Shifting Universities’ Mindsets Toward Innovation

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to the latest episode of Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo, and I'm joined in Washington, D.C. by my co host today, Michael Horn. And we're going to have with us today Randy Bass, who's a vice provost at Georgetown University here in Washington, who's well known in higher education circles for some of the innovative work that they're doing at Georgetown. He heads up an effort there that he'll be talking about called the Red House and an effort to talking about the Designing the futures of education. Of higher education. And he'll be talking about some of the projects, but more importantly, talking about changing the culture. We heard on a recent episode of Future you with Michael Crow around strategy, how important it is to also shift the culture and the mindset of universities to make them more innovative and change for the future. A question that we like to ask a lot of our guests is out of all the things you could have done in life, why higher education?

I think I got hooked in college. I spent seven of the eight semesters that I was in college sitting on a committee to reform the general education program at my university.

Which university?

This was at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. And I became the student representative on the committee in January of my freshman year.

Wow.

And by the time I had graduated, it had been rolled out and sliced and diced by the faculty. And so it basically defined my entire college career. And I became fascinated by the question of reforming higher education and the obstacles to reforming higher education. So I'm probably one of the few people that ever went to get a PhD in literature so I could become a provost and reform higher education.

So that leads, I guess, right in as the provost position. It's leading the Red House at Georgetown University, quite literally a red house. But for those not familiar with what the work at the Red House is and why it was set up, can you enlighten us and talk about your position there?

Absolutely. So just to be technically correct, I'm actually the vice provost. I didn't know there were such things when I was a freshman. But so as vice Provost for Education at Georgetown, one of the things I do is lead an initiative called Designing the Futures of the University. And that initiative, which started a little over four years ago, got its space in a townhouse that is red and has come to be known as the Red House. And the purpose of the Red House and the Designing the Futures initiative is to try to accelerate innovation at Georgetown by Piloting curricular experiments that deliberately mess with the model. So these are not merely pedagogical innovations, which we have many of those, but these are innovations that specifically are trying to push the boundaries. On the one side, size fits all 15 week three credit semester course, or the nine month calendar, how we count credits toward a minor or a major or even a degree.

So talk a little bit about you've been running a lot of experiments at the Red House. Can you talk a little bit about the ones that you're most excited about or the ones that are furthest along that maybe our listeners could potentially replicate even at their own places?

So first let me say that I think one of the biggest impacts that we've had on the university is by opening up people's imagination of what's possible in terms of the kinds of things that they could pilot. So I'll talk about one or two of our signature programs, but I actually think that the greatest success is when I can point to other places in the university or whole schools that are now making room for things like emergent one credit modules and whatnot.

Meaning not even incubated at the Red House.

Not even incubated that we just sort of created a space in which these things are normal. So four years ago when we started, nobody was designing one credit modules. Nobody was designing things that could be unbundled and then rebundled in different ways. And now in almost every school in the university, something is going on along those lines within the Red House. I would say a couple of our biggest signature programs. One is known as Core Pathways, which was an alternative way to allow students to navigate their way through the core curriculum. We focused it around a big theme. Our first theme was climate change. Students take seven week 1.5 credit modules. So again, did not exist before we did that. Cannot take the the same discipline two modules in a row. But when they've taken two 1.5 credit modules, they can bundle them into one of their core requirements. Part of the beauty of this particular design is that faculty continue to teach just basically what they taught. Like if they're a theology person or history person or science person, they just teach seven weeks of science. But then we overlay these big integrative moments where all the students come together for big ethical exercises or role playing simulations, et cetera. What I was trying to do was to create a scalable and sustainable interdisciplinary core curriculum. Most are not that, because a lot of places will send two faculty away.

Sure. Dependent on the faculty members, and they'll

create the most Beautiful course that you could ever imagine that no two other faculty could ever teach. But this was trying to find a balance of interchangeable parts and a very thoughtful, intentional, integrative structure.

So what's interesting about that is it seems like it's working within the processes and well established norms of the university to allow you to do something different, but not trying to swim against the grain of that. Is that a fair reading of it? To leverage the institutional momentum but not try to sort of push back on that momentum in some way?

Absolutely. In some ways it's very radical because it's these 1.5 bundle able modules which had never existed. In some ways it colors entirely within the lines. Faculty teach two 1.5s, they add up to a 3, that's a course. Students take two 1.5s add up to a 3, that'S a requirement. So it's very easy for everyone to understand. It's very easy to count toward load. Everything works out symmetrically and it's completely built into the core curriculum. So it's a kind of radical structural change in the belly of the beast.

