There's an interesting article in Fast Company that got me thinking about what happens every time we see a leadership change in higher ed. The piece raises an interesting question about internal vs. external hires, but I'm more intrigued by the description of the organizational "core."
Accept the claim that every organization has a core that everything in the organization revolves around. For universities, this core is traditionally described as knowledge production, credentialing that leads somewhere, or a loosely defined social mission. When university leadership turns over, there's a predictable script of reassessing the core before or shortly after new leadership arrives on campus. The assumption is that the university has drifted from it's core due to some form of leadership wobble. But what if we assumed the core is actually broken and the underlying model of higher ed is fractured?
Imagine a university that ran with that assumption. If the core is broken, you stop trying to polish old versions of it with faculty committees and public pronouncements, and start asking wilder, more interesting questions. What if credentialing didn't mean four years and a mountain of debt, but a series of stackable, verifiable skills that employers actually trust? What if knowledge production stopped assuming every discipline needs its own tenured priesthood, and instead let schools and colleges within universities specialize the way hospitals do, some doing world class research, others doing world class teaching, without pretending to be one in the same? What if the vague social mission got specific and was tied to regional economic needs? None of this is guaranteed to work and faculty senates would have a field day with it. But treating the core as broken rather than a bit wobbly opens the door to genuine reinvention and innovation.
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