a curricular perspective.

I want to go back, and that was my last book, but I want to go preschool.

Yes. So just give us get like, I don't know if it's fair to give us a quick walkthrough, but it sounds like soup to nuts since these things are so interdependent. And we know that a lot of the requirements in high school came actually from college presidents, the Council of 10, many, many, many, many, many, many years ago. Just walk us through. How would that look from your perspective?

Sure. I mean, for one thing, I think one thing we've done, and this is not going all the way back to the Council of Ten, which was chaired by the same Charles Eliot who wrote the new education in 1869 and started the revolution that I'm saying we need a new version of. But we become very, very narrow in what we actually test. Basically, we test math and reading. Now, there's all kinds of different ways of learning that are incredibly important and useful, that have dropped out of the ways we value human minds and human intellects. And I think some of the resentment against higher education is by people who are very smart. They're just not academic material. So for example, when I was in high school, vocational education was crucial in my high school now, and I know this from a nephew of mine who was interested in computers, but not in other academic subjects. In the city of Denver, there's one place that offers true vocational training. Now what that means is if you don't have a pre college aptitude, if you don't have pre college interests, you're considered a failure. That's horrible. We're writing off a very large segment of society that is actually incredibly necessary and important in the world we're living in now. So that would be one thing. More inclusiveness, more generosity towards subjects. Not just vocational training, but art, music, dance, things that we know are important for inspiring students. More physical exercise. We make kids sit longer than ever. And definitely a change in the testing regime. America tests earlier and more often than any other country. By the time you get to college, you've had one about studies, say about 112 high stakes summative tests. The kind that where somebody is saying this goes on your permanent record. I think that's almost a kind of child abuse. When I interviewed principals, my last book for now youw See It, Principal after principal said, when it's high stakes exam time, end of grade tests or whatever it is in your particular state, the students are freaking out, the parents are freaking out, the faculty is freaking out. And every principal said, and we as principals are freaking out. There's too much emphasis put on a very poor kind and an impoverished kind of high stakes multiple choice testing. And that has implications for college and back to K through 12, which is

why in many of these cities now we're seeing these scandals where, you know, basically students were pushed through and principals and teachers are actually being implicated for doing that.

So Kathy, two choices, cheating or abuse or going to a cram school where you learn how to game the test. That's three totally impoverished and destitute versions of learning. I'm so against it. I can't. I mean I'm. And we're living in a computational age where we have all kinds of things that you can algorithmically actually program in ways to have much more subtle testing, including peer review.

So Kathy, you know, I'm here applauding everything you're saying. And when you say this on college campuses, and when I hear people talking about this on college campuses, then somebody in the audience will say, sure. But you know, we have the Structure we have is also financed in a certain way. Right. And we have to have all these majors and all these schools and we have to do it the way we've been doing it, because that's the way we know how to do it. That's the way it's financed. How would you change the financing structure of higher education, which seems to really drive a lot of the curricular reforms and other reforms at colleges and universities?

So I did that for eight years on a micro level. That exactly was my job, was to figure out how to make programs like Environmental Solutions, which was a program where the grants were written by and funding was shared across the law school, which charges tuition per seat, basis per classroom, the business school, which has a different method, the School of Environmental Science, which has a different method, and the undergraduate program, which had a different one. So my job was to figure out how to make a kind of a bank account. We never called it a tax. It was a bank account where each school would put a certain percentage of money into a bank account and they could design very encompassing large programs across the schools and withdraw money in the same financial structure and formula by which they put it in. So it was very complicated and almost handcrafted, but we were able to do this in massive ways. That's one way. Another way is having certain kinds of skunk works, to use that old fashioned term, where you're setting aside one part of the university to do something experimental. And if it works, then you use that model to expand it outward. That's basically what the red House that Georgetown is using, which is one of the programs I profile in the book.

Well, and you're making us look good because we were just talking about it before you came on.

So, yeah, you try the most radical things you can. Does credit hour have to be tied to seat time? Can you get a master's degree and a bachelor's degree at the same time? Can you invent your own degree with a committee of faculty from different places? These are all many things that they're pioneering there. And once they work them out on a small level, they then have a little working model. It's almost like an architect's maquette. That then allows you to see where the structural problems are, where the fissures are, what works, what doesn't work, what's going to collapse under the weight of itself and then from there go on to make something much bigger. I think that's a very, very plausible model on a faculty level. When I was out at UC Santa Cruz last week, Jody Green, who's the head of a new center for teaching and learning there, said something that's so simple and I've never heard it anywhere else. She said, in the UC system and many, many other universities, every year faculty have to say what they've done as teachers, what they've done as researchers, what they've done as institutional citizens. I hate the term service, by the way. So I'm just, I always call it institutional leaders or change makers or citizens or something. Anything but service, which automatically demeans that role. And you can't have change if you feel demeaned. So that's number one thing, change the name. It's not service, it's institutional leadership. But her idea was that faculty, if they wished in a given year or even for two or three years, could choose two out of those three and say, you know, for the next three years, I'm not going to do research. I'm going to focus on teaching and I'm going to focus on institutional change and I'm going to do just as much work, but I'm going to really free up my time and dedicate myself to this and focus and report on two of the three things. And her idea was if you gave people that kind of control over their own time, they would be much more inclined to do something. So many things that require change are add ons. I call it philanthropy. For example, many times when you're doing team teaching, your department or college won't count that as a course. It's like you're doing it for free. It's philanthropy. But if that were part of your counting, because this year you're not going to do research, just going to focus on teaching or you're going to just focus on one of those other components, it makes sense and it frees up your time and gives you the honor of doing something autonomously rather than top down.

Perfect. Now, Kathy, that's an unbelievably robust vision you've just painted. And we were, before you came on, we were having a conversation around chief innovation officers and their roles and creating some of these structures. You've just given us a whole nother section and food for thought about how to help universities, as you said, not just add on, but actually fundamentally innovate and change the architecture that underlies them. So really appreciate you joining us this week on Future you. And thanks, of course, to all our listeners joining us. My name is Michael Horn and we've just been joined by Kathy Davidson, the founding director of the Futures Initiative and a distinguished professor in the PhD program in English at CUNY and the author of her most recent book, book, most recent, we should say, the New how to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Kathy, thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much.

No, and we look forward to it. And again, I'm Michael Horn. You can follow me on Twitter at

michaelbhorn or@michaelbhorn.com and I'm Jeff Salingo. And you can follow me on Twitter at jsalingo or on the web@jeffsalingo.com and you can download, subscribe and rate Future you on itunes or Google Play and follow us on Facebook at Future you podcast. Thanks for joining us today.