Alena Selezneva
Recently, the president of Bryn Mawr College told me about a faculty initiative she was excited about: The Institute of Failure, where people delivered monologues about ways they’d failed absent the old “and here’s what I learned” narrative. The point was simply to sit with a moment of failure and understand it as natural. Showing students that successful people can be honest and vulnerable is a great modeling exercise.
And it’s downright un-American, where every failure must be immediately followed by a platitude about a bigger success. Needless to say, I loved it. I’ve long said that failure and loss are my main topics as a writer.
But then I thought a little harder. As someone who was in the position of sending out tons of rejection letters, I realized that people can read those as indicators of failure. But if you submit a great manuscript to a press that doesn’t publish in your discipline, or apply to a school where the admit rate is in single digits, that’s no failure. Often there are things entirely beyond your control. When running races, I can get a personal record, have a flawless race, and still be beaten because someone faster showed up that day. Is that a failure? No, it’s life.
As I reflect on the Institute of Failure, I realize I’m actually less interested in “failure” than I am in what the brilliant writer Kathryn Schulz calls “wrongology.”
Years ago, someone I knew socially told me he’d just read a book he thought I’d like. “It’s called Being Wrong.” Um. When I asked why he thought that, he said, “I have the sense you don’t mind being wrong.”
Bingo! I immediately bought the book, devoured it, recommended it to a zillion people, and wondered why Kathryn Schulz is not my friend. In lively and witty prose, she trots out examples from all walks of life to argue that you can only be wrong in retrospect, and that’s where the learning and growth take place. For Schulz, the capacity to err isn’t a flaw but a crucial part of our cognition and the path to development.
Normalizing being wrong should be part of every college discussion. We know this. It’s the value in “grading.” But somehow, many of us forget this for ourselves when we’ve left our roles as students and take up the red pen.
Here’s the thing I’ve been wondering about: Every scientist worth her NaCl knows a theory is right until it’s proved wrong. That’s why she keeps experimenting. But in higher education, we tend to treat our current crisis—declining enrollment, loss of public trust—as a “failure” of the market or demographics or even the political landscape. We rarely stop to ask if we are fundamentally wrong about the model we are using.
We see clinging to the old ways satirized in pop culture. The second season of the show A Man on the Inside (by Michael Schur, the creator of one of the smartest comedies ever) is, in some ways, a love letter to what many people think of as “college.” But it also proves the point: We confuse the aesthetic of academia—the gorgeous campus, the passionate faculty, the dorm-living young people that represents the small college liberal arts experience—with the institutions that serve the 70 percent of students who fall outside the traditional, fictional Wheeler ideal.
Watching this, I was reminded of a story my late uncle, Seymour Benzer, a geneticist at Caltech, once told me. He had been invited to Oxford to give a talk and was walking the quads with a colleague. They passed workers scraping soot off the ancient buildings. The witty Brit he was with turned to him and said, “We put that in bags and ship it to Yale for their buildings.”
It was an apt reminder that we’ve long mimicked the ancient Oxbridge model, importing not just the architecture, but the “soot”—the assumption that tradition itself confers value. That might work for elite institutions where students are buying social capital. But for the rest of higher ed? In today’s world, faculty who cling to their lectures and red pens don’t serve our current students.
We are busy scraping the soot off the past and applying it to the present, rather than admitting that the building itself might need a redesign.
Higher ed in the U.S. has been one of our country’s greatest achievements. But maybe we can think about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit it without shame, and then learn and grow and change? Some of us must out of sheer necessity if we want to keep our jobs.
Perhaps we need our own Higher Education Institute of Being Wrong where we stop ignoring the icky things we don’t want to admit to, realize that change can be good, and start thinking about how we could do better.
Here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head, not-very-nuanced list of things we might work together on: Shared governance is essential, but as currently practiced it’s a twig in our bike spokes. The credit hour, with its devotion to seat time, makes no sense as a measurement of learning in the age of living online. General education creates a shopping experience at best, giving students an excuse to cheat because they don’t see the value. Majors? Don’t even get me started on how dumb they are in an integrated and complex world. We’re still organized around 19th-century disciplines. And let’s not forget how we’ve labeled commuter students, adult learners, and part-timers “nontraditional” when they’re actually the majority.
It hurts me to say this, but maybe we were wrong in how we presented DEI. Not about how it’s an essential value for our democratic society, but that the practice toward inclusion has been undermined by often badly led, punitive, compliance-driven training that has pissed off many within the academy as well as those on the outside.
And anyone who’s set foot in a classroom recently knows that we are wrong if we think students are the same as they were even six years ago and we can keep teaching them as we always have. Plus, we need to do something for all those who left with some college, a boatload of debt, and deep animosity toward those of us who told them they’d be unemployed losers without a degree.
The proof is in the audited budgets: Many institutions, including the fancy-pants ones, are in the financial dung heap. Moody’s downgraded higher ed from “stable” to “negative” last year, and that’s where it remains.
Maybe the public skepticism that we’re not responsive to today’s society is not entirely wrong. We’ve all chased the same narrow definition of prestige and how faculty productivity should be measured (do we all need to be mini-me’s of our thesis advisers?) instead of asking if excellence might look different for different institutions serving different students.
The current crisis is an opportunity to stop importing the old soot and finally start building new structures. I’ve been hearing about exciting innovations. Stay tuned.
