Education

Solving Higher Education’s Identity Crisis


How do you stay true to the past yet evolve to meet the future?

Last week I shared insights from several academic deans of business schools across the United States. They shared their first-hand experiences helping their institutions adapt to meet the many challenges of 2020 – from changing operations to keep students, faculty and staff safe in the midst of pandemic; to shifting all instruction online within a matter of days; to the prospects of an enrollment crash; to the reimagining of the value a university education provides in this unusual era.

For years I’ve studied the tensions as we move from an age of standardization (where we’re told what to do and how to do it) to an age of personalization (where we can influence the success of our organizations in our own ways).

Higher education is a highly standardized environment – largely by design. If your aim is to develop knowledge and expertise, you need some way to standardize and measure knowledge and expertise. People who have established themselves by those existing standards are not in any hurry to change the standards. This is true throughout corporate America as well, but it’s especially true within the system that is designed to produce and certify the very credentials we use to prove our knowledge and expertise.

There’s good reason to have standards that withstand the test of time, but there’s also good reason to rethink those standards to meet the needs of today.

Leaders in every industry talk about the need to staff their teams with talented people who can be agile, experimental and empathetic. So, how do universities find the balance between the standardization needed to shepherd such important institutions with the personalization needed to meet society’s need for people who are ready to contribute at their highest individual capacity?  

This article continues my deep dive into higher education with a conversation I had with two leaders from Fairfield University (located in Connecticut):  

Mark R. Nemec, Ph.D. – Fairfield University President

Richard A. Greenwald, Ph.D. – Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Fairfield University, and a Professor of History

Fairfield is a Jesuit, Catholic University, rooted in one of the world’s oldest intellectual and spiritual traditions. That might make it sound like it’s steeped in standardization. But its Jesuit roots give it a head start in the push toward personalization.

A core Ignatian value is cura personalis, which translated is “care of the whole person.” Fairfield’s institutional mission is stated as “education in the liberal arts, sciences and professions that prepares students to lead their communities with insight, empathy, critical rigor and a determination to serve and promote justice.”

Through my conversation with Dr. Nemec and Dr. Greenwald, I found that while they readily admit to not having all the answers, Fairfield’s leaders have sought to build a system that brings those ideas and the Jesuit mission to reality as much as possible.

They provide a good example of how we don’t have to eliminate standardization in order to honor personalization. We need certain standards. But we also need to make sure our standards don’t get in the way of our progress toward serving individuals who want to influence their organizations and their careers in their own ways. We need standards that are adaptable and that push us in that direction.

I started our conversation by asking about their opinions of this balance between standardization and personalization, and about their key learnings during this pandemic.

Glenn Llopis:

Where do you think things are going to evolve as we have a greater dependency and responsibility on the student? Where is your starting point when you think about planning for a future that is still fuzzy?

Mark R. Nemec, Ph.D.:

As a Jesuit Catholic institution, we are honored to be stewards a 500-year tradition. People have a general understanding of a Jesuit education as rigorous and thoughtful, forming young men and women who have a greater sense of purpose. Our hope is that every student who comes through Fairfield leaves both with this purpose and with a desire to answer three fundamental Ignatian questions: who are they, whose are they, and who are they called to be?

Llopis:

It sounds like the Jesuit tradition is already pretty focused on the individual.

Dr. Nemec:

Yes. The development of the individual is what we as a Jesuit, Catholic university are all about. 

However, beyond higher education I would suggest that any purpose driven organization must be focused on the individual. I spent 14 years in the private sector and a number of years at Forrester Research helping companies assess the future of work and organizations. So this idea of personalization is something I have been playing around with a lot.

But I think one of the tensions for a place like Fairfield, or a health system or even a company, is how do you maintain quality in an era of personalization? We want to meet the student where they are. But we also want to ensure that we do so with quality. We hold ourselves accountable as well as we have accrediting bodies and they still have various metrics they’re looking at.

So the first tension is that personalization actually puts a greater premium on innate quality and on having a framework to define success, which might seem counterintuitive. In some ways this pandemic has heightened this – it’s led to what I would call a flight to quality.

Richard A. Greenwald, Ph.D.

The focus on the whole person – mind, body, spirit – which is very much at the core of what a Jesuit education is about. We have a tradition to rely on, and a whole pedagogy that develops those areas equally. The term I use when I talk about the sort of new mode of education is not necessarily personalization: it’s curation. It’s walking with the students and personalizing their education, knowing that there are multiple ways of getting them to where they need to be.

It’s not the cookie cutter approach that was the way when I was in school, where you follow this pathway, here are the requirements for your major, there’s no deviation. What we’ve done at Fairfield, and what I think a few other very good schools have done, is to allow a framework with some choice. And that’s what Dr. Nemec was referring to is that you’ve got to control the quality so that students can choose different paths to finish, but be assured that they will have the same quality.