In terms of governance at Georgetown, did you have to run that through normal faculty governance channels and even the other things that you're doing at the Red House, how does it interact or correspond with faculty governance?

So in the particular case of Core Pathways, because each course is offered through the department as it normally would have been, that did not have to run through a special committee, which I'll talk about in a second. In that case, this pilot has basically been endorsed and watched by the Core Curriculum Committee, which I also chair, which is one of the co chair. That's one of the distinct advantages of running an incubator like I do as Vice Provost for Education, as opposed to

an office off on the side, someone

who's been blessed by the university to do some work, but doesn't have a kind of structural mainstream authority. But I think that it really matters that I'm playing both of those roles. So that. So that that went just through that governance and has had tremendous buy in. And we now have had almost 15 faculty who've been involved just in the first year. Most pilots that come out of the Red House go through a special futures advisory committee, which was created just to approve, to review and to hopefully approve the pilots that came out of the Red House. It has a member from every single school's curriculum committee. If that committee approves a pilot, no other committee has to approve it. If it's a course level pilot. If the futures advisory Committee approves it, it goes into play as a pilot. If they reapprove it, it is now part of the curriculum.

So does that structure then ensure that things are not slowed down in a way by faculty governance, which I know is a complaint of some university administrators elsewhere, that the faculty governance process slows down innovation?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we want everything to be vetted. In many ways, this is all very much a dialectic, like we want to speed up and the environment wants us to slow down. So to me, these two things are really both necessary. The Futures Advisory Committee was a way both to speed things up, but also, I think, very importantly, the idea was to try to build a kind of organizational intelligence that it wasn't as if we had to keep shopping year by year to all the different curriculum committees. With changing personnel, at least we could build a kind of collective knowledge. What is it we're trying to do with these exceptions? What are the standards that we're trying to bring to them? What are the things that are tolerable? What are the things that are non negotiable?

I love these points in the interview where I have two totally different directions I want to go, but I'm going to go with this one because our friend Randy Jeff here has been in the news a little bit with his piece he wrote for the Chronicle for Higher Education where he talked about reinventing the academic majors as we have known them at least. And some of the core pathway work that you're doing sounds actually very similar to some of the ideas that Jeff had in that column. So I'm curious how you think about what should academic majors or disciplines look like in the future.

I completely agree with the perspective that Jeff talked about that we need some majors that are really customized to big themes that cut across different majors in different ways than we normally have thought about. And there are also pathways. So, you know, I think this is a logical way to think about how people can move through. I think one thing that we want to be really clear about is that the concept of the major is not monolithic.

Right.

You can major in chemistry, but like our largest major in the sciences is called the Biology of Global Health. And it already is doing, I think what you argue for in that, that it's as important to learn about science communication and science advocacy and ethics and what it means that global health affects the most marginal and vulnerable, as well as a lot of biology content. That major grew out of the need to do that. There are a lot of majors like that. We have data analytics and environmental Sciences. There are many majors and combinations of majors and minors that are already diverse and moving in that direction. To me, the point that I really take when I was reading your column and when I think about things like this is the importance of just creating an agile, responsive environment that it's not about declaring, okay, from now on we won't have this and we'll only have this. Many majors are constantly evolving. What people can do within majors is constantly evolving. I think the most important thing that we can do is just continue to create the most open, thoughtful environment that allows new combinations of things to be tried and where those make sense again. Like Biology of Global Health in about nine years became the largest major in the sciences. When it was introduced, it was, you know, like, here's a good idea. Those kinds of things I think will rise to the surface, but I think it's just about making an environment that's really hospitable to that kind of agility.

So that notion of agility makes a lot of sense when you describe it that way. One of the biggest pushbacks though, to Jeff's piece, I think was we can't possibly be responsible for sort of the whims of the market or constantly adjusting and things like that. So how do you reconcile that? Or. Because when you describe it, it makes a lot of sense, I think.

So I don't think we should adjust the curriculum to the whims of the market. I think it's a good idea to adjust the curriculum to the handful of existential threats that are threatening civilization.

A purpose of universities historically, that feels

like a better bet. So I think to focus on things like inequality and AI and not just AI as to get a job, but. Yeah, but AI as a force and a threat in our world that this current generation of undergraduates will, will deal with in ways we can't even imagine, you know, before they're done with their careers. I think those are the most important things to look at. You know, there are clearly market trends I think, that we want to pay attention to. There's absolutely no part of the higher education ecosystem that shouldn't be paying attention to what people do as their job. But I think we have to be preparing people, as they say, for their seventh job as much as for their first job. And that, you know, So I think if we think in terms of long term career resilience and the most important existential threats to our society, it seems to me those are the two things that should guide what we do.

