The Wicked Problem of Wicked Problems
Posted: February 13, 2012 Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, innovation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: AC4D, complexity, design, Jon Kolko, planning, strategy, systems thinking, wicked problems 2 Comments »
All Knotted Up...Like a Wicked Problem
Wicked problems are receiving a lot of attention these days giving much excitement to systems thinkers and designers alike. Yet what these problems mean for planning and understanding social programs and policies is not clear and may be even more wicked that it first appears.
I was excited to learn that Jon Kolko and his creative band of learners at the Austin Center for Design (AC4D) are coming out with a book on wicked problems. As one who studies and helps others to intervene in addressing such problems, this was like being a Star Trek fan learning that Leonard Nimoy was coming to speak at the Trekkie convention in my hometown. It is refreshing to see that the concept of the wicked problem is gaining traction beyond the small band of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of complexity, systems and design thinking (which, admittedly is where many AC4D folk inhabit, but hopefully their audience will not).
But it’s not just one book. We are seeing transformations in education and science — with calls for a ‘new breed of scientist’ being created at places like Massey University in New Zealand — or spread through the news or business stories in various forms.
The concept of the wicked problem was originally posed by management science scholar and systems thinker C. West Churchman with planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber. The Wikipedia entry on wicked problems provides some examples of what these things are:
Classic examples of wicked problems include economic, environmental, and political issues. A problem whose solution requires a great number of people to change their mindsets and behavior is likely to be a wicked problem. Therefore, many standard examples of wicked problems come from the areas of public planning and policy. These include global climate change[4], natural hazards, healthcare, the AIDS epidemic, pandemic influenza, international drug trafficking, homeland security, nuclear weapons, and nuclear energy and waste.
In recent years, problems in many areas have been identified as exhibiting elements of wickedness – examples range from aspects of design decision making and knowledge management[5] to business strategy.[6]
As our social lives become more interconnected through the Internet, globalization, and mass migration, the complexity of the situations we find ourselves in grows. More of anything in diverse forms interacting together is likely to create complexity as new properties emerge and those properties change the trajectory of actions and reactions of the parts dynamically.
As one who is interested in wicked problems and works with people to address them, I should be thrilled to see the term used so widely. I am, but cautiously so. There is a risk that in the enthusiasm to embrace the lexicon of complexity that the meaning gets lost, which is what one gets from the hype cycle (See below).
The Hype Cycle: Coming to a Wicked Problem Near You?
The hype cycle is described as phenomonena initiated by a technology (or idea) and, once caught on, spikes the expectations beyond reason leading to discouragement, mass abandonment of the idea, and then — hopefully — a return to a level of reasonable return.
While the “cycle” (it is not a cycle) has limitations, the analogy here is well suited to fads of various types and the rapid ascension of the concept “wicked problem” in past years is indicative of a trend. Below are two representations of the amount of citations of the work “wicked problem” and “wicked problems” from Google’s Ngram service:
Wicked Problem Citations: 1950-2008
Wicked Problem(s) Citations: 1973-2008
It appears that wicked problems (plural) are increasing and reference to a single problem is staying the same.
Regardless, an upward trend is evident. What it means is another matter…
If wicked problems are becoming talked about more often and by more people, it is appropriate to ask what kind of impact that this new thinking will have on not only the way the problems are posed, but how people seek to address them.
To that end, it is worth envisioning the future with caution. One of the reasons for this is that wicked problems are often not wholly wicked in their composition or the strategy required to address the problem — which ironically makes these types of problems even more wicked.
This has to do with the interconnected, multidimensional, and embedded nature of the problems themselves which contain within them many interconnected non-wicked problems. I’ve started to see difficulties with organizations developing strategy that fails to consider this. It is, as I’ve discussed before, an artefact of either-or thinking. Tackling the kind of wicked problems like poverty, chronic disease, and global finance require a meta-level strategy that recognizes, shapes and adapts to complexity, while accounting for micro-level issues that are indeed, very linear and simple.
Finding, training and retaining the right talent to work with diverse communities on problems that are poorly supported or funded from many sources is wicked. The human resource needs for payroll, supply management, and field support might be much less so. Yet, both are joined-up and require strategies that can extend beyond traditional management and strategy, but also embrace some of the very ‘best practices’ that seem at the outset to be antithetical to complexity.
Just as I shake my head in frustration at seeing complexity dealt with using amplified linear strategies that ‘do the wrong things righter‘, I have surprised myself by how much I’ve been twitching at hearing recent converts to systems thinking rail against the traditional ways of planning as if anything other than seeing problems as complex would be wrong.
At issue is that wicked problems are made more so by having both complex and non-complex elements working together, requiring a level of strategy development that is far more sophisticated than many first thought. Even a review of the better management texts using complexity give short shrift to the relationship between the complex, the simple and the complicated working simultaneously in environments and how we plan for that. The Cynefin Framework provides a start, but just a start.
Until we recognize this complexity — no pun intended — in the way we plan, there is great risk of replicating the hype cycle when our sole use complexity-based models yield poor results of a different nature than the poor results we are seeing from traditional linear, reductionist thinking models applied to many of the problems we deem as wicked today.