Dr. Nemec:

We don’t have a fully prescribed set of courses, but we still have a core curriculum with three very specific learning outcomes: we want everybody to be able to communicate effectively, we want every student to be able to think across disciplines, and we want every student to be able to think of the other.

The students have to take some ownership of it. Individuals will come to those learnings in their own way. I think curation is an interesting word for it. Formation is another term. But it’s this idea that the students will find their way there as individuals.

Dr. Greenwald:

The other phrase I would use is calibration. There’s an individual path, there are multiple paths that students can take, but the only way we can assure quality is if the faculty teaching in those areas have deep conversations – philosophical conversations on a regular basis. This ensures they are covering the same ground without putting constraints around what that ground is, because the world will change, their disciplines will change, and the courses will change. So if you keep calibrating the framework and curating the journey, that’s how you get to a more individualized approach to things.

Llopis:

How is Fairfield able to achieve that balance?

Dr. Nemec:

We’re blessed with some advantages, which I think are so intrinsic we sometimes just take them for granted. We’re about as residential community as there is for undergrads. We have 4,000 undergrads, 3,200 of whom live on campus, 400 or so live at the beach, and we usually have about 400 or so study abroad.

Our campus is truly self-contained. If needed, we could have one point of entrance and exit onto campus. We truly are a community.

The challenge there is how do you then, in Ignatian terms, meet the world as it is? I think that’s also the challenge of this move toward personalization. How do you make sure that what individuals are undertaking as a learning journey – curated and calibrated – is relevant and translates to the world they’re going to meet?

Dr. Greenwald:

One thing that has changed in higher ed, at least for forward-thinking institutions, is they no longer control expertise in the way that they might have before. Years ago, institutions would get locked into their traditions and their disciplines and were not trustful of outside experts because those experts didn’t have a Ph.D. in the field.

And that doesn’t serve anybody. It atrophies the disciplines. It calcifies the curriculum. It doesn’t serve students when they want to go out into the workplace, because they don’t have any real-world experiences. In the last 20 years, with civic engagement and community partnerships being a big thing in higher ed, slowly institutions and departments and others have had to recognize that there are lots of experts out there who have knowledge – and that knowledge might even be co-equal with the knowledge the faculty have. And it’s useful. Work with community groups or work with schools if you’re doing teacher training. If you’re in nursing school, work with hospital organizations, get feedback from them about what they’re looking for so that you can adapt your curriculum to meet those needs.

Dr. Nemec:

Building that habit is essential and hard. It’s one of the things we’ve done over these last few years. Here’s an example: when I first arrived, we kept scratching our head wondering why we weren’t having as much success in placing some of our business students in internships. It was because our curriculum was getting them exposure to certain concepts too late. So our new dean talked to finance professionals and said, “All right, we’ll create an honors track where those high-performing students who can understand derivatives will get that by their sophomore year, rather than waiting.” The old curriculum worked for the old business, but business has shifted.

Llopis:

That’s the importance of evolving to meet the needs. That also shows some flexibility in your methods – exploring why a certain result was falling short, and being open to trying new methods in the process. That’s something that leaders at many organizations struggle with, because the methods are so calcified that they’re not allowed to try something new.

How does that process help you reimagine your identity as an institution?

Dr. Nemec:

The university’s privileged position should not be something we take for granted. The fact that society looks to universities to prepare young men and women is not something that’s a God-given right. They can and might find alternative mechanisms to produce doctors or lawyers or judges or teachers. We have to understand that and acknowledge that and make sure we are staying relevant.

The pandemic has been horrific on so many levels. But one thing it has done is forced the whole sector to ask itself: How relevant are we? And then second, the pandemic has taken seven years of change and truncated it all the way down to seven months, seven weeks or even to seven days.

Dr. Greenwald:

I would go one step further. I think the pandemic will forever change the way teaching happens, and in an interesting way that I don’t think was expected. Institutions have learned how important face-to-face instruction actually is, with that mentoring relationship and the personalization that takes place – but they also now recognize that how much of that was wasted.

The flipped classroom model that everyone was talking about, and most academics were afraid of, actually is what folks are craving now. They realize there were things that worked really well online, but it doesn’t take away from what needs to happen face-to-face. So I think there’s going to be a real profound shift at the institutions that are smart enough to encourage it and with a faculty that are adventurous enough to rethink how we deliver education.

Llopis:

Do you see any other outdated standards that need to be overcome?

Dr. Greenwald:

Another issue is that higher education is stuck with this model of fall semester and spring semester based on federal financial aid guidelines. But business doesn’t stop for the summer. You’re still working in the summer. The university is still open in the summer. There are opportunities to take advantage of, but it has to take place in different formats. And that’s what I think institutions will come out of this recognizing what were hard-learned lessons as possible opportunities.

