Don’t Stay in Your Lane

Early in my career, as a graduate student, I was asked to serve as an academic adviser. I gather this was as a result of good teaching evaluations, proving -- at least I thought at the time -- the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished. What I found over 10-plus years of doing advising as one of my “other duties as assigned” was that it was usually deeply fulfilling work. Each unique human who I worked with as an advisee required a real conversation to get to know them. There were essentially no set answers or pat directions I could give to any two advisees.

There was, however, one piece of advice that I found was at least generally applicable. It was:

Make decisions that open up the most future pathways.

That is, when faced with two roads diverging in the woods/fire swamp that is your life, one way to choose which path to take is to pick the one that leads to a greater number of additional options.

The simple truth is that no one knows what’s coming next in higher ed. That said, and to quote Sam Cooke as it related then to the civil rights movement, it’s clear that “a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.” This is true for tenured faculty as well. How can you prepare yourself for the coming changes? My advice is to turn your head, check your mirrors and signal first, but be fully prepared to change lanes.

Please note that this is different from saying that you should exit the highway you are currently driving on. I am not at all suggesting that people should abandon academia. Far from it. academia is, in my view, the backbone of society, and we would not be who we are if higher ed shrinks from its leading, innovative role.

What I am strongly suggesting is two things:

1) Immediately open your mind to alternative forms of teaching and learning.

and

2) Develop a new set of interests and skills around online delivery.

So, for one example for those faculty members reading this, what would it look like to take your semester-long course and break it up into modules that could be delivered in a variety of ways and on a variety of platforms? For another, related example, what would it look like truly to think about who is consuming your content? That is, if you believe that what you teach is useful for people in developing their work skills, how can you get that content to people well beyond your real or virtual campuses, who are already in their work lives?

Your campus likely either has a team of talented instructional designers whose jobs include working with you on these processes or has partnered with a MOOC platform or an online program management group to facilitate this process. Some schools are in the midst of bringing these previously outsourced services back in house. Some schools, like Davidson College, Duke University, Stanford University and many others, have spent much of the last decade paving the road for these changes.

There are numerous professional organizations, like NISOD (for teachers and administrators in the community and technical college world), OLC (specifically focused on “advancing digital teaching and learning experiences”), Educause (“the largest community of technology, academic, industry and campus leaders advancing higher education through the use of IT”), and many others the instructional designers on your campus can likely connect you to.

When I have suggested this change in perspective to former academic colleagues, one of the primary responses they resist is they have been told from the first days of their careers to become the leading expert in their chosen subject matter. Further, they were told that the narrower the field of expertise, the better. In my own experience, I was told that constitutional law was not sufficient. Pre-18th-century origins of constitutional law was not limited enough. Classical origins of constitutional thought was beginning to get close to the right neighborhood of focus. Athenian origins of the tripartite system of American constitutional thought -- now we’re talking. There are likely only a handful of people who know more about this topic. My colleagues and even occasionally my students benefited from that expertise.

That said, that focused of a perspective is often now too narrow to help our increasingly ends-oriented, job-hopping learners (although their happiness about changing jobs so quickly is still being studied). It needs to be recalled that, according to an analysis of LinkedIn statistics, today’s students work for fully twice as many companies in the first five years after they graduate as in the past.

A premium on a narrow scholarly focus was also more relevant when academic publishing was a if not the key metric for success for academics at top research universities. While expertise and publishing in leading journals will, I hope, always be central to what adds value to many institutions of higher learning, the number of schools for which this is the central metric for success is narrowing. In an increasingly competitive environment, where microcredentials and the like are encroaching on higher ed’s previously well-moated towers, faculty members would be wise to see if they can look down the road a bit, over the horizon from their view atop their towers, and imagine what life might be like in the not-too-distant future.

In addition to possible professional self-interest, one of the other reasons to adopt this lane-changing mind-set is to better serve students. More and more, even traditional liberal arts colleges, like my own alma mater, St. John’s College, are focused on preparing learners to be entrepreneurial. If faculty can model a broader mind-set and a broader skill set, we are more likely to recruit, retain and ultimately reward our students in a rapidly changing economy.

So, to summarize using the particular vernacular of New England, my beloved home region:

Dear faculty,

Sincerely yours,

The Future

Akiba J. Covitz, Ph.D., serves as chief revenue officer for Sense Education, an AI company that makes classes bigger and better. He is also senior adviser to Entangled Solutions. He previously served as associate dean for faculty development at Harvard Law School, as vice president for university partnerships at edX, as senior vice president for strategic relationships at Academic Partnerships and as a tenure-track professor.