Picture credits: A Close Up on Knotted Rope by Sundariel used under Creative Commons License from DeviantArt
Graph: Gartner Hype Cycle by Jeremy Kemp used under licence from Wikipedia.
Knowledge Hypocrites: Take Two!
Posted: February 4, 2012 Filed under: knowledge translation, public health, systems thinking | Tags: beliefs, health promotion, hypocrisy, knowledge mobilization, knowledge translation, reflective practice, values 3 Comments »Knowledge Hypocrites: Take Two!.
The link above points to a great post by KMBeing that deserves some re-blogging here. It looks at the issue of hypocrisy in espousing the values of taking knowledge and putting it into practice, without practicing it. It’s worth a read.
There are a lot of professions and practices where we say one thing and mean another. This is something that can apply to health promotion, design, evaluation and social justice work in any guise.
What do the words and ideas mean and what do they mean in practice?
These two concepts are part of reflective practice and also require good communication, the kind that that allows people to find out what the meaning of their words are in the eyes and ears of another. Good communication requires speaking clearly, listening clearly, and clarifying clearly and doing so honestly and openly.
One of the issues with many of knowledge practitioners is that the rhetoric of knowledge translation/mobilization is so seductive. It is so common-sensical and even trendy. But the idea of sharing what we know, building relationships, and working together in true collaboration is much harder when viewed in reality where people have different resources, power structures, perceptions, reflective capacities, skills, knowledge, and time.
Knowledge mobilization is about not just strategy or tactics, but building up a system that supports it all. David Phipps, who wrote the original article looking at these hypocrisies was referring to this by commenting on the fact that there are too few incentives to change the way things are done and so without a top-level strategy to support change and no incentive from the bottom, the system remains the same.
Designing and living a system that works requires living and designing practices that support our values and communication now.
The PR Problem for Design, Evaluation,and Complexity
Posted: January 29, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation | Tags: complexity, design, design thinking, evaluation, George Miller, language, psychology, public relations, social change 2 Comments »
I (heart) PR
Complex concepts like evaluation, design and even complexity itself provide insight, strategies and applications that provide usable solutions to real-world problems, but also suffer from widespread misunderstandings, confusion and even derision. If they are to take hold beyond their initial communities of interest, they need to address their PR problem head on.
This past week was Design Week in Toronto. As one works extensively with design concepts and even has a health promotion-focused design studio, one couldn’t be faulted for thinking that this would be a big week for someone like me who lives and works in the city. Well, it came and went and I didn’t attend a single thing. The reason was partly due to timing and my schedule, but largely because the focus of the week was not really on design writ large, but rather interior design. Sure, there were a few events that focused on social issues (what I am interested in) like the Design With Dialogue session on Designing a Future for our Future, but mostly it was focused on one area of a large field.
And thus, interior design was left to represent all of design.
So why does this matter? It matters a lot because when people hear the term design, most of what was presented this week fits with that perception. The problem is that design is so much more than that. It is about making things, creative thinking and problem tackling (design thinking), social innovation, and responsive planning for complex situations. Architects, business leaders, military strategists, social service agencies and health promoters all engage in design. Indeed, Herbert Simon‘s oft-quoted and often contested definition fits nicely here:
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones
If one accepts that we are all designers and all of what we create and use for change is design, than a week devoted to the topic should offer much more than innovative concepts in furniture or flooring. Yet, this high-concept style showcase is what most people think about when they first hear design. Give people a choice between a Philippe Stark Juicy Salif citrus juicer and creating a trades-based, social change curriculum for low-income kids such as the work by Emily Pilloton as the example of design and they will probably guess think Stark over Pilloton, when both are equally valid examples.
Evaluation (another area I focus my work on) is equally fraught with perception problems. If you want to raise someone’s blood pressure or heart rate, tell them that either they or their work will be the focus of an evaluation. Evaluation may be the longest four-letter word in the English language. Yet, tell someone that you have a strategy that can enable people to learn about what they do, its impact, and provide intelligence on ways to improve, adapt and outperform their competitors and you’ll find an inspired audience for evaluation services.
Lastly, complexity presents the same challenge. It’s very name — complexity — can make people shy away from it. As humans, we crave the simple in most things as it is easier to understand, manage and control. Complexity offers none of these things and, if anything, reveals how little control we have. Entire fields of inquiry have been established around complexity science and its related theories and practices. Complexity can help us make sense of why things don’t work as we think they ought to and allow us to better navigate through unpredictable terrain with greater resilience than if we tried to tackle such problems as if they were linear in their cause and consequence.
In all of these cases — design, evaluation and complexity — there exists a PR problem. The advantages that they pose are tremendous, yet these concepts are frequently misunderstood, dismissed, or inappropriately used . When this happens, it creates even greater distance between the potential benefits these concepts offer and their real-world application.