Dr. Nemec:

Yes, both different modalities and different sequencing.

One of the things we’re trying to embrace, and it’s taking some time, is the start time for professional master’s programs. If you’re a working adult who’s changing careers, why should you have to wait until September to start? That timing just seems crazy to me. We’re slowly but surely getting out of that habit.

Another piece the pandemic has exposed, back to the notion of curation and personalization, is the myth that somehow teaching online was of less quality than teaching in person. But the modality doesn’t inherently make something more quality or less. It’s what goes into it, and I think we assumed that anything that was online was less personal and lower quality. The reality is online offers as much opportunity, if not more, for both quality and personalization. And I think that is one of the exciting elements of this.

Llopis:

Is there any way for students, parents or employers to assess an institution’s commitment to this kind of evolution?

Dr. Greenwald:

One measure of this is how much investment an institution puts into continuous educational improvement for faculty. Folks who have Ph.Ds don’t really get taught how to teach in the Ph.D. program because that’s not what it’s about. A good measure for a parent or potential student to ask is: What percentage of your faculty go to training workshops on new pedagogy? That’s a telling number.

I know of one school where 16 out of 900 faculty attended workshops. We’ve made it part of our culture. I think we had 85% of our faculty attend workshops, and they probably attended multiple workshops. If the faculty culture is one that recognizes they have to be student focused, then when times change or conditions change, they recognize the need to change themselves. And that culture takes years to develop. You have to condition it, feed it and respect it.

Dr. Nemec:

This is why I very politely say that Fairfield has some advantages and is an institution on the rise. The world is asking for something that is innate to who we are. I think, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, Fairfield was in an awkward spot: do we want to be a standardized, quasi-small R1 kind of place, or even just a masters comprehensive? And I think now we recognize that being student-centric is not a bad thing.

Llopis:

I hear you describing this formula: curation + calibration + community = quality. You haven’t placed stringent limits on a student’s journey at Fairfield. You’ve created a pathway that gives them options. And that’s what personalization is all about.

What kind of mindset is needed in order to create the kind of culture you’ve created?

Dr. Nemec:

We’re not assuming that we’re going to lock students into one set of skills. It’s instead a set of competencies. We hear from employers that Fairfield students know what they don’t know, and are willing to continuously learn.

There is a former rugby mate of mine who had a very successful career as an executive at a global services firm who mentors undergraduates, and he told me he’s tired of students asking such precise questions about what to major in and what courses to take. He said, “Look, employers want to know three things. Are you going to work hard? Can I put you in front of clients? And can I work with you?”

Those things have not changed. Employers want people who are solid but adaptable. They want people who are curious and are capable of asking the right questions.

Dr. Greenwald:

We have a robust undergraduate research program at the university as a whole, and hundreds of students every year are creating knowledge with faculty mentorship. But part of that creation is they’re learning how to ask the questions, and sometimes stumbling, finding answers.

The thing about undergraduate research projects is they need more support than graduate students. While graduate students can be more precise, because they have more knowledge and more experience, undergraduates need a lot more support to do that. But the goal is getting folks to the point where they can ask those questions and know how to answer them. That’s something that I think is important. I think that’s why we’re seeing more and more students attracted to undergraduate research – and not just in the sciences or engineering, but in all fields.

In fact, that’s one of our selling points when I speak to parents – that students don’t just sit back as passive learners, they are required to be active learners.

Llopis:

What have you learned about the mindsets of students and parents during this time? And how has Fairfield adapted to that mindset? It’s as if the balance of power seems to have swayed toward the student and parent, especially as they grapple with the value of quality.

Dr. Greenwald:

My sense is that parents want to know that an institution has integrity and is truly student focused. And that goes a long way. They want to know: Are you staying up at night worrying like we are? Can we trust you with this?

The other thing is they’re looking for a return on investment. It’s not just about graduation rate, employment rates, starting salaries – but what’s the process to launch successfully? And they want to know that you’re thinking about it, not just for one major, but for the entire student body.

Llopis:

So Dr. Nemec, what did you learn about yourself as an individual, as a leader during this pandemic?

Dr. Nemec:

I would say, this notion of being a steward, and the idea that the leader’s role is to leave any institution better than they found it is absolutely essential. And second, as a team, recognizing the importance of specificity and communication and tolerance for uncertainty and the willingness and ability to just say we don’t know. We have an idea, we have a plan. But there’s also uncertainty out there. Sometimes the most personal thing one can do is just to acknowledge that one doesn’t know and that things are uncertain.

