Alena Selezneva
In the last century, when I was a young editor at Oxford University Press, I worked with a young author on his book Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Timothy Ryback has since had an extraordinary and international career, now as the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Restoration in The Hague.
Tim became a friend and as friends do, we talked about stuff and swapped book recs. These days, I read him in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New York Times. His last three books have been published by Knopf. A terrific stylist, he quietly exited the academic building and walked into the big time because he writes for the world, not the guild, a valuable lesson.
Tim recently reminded me that I had recommended to him Milan Kundera’s novel in stories, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, about postwar Czechoslovakia and how totalitarianism erases the past. If I were made of tougher stuff, I would reread it now. More germane, though, is Tim’s recent work on Hitler’s rise to power. If you missed it, see his Atlantic piece, coming out as a book before the midterms, an elegant description of how Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days. It will give you chills. And remind you why we need trained historians (those who don’t remember the past—well, you know the rest).
Back in the day, Tim had recommended to me a new (in 1989) book by James Fallows called More Like Us: Making America Great Again, long before that phrase gave many of us the ick.
The argument, as I remember it, is that instead of trying to copy Japan, as American companies worried about losing their edge wanted to do, we should lean into our essential values. Rather than aping a society that was more rigid, hierarchical and conformist, we should let our U.S. freak flag fly: Be inventive, open, welcoming, individualistic; embrace our capacity for change and our willingness to make amendments when they’re warranted.
In other words, when humans feel threatened, it’s a natural impulse to want to imitate “winners,” but our strength as Americans lies in our own messy, pluralistic habits of experimenting, adapting and starting over.
We also, as humans, tend to generalize (as I did in the preceding sentence). I see a disturbing and flattening impulse in the way we describe colleges and universities, as if “higher ed” were one thing. And maybe that’s because we’re all becoming too similar and need to start to differentiate. I can’t stop hearing Fallows’s book title in my head in conversations these days, and it’s all I can do not to shout it out.
I think about it when I see students mimicking their professors, producing unreadable, jargon-weedy prose to prove they belong in the club instead of writing in their own quirky and distinct voices. I see even more of it in scholarship churned out in vague multisyllabic prose to win professional approbation. For three decades I’ve been shrieking, “People! Just write like a human, for humans. Write like you—the best, smartest version of you.”
Even more, I think about it in the context of a phrase I just learned, “institutional isomorphism,” which describes what happens when organizations adopt similar structures and strategies because that’s how they gain legitimacy: rankings, accreditation norms, peer benchmarking. Sound familiar?
In Fallows’s terms, instead of institutions retaining the missions that made them distinctive, most in higher ed aspire to become more like those who wouldn’t admit them to their fancy little clubs. It’s like our sector has opted to become a giant smoothie, where spinach gets blended with blueberries, flaxseeds, tofu, agave and peanut butter and maybe a scoop of disgusting protein powder (for those willing to pay more).
There are few worlds as status-conscious and hierarchical as higher ed. Everyone knows exactly where they land in the pecking order. Most of us faculty were trained at institutions more prestigious than the one that cuts our paycheck, so we default to copying old professors. We think we all need to teach in graduate programs, write monographs and serve on journal boards because those badges are the ones flaunted by peers at places we admire.
Of the nearly 4,000 institutions in this country devoted to serving students, how many have truly specific missions or do things differently than the standard marketing slogans—“opening minds,” “transforming lives,” “changing the world,” blah blah blah? Some. Not most.
The rest of us are weirdly homogeneous. The other day I watched a lecturer give a brief overview of the history of land-grant universities, explaining the origins from the 1862 Morrill Act to point out that these “people’s colleges” were established to be in opposition to the elites. They were meant to prioritize the practical arts for the working class and lead developments that would help their communities.
And oops, you know what? Today they’ve mostly traded that gritty distinction for the same prestige-chasing trifecta everyone else is going after: high-stakes research, global branding and service that looks more like corporate consulting. We’re all chasing the same models (you know who) and erasing what made us different in the first place. Smoothies!
Regional colleges that once trained teachers for their own public schools now advertise a mission indistinguishable from every other campus brochure, as do small private liberal arts colleges. In grinding down the local edges that made them matter to their communities, many institutions trade vitality for vague aspiration.
In the smoothie-fication of higher ed, community colleges are seeking to offer B.A.s and four-year colleges are awarding stackable credentials and A.A.s and everyone’s looking at three-year degrees. Residential colleges hope to lure adult learners with online programs. Any institution not thinking about and implementing internships, apprenticeships and career-connected learning is—well, are there any? Smoothies everywhere you look.
With the challenges facing all of us now, maybe it’s time for each institution to do some hard emotional archaeology and figure out what makes them distinctive beyond a marketing campaign. For those that can’t come up with a real and meaningful answer, the work is just as clear: Figure out how best to serve the students they actually have, in the community where they’re actually located, instead of chasing and hoping to matriculate the students they fantasize about.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Scattered across the map are colleges and universities that know who they are, places that prize fit over flash and resist the pull of sameness and the glitter of rankings. There are super cool institutions you may have never heard of that have no interest in jumping into the higher ed blender. They let their freak flags fly, have leaders who understand the landscape and boards that support a refusal to be homogenized. Their faculty don’t have their heads in another century. These places are among those that will thrive because they’ve chosen to be more like themselves—and, in the deepest sense, more like us at our best.
In future columns, I’m going to shine a light on places that are doing things in unique, quirky ways. It’s time to tell some good stories and provide some inspiration for the future.