So, Randy, if I could summarize Some of the comments that I've received back from, from the academic community over the last couple of days, one of them is departments, right. When you talk about remaking majors, in some cases doing away with majors, which I actually didn't say you, does that mean we're going to do away with departments? So the question is, especially in your work, how do you decouple kind of the talk of the major and the academic discipline from the department, which is a, you know, a structural issue within universities. I understand there's budgeting and tenure lines and things like that. So that's one. And then I think this is also heavily related to the value of the liberal arts. Right. I think that many of the professors that I've been hearing from, especially over the weekend, work at less selective and less elite universities than Georgetown. And they teach history, they teach English and they're just talking about the decline of majors that they have, that no one values what they're doing. And I think a lot of this is caught up in what do we do about the liberal arts. Two hefty questions. Sorry.

In terms of the relationship between departments and majors, again, I think if you were to map that in some sort of meta way across the curriculum, you'd find that there's all kinds of different relationships. I think that when people have arguments they tend to come down to a small number of departments that are also the same name as their majors. But that's really not what the curriculum looks like. If you look at it overall,

I

think there are really good reasons to have disciplines. You know, you read the work of people like Chad Wellman and whatnot, that it's. It. There is a. It's easy to see that these are just political entities that are there to kind of protect self interest. But there's actually very deep reasons why we need disciplines and we need something like departments organized around disciplines to sort of steward bodies of knowledge. Any powerful interdisciplinary approach to a major global challenge is partially rooted in what those disciplines can do. You can't offer it in the general education curriculum if there's not a larger community of people who do that thing in depth. So I think it's really important to just see that these things have to be balanced. But I think that one of the roles of higher education leadership is to find non alienating ways to engage the community to think about the future. Universities are very good at looking in the rearview mirror, as John Seely Brown has said, not that good at thinking about the future. We rarely design curriculum focused on the future. And I Think leadership has to get communities in a very inclusive way to ask, what do we know socioeconomically, what do we know about markets, what do we know about threats? And what is it that every discipline can contribute to those, and how to make it agile for that in the liberal arts. So the history of US Higher ed, Dave Labray would say, is always about this constant touch between professionalism and liberalization. And I think that we have to learn how to talk about the value of liberal education that's separate from Gen Ed requirements. What is it? And you know, you mentioned Joseph Allen's book in your column, you know, Robot Proof. I think he gets at some of these ideas. What is it about liberal education that isn't just about departments and disciplines, about kinds of thinking, about learning modalities, about creativity, about flexibility, and ask how is it that we can remix what we consider professional preparation and the kind of depth and modalities?

I think that's an easier conversation to have at a place like Georgetown where people feel a empowered but also feel secure than it is at many colleges which are feeling under threat right now. Or is it not any easier necessarily?

Honestly, you know, I think it's easier in some ways to have it at a place that feels more of a sense of crisis, both a sense of crisis about itself as an institution and also that is constantly reminded by a far more diverse population of what it means for them to succeed. So to me, some of the most exciting work going on in reimagining the relationship between workforce preparation and the ideals and practices of liberal education are going on in community colleges. As far as I'm concerned, you know, something like the Ethnography of Work class at Gutman Community College that mixes sociological theory with reflection out in the workplace, that helps students also think about what they want to do with their careers, is a brilliant example of remixing liberal education with workforce preparation.

Last question that I have is stepping back up a level and thinking about the structure of the Red House and the broader agenda around innovation within the curriculum at Georgetown. As you've created that structure, what sort of problems is that good at solving and what sort of problems that a university might face? Is it not the right structure for like, business model innovation or something like that? Does that fit well within this? Or you would need a different structure to tackle something like that.

So I think the Red House was designed for a place that didn't need to change right away. You know, one of the things in our email correspondence was what problem were we trying to solve? And I would say that the problem we were trying to solve was how to accelerate innovation in a place that didn't think it had a problem. So the role of the Red House was really to work in a, in a iterative, I won't say slow way, because I think we've actually made a lot of progress in four years, but we did not have to reinvent the curriculum in order to survive in three years. That was not on the table.

That was not the mission.

Yeah, it was really to say, what, over the next 10 to 15 years, how would we like to change the environment that would enable us to take on questions of equity, take on questions of affordability, take on questions of curriculum variation and flexibility.

So do you think one of the lasting legacies of this will be the change in culture rather than the specific projects? I mean, obviously the specific projects are important, but it seems like you've changed the culture a little bit at the, at the university.