I’ve seen the importance of authentic leadership – and that authentic leadership is more than expertise and knowledge. It’s also built out of a willingness to recognize what the limits of that are. It’s an approach that we need now more than ever. The role for me as president is to make sure that despite all of the uncertainty, that we don’t lose sight of our broader purpose. So while some of the tactics, some of the details, what happens tomorrow might not be known or understood, the purpose and the reason why Fairfield exists doesn’t change.

Llopis:

How do you actually make people feel comfortable in the middle of that ambiguity?

Dr. Greenwald:

You’ve got to create a structure that provides time and space for that ambiguity. Otherwise, it’s panic. So, senior leadership has been meeting – we spent four hours yesterday talking about the future. We spend a lot of time together.

On the academic side, all the deans and the provost meet every day, and sometimes it’s a long meeting and sometimes it’s a short meeting. Then the leadership in the college meets every day after that meeting. We bring forward our anxieties and ideas and the issues that need to be solved, but we also don’t try to solve all of them once. You need to know what you can’t solve or what you need to know before you can solve something. You’ve got to be in tune with the emotions and the anxiety that people have, because everyone wants an answer. And sometimes you just don’t have one.

Because Dr. Nemec has the philosophy that he does, I felt at liberty to admit when there’s something I don’t know. And that gets back to integrity and trust. People can smell BS. Faculty and staff and everyone else can smell it. So, be honest.

Llopis:

That notion of knowing what you can solve is a good one to explore. I’m convinced most people don’t know what they should be solving for – even before they get to the point of trying to figure out whether it can be solved in the moment.

In the age of standardization, leaders and organizations are quick to benchmark and just look to others and say: Well, they’re doing that so we should be doing that. I think that mentality got us into this mess in many respects. And I will tell you that this same line of thinking is common in all of corporate America and healthcare as well. They’ve built models on benchmarking, rather than on their own potential.

Dr. Greenwald:

In higher ed, there’s a lot of emulation. There’s what’s known as the Harvard effect. Harvard does X, so everyone does X, but you’re not Harvard, you can’t do it as well as they could. So all you’re doing is taking your resources and shrinking their ability to function. And you’re now just a poor imitation of what is ahead of you.

That’s where a lot of institutions have gotten themselves into a bad position because they’ve tried to emulate the top 10. And there’s no way they can do that. And they’ve given up on what they do really well.

Dr. Nemec:

In higher education the challenge is the fact that there’s so few models. There are a few institutions who’ve thought of new models, but not many.

At Fairfield we’re blessed with a position and resources and a history. We want to be respectful of the legacy and what’s gone before, while also seizing the opportunity now for a slightly different model. I think the challenge in higher ed is that duality is often not easily either managed or understood.

Universities are actually have been more dynamic and have seen more creative destruction than people realize. It just happens at a glacial pace. It’s sort of like the shift of tectonic plates. It happens. Harvard of 1850 could never have imagined what Harvard of even 1950 would look like. And Harvard in 1950 can’t imagine what Harvard is today. Because it happens at such a slow rate, people aren’t even aware that change is happening.

I think our role as leaders is to help people acknowledge that evolution and actually embrace it. One of the things the pandemic is doing is actually like an earthquake and it’s making folks realize this is happening.

And one of the bigger challenges we have is helping people make the shift. Faculty were trained a certain way and think of themselves a certain way. And we have to acknowledge that. We’ve had faculty say, “Well, I don’t see myself in this new world.” And one of our roles is underscoring the fact that this isn’t threatening, it’s an opportunity. But depending on where you are in your career and on your journey, it’s not always easy.

Llopis:

This is such an excellent and important discussion. And in those last remarks I here echoes of what I often see in leaders across all industries and levels and functions: We’re in the midst of an identity crisis. This crisis has been brought on by a few things:

  • All of the changes that we’ve been discussing. As the world shifts around us, the standards and the realities that have shaped our identities as experts or as leaders also have changed. We naturally start to wonder: Where does that leave us?
  • Our identity crisis is also the result of the fact that we’ve largely been forced to assimilate to the organization’s identity and standards throughout our careers.
  • We’ve acclimated to the behaviors and values that we are judged by, because that’s what we’ve had to do to get ahead in our fields and our organizations. All the while we’ve lost track of who we really are.

This loss in identity is an epidemic throughout the country. I think there’s a lot to learn from Fairfield’s process of working to balance the traditions of an established institutions while building new systems for helping individuals be ready to know themselves and discover their personal mission – while developing the ability to adapt along with a fast-changing world.

It’s never been more clear to me that all of these sectors – higher education, healthcare and the entirety of corporate America – need each other in order to survive and thrive.

That’s why later this month, leaders across all sectors will gather for a virtual summit to discuss those strategies for making your institution more agile – strategies to achieve inclusion in today’s personalized world.

Learn more at: www.ageofpersonalization.com



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