Matt Reed so often gets it right. His essay on the shininess
of the new in this
blog entry captures well the incentive to innovate at the expense of
closure & completion in higher education administration (and perhaps
elsewhere, but HE is my focus).
On the one hand, there is some comfort in knowing that an
institution is not alone in difficulty with follow-through. On the other hand, if we all suffer a similar
malady, we should be able to address it with some mindful commitment of resources. Yet, as noted by several folk with
respectable credentials, the incentives tend to run the other way at the
administrative level. We end up feeling
like we don’t finish anything. The
launch is all.
The frustration lies in part in the mismatch between the
pace of change (slow) in higher education organizations compared to the
contemporary demands for change from the social and political environments in
which we operate. In short, large
educational organizations still plan years in advance, and commit their
resources to longer term projects.
Why? So we can offer our students
an opportunity to plan their trajectory.
We are also tasked with using the public funds with which we are
entrusted by our taxpayers as efficiently as possible to promote educational
success in our service area. Oddly
enough, we don’t have climbing walls or any of the other things about which
some pundits like to hyperventilate. We
also have no federal loans, and therefore a zero default rate. It’s a rather different picture here than
what one might gather from the media coverage.
Legislatures and think-tanks have the luxury of demanding
turns on a dime; however, without the caveat that they also provide a
concomitant increase in wherewithal to make nimble change occur, and to keep it
going thereafter. If there is new money
available, it frequently is for the program start-up, not for sustainable
operations. As much as we’d like to
implement a promising new program, many a time the decision has been to wait
until we can support it beyond the initial investment. When we do launch something new, changes in
the world beyond our doors may make the effort obsolete well before
implementation is achieved.
There's nothing quite like the feeling of starting something wonderful, and then having the funding disappear. It is painfully regrettable when new programs with the potential to improve things for our students die on the vine for lack of continuing investment.