Oh, absolutely. I've been saying all along our, our job, what I was trying to do was not to create new programs, but to create models that would then be taken up by the rest of the university. So, no, I think the long term success is to have expanded kind of curricular imagination of the university so as it invents itself both out of desire and out of need, it can do so with a much wider set of tools.

Randy, it's always a pleasure to listen to you talk about in such thoughtful ways about both challenges you're solving at Georgetown, but the broader conversation around what it means to be innovative in higher education. So really appreciate you joining us on this podcast.

Thanks.

My pleasure.

And we'll be back right after this.

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 those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. This episode was also made possible with support from Entangled Solutions. If you want to shape the future of education, Entangled Solutions would like to hear from you. Entangled Solutions is hiring smart, mission driven team members interested in helping world class institutions solve their most vexing challenges in learning and education. Learn more at Entangled Solutions.

Welcome back to Future youe. Another great conversation with Randy Bass, who I've gotten to know over the years at Georgetown, who's really kind of a national leader on change in higher ed, particularly around pedagogy. Michael. He talked a lot about Culture, especially at a place like, like Georgetown. You know, a lot of the colleges, universities that we featured on Future youe up until this point are smaller places or places that were in trouble for different reasons. You know, Georgetown is, is one of the elite of American higher education. It's not a place that needs to change. What do you think about his approach on how he's approaching change at a place like Georgetown?

Yeah, I was struck by a few things. Well, first, he's extraordinarily thoughtful and he fits very well within a faculty structure. Thinking about these questions, I thought the second thing that struck me was great for Georgetown to be not just investing in innovation, but also signaling that it's an important part. Because as we've talked about, the time to be innovating is when things are good, not necessarily when it's too late and you don't have the cash or resources or whatever you need to stay afloat. And so good for them to be pushing the bounds and, and thinking about the future. And that future orientation was the other thing that occurred to me. People often say generals are always fighting the last or preparing for the last war. And I guess you could think about curriculum in the same way. And he was asking questions about how do we think about what we should be preparing students for, not just in the first job in the seventh. Our friend Michelle Wise often like hates that rhetoric because she thinks it's a cop out for, for sort of a lifelong learning phrase. But I thought the way he was asking it was really thoughtful in terms of what are the major challenges society is facing right now. And so I don't know, I was quite struck by it. The last thing I was taken by was the innovation that they're doing, I would say is fundamentally sustaining in nature. It's building on the campus and it's very clever in the way it's breaking new ground breaking things that you couldn't have done before. But it's still sustaining in nature. It's building on the resources, processes, priorities of the existing organization. It's not saying we should launch some competency based online thing that is going to serve 200,000 students or do a Purdue Kaplan type deal or something like that. That's not the purpose of this innovation. So I just think it's important for people to say this is the type of innovation that it's doing. And for Georgetown this is a great idea because I don't know that you, Georgetown needs to be thinking of the disruptive thing that's going to allow them to serve 1 million students, as Western Governors University says that they now want to do. And so I thought it made sense for their context, their situation where they are at Georgetown. And quite frankly, if it works there and it allows faculty members and people in higher ed to think about innovation more broadly, that would be a really healthy thing thing across the academic landscape.

He also, I think, outlined a possibility for how to involve faculty in this, in this process. Right. I've been to the Red House, as he said. It is a little red house right across the street from campus, and faculty are heavily involved in the process, as he said. You know, they're already seeing some experiments happening in departments and schools even without the support of the Red House. So it's already starting to change the culture. But I also thought, and I think we got into the weeds a little bit probably with faculty governance. But I think it was really interesting how he talked about how they created this special committee within faculty governance, include somebody from all the other committees, if they approve, goes forward. And I think that's one of the biggest hurdles that we've talked about before on Future you is around the faculty governance process. And so they figured out a way to get them involved not only in the design of these things, but also to feel like they have a say in the approval of these things without it having to go through the bureaucracy of a normal faculty governance process.

Yeah, I think that's right. Although it is going through a faculty approval process. And the only reason I mentioned that, Jeff, is as we've been talking about some of the pushback on your own column, love to have you in the news and put you on the seat. So much of the pushback that I've been reading, Jeff, has been around the university as it exists today. Not the question you were asking, which is what should this look like from a blank slate perspective? And people's pushback has sort of been like, if I. From an innovation and organizational perspective, I would say they've been saying, well, we can't do that. Well, that's not the question you were asking. At least is my take.

Yeah, to be honest with you, when the Chronicle asked me to write this piece on majors, I never thought that academic majors were a third rail of colleges in university or you've learned differently. And boy, did I learn differently. Over this past week, you know, there were three columns about it and Inside Higher Ed, Frank Bruni featured it. You know, I spent, I spent the weekend that when Frank wrote about it, answering questions around it or defending it on social media, when the New York

Times mentions these things. You know, it becomes a story.

