Elegy for the Shiny

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.