I guess it is. But really. But the. At the end of the day here, I talked about remaking majors as we currently think them. Right. And I think a lot of people then conflated that with I just want to do away with every academic major out there. I think then we also, and as a question that we asked Randy about is we tend to connect majors with departments. And how do we decouple that? Because when people say, well, you want to do away with majors, that means you want to do away with departments, that means you want to do away with faculty. Right. That's where they take that argument. And I didn't see say any of that. Right? Nope. This was really around a much more student centered way of thinking about the future of higher education. I also understand that the job market changes. Right. So this is actually not in reaction to the exact job market because I think sometimes colleges go too far in that direction. Right. And create, you know, majors around social media management. And, you know, we see a lot of the things that majors, they're much more sued for, but I don't consider them disciplines or academic majors. But a lot of colleges, especially struggling ones, have created these majors. I'm actually thinking if we create these majors that help people navigate the ambiguity of what the workforce is going to look like. A lot of the stuff, and we had Joe on this podcast before, a lot of the stuff that he talked about in his book. And how do we combine the practicalities of majors of some majors and the basis and the foundation of the liberal arts, I think is what's going to be most important for this future workforce.

Yeah. So one thing that jumped out to me though also was that we might learn from the boot camps in terms of how they create curriculum. Because one of the biggest criticisms was, well, we can't possibly have a faculty that reinvents their pedagogy or curriculum every five years or whatever it is. Well, you know, what boot camps do is a very different model where they say, this is what's relevant right now. We're going to bring on different faculty who've actually practiced in that area and do it. And the only reason I mentioned that in, because I know that I'll get pushback, is that there is some element of the market speaking here and students. You know, our friend Ryan Craig at University Ventures Fund has a book coming out in the fall. We'll have to have him on when it does the new you. He argues that these faster, cheaper programs are going to be a disruptive force in higher education. And actually, you know, we've argued that they're probably hollowing out the master's degree in professional graduate degrees right now. But he says that actually it's going to start tackling into the bachelor's degrees is the argument he makes. And if that's so, I think part of this will be their rapidity, you know, their. Their ability to quickly put things together and not go through faculty committees. And that's the other thing that hit me on this was, you know, anyone who knows how a major is put together, it's not a thoughtful expression of the. Of, you know, exactly how you should construct going into a discipline and really enmeshing yourself in it. It's much more of an ad hoc. I teach this. I think it's important sort of negotiation or bargaining process at a lot of universities. And so your suggestion, it's much more moderate than I think people interpreted it, but because of the process through which majors are created today, it was very hard for them to see that and separate structure from the actual prescription.

Yeah. And I think colleges, universities, and faculty members at them are under incredible pressure today. I get that. And I think part of this is. And we didn't really talk about this, but I brought it up in some comments I made over the weekend after Frank Bruni's column, is that a lot of this is caught up in the cost of higher education and the price of higher education.

Yeah. Wouldn't be an issue if.

Right. At a time 30 or 40 years ago when the price of higher education was relatively lower. You know, people can pursue careers in English and history, especially at not elite universities, where I think they still do that because they have the network and both the social and the financial capital to sustain themselves after college. You know, they can do that and explore and then move into the job market in a different way than they do now. I also think it strikes a little bit elitist to me that we kind of denigrate these more what are called practical majors. You know, we're going to have Pat McGuire on in a future you episode from Trinity University, and she talks a lot about the healthcare majors, for example, which are very popular on many campuses. They're very rigorous and they're very rigorous, but they're practical. Right. And what I think we should be talking about is how do we incorporate the liberal arts into those types of majors? Some places have done that, but how do we do that more? That's, to me, that is the savior of the liberal arts. I don't necessarily think they really need as much saving as people think think they do. I think they're doing pretty well on most campuses. But again, I think that let's try to figure out a way to integrate them into those professional fields in ways that we know are absolutely critical and give those students the soft skills that we know they need. Communications and writing and teamwork and logical and critical thinking is what they need. And that, to me, is how we really invigorate the liberal arts for the future.

So as a liberal arts major, I agree. But I would also say that I think we often from the elite of higher ed, have an idealized version of what the liberal arts looks like across the vast diversity of campuses and levels and types of institutions that is American higher education. And sometimes this conversation gets a little distorted because we don't make those nuances. So on that note, more thinking for us to do, more conversation to come. And thank you so much for joining us once again on this episode of Future youe. And we will see you next time.

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