This distance is partly an artefact of poorly articulated definitions and examples, but also by design (no pun intended). There are those who relish having these concepts appear opaque to those outside of their social cluster. Thus, we have the ‘superstar designer’ who seeks to create products and personas that are built upon their rarity, rather than accessibility. There are evaluators who exploit the fear that people have of evaluation and lack the understanding of the methods and practices of evaluation (vs concepts like research or innovation consulting) to gain contracts and social influence within their field. Complexity, with its foundations in physics and systems biology, can appear to the layperson as otherworldly, making its practitioners and scientists seem all the more powerful and smart. These tactics benefit a small ‘elite’(?) number of professionals, while robbing a far larger audience of the potential benefits.
In 1969, then president of the American Psychological Association, George Miller, implored members to “give psychology away“. His message was that psychology was too important to be left just to the professional, graduate-trained practitioners to use. If psychology was to confer social benefits, it was necessary to ensure that everyone had access to it — it’s theories, methods, models and treatments. It is perhaps no surprise that psychology remains one of the most popular undergraduate degree programs in the arts and social sciences and the focus of television shows, magazines and and an array of services. Miller was commenting on the need to change a field that he perceived was becoming elitist and not serving the needs of society.
The same might be true of design, evaluation and complexity if we let it. It’s not a surprise that these three concepts are intimately tied together, as those training to apply design thinking and strategic foresight learn. Perhaps its time to start giving these ideas away, but to do so we first need to rehab their image and apply some design thinking and brand development strategy to all three ideas. As practitioners in any or all of these fields, giving away what we do by educating, reinforcing, and ensuring that the work we do is of the highest quality is a way to lead by example. None of us is likely to change things by ourselves, but together we can do wonders.
For those interested in evaluation, I suggest catching up on the AEA365 blog sponsored by the American Evaluation Association, where evaluation bloggers and practitioners share ideas about how to practice evaluation, but also how to communicate it to others. For those interested in design, I would encourage you to look at places like the Design Thinkers LinkedIn group, where practitioners from around the world discuss innovations and way to promote and apply design thinking. A similar group, and opportunity, exists with the Systems Thinking LinkedIn group or by joining the Plexus Institute, which does considerable work to promote complexity and systems thinking in North America.
Photo: I (Heart) PR by The Silfwer used under Creative Commons Licence from Flickr.
Common Sense, Complexity and Leadership
Posted: January 23, 2012 Filed under: complexity, social systems | Tags: common sense, complexity, decision making, developmental design, Duncan Watts, evaluation, leadership, social networks, strategy, systems thinking Leave a comment »
Bye, Bye Common Sense
Great leaders are often ascribed traits that include ample common sense. But what passes for common sense is often a grab bag of miscellaneous, inconsistent ideas that are context dependent and less useful in the complex environments where leadership is called for most.
common sense |ˌkɑmən ˈsɛns|
noun
good sense and sound judgment in practical matters: use your common sense | [ as modifier ] : a common-sense approach.
Today Research in Motion announced that its founder Mike Lazaridis and his co-CEO Jim Balsillie would be relinquishing their roles with the company. In their place, a ‘pragmatic, operational-type guy ‘was installed. Presumably, Thorsten Heins has the common sense to lead RIM after the founders lost theirs. Yet, the pragmatic, common sense that RIM is looking for might not be what they need given the complexity of the environment they are leading in.
Common sense is a false lure in complex systems. In his recent book, Everything is Obvious *Once You Know the Answer, social network researcher and Yahoo! Research scientist Duncan Watts eloquently critiques the concept of common sense, illustrating dozens of times over how “common sense” doesn’t fare so well in decisions that go beyond the routine and into the complex. Indeed. the very definition of the term implies that the problems that common sense works towards addressing are relatively simple and pragmatic.
Certainly, navigating daily social conventions might lend itself well to what we might call common sense. Watts refers to sociologist Harry Collins’ term ‘collective tacit knowledge‘ that is encoded in social norms, customs and practices of a particular world to describe common sense. However, what becomes common is a byproduct of many small decisions, dynamic and flexible changes to perspective, an accumulation of knowledge gained from small experiments over time, and the application of all of this knowledge to particular, context-dependent, situations. This constellation of factors and its interdependent, contextual overlap is why artificial intelligence systems have such a difficult time mimicking human thought and action. It is this attention to context that is most worth noting for it is this context that keeps common sense from being anything but common:
Common sense…is not so much a worldview as a grab bag of logically inconsistent, often contradictory beliefs, each of which seems right at the time but carries no guarantee of being right any other time.
Watts goes on to argue:
Commonsense reasoning, therefore, does not suffer from a single overriding limitation but rather from a combination of limitations, all of which reinforce and even disguise one another. The net result is that common sense is wonderful at making sense of the world, but not necessarily at understanding it.
Thus, we often concoct a narrative about the way something happens that sounds plausible, rational and be completely wrong. Throughout the book, Watts shows how often mistakes are made based on this common sense approach to solving problems.
When it comes to RIM, some have pointed to the late Steve Jobs’ assertion that they would have difficulty catching up to firms like Apple given that the consumer market is not their strength, the enterprise market is. Yet, Steve Jobs didn’t let the fact that Apple was a computer company stop him from making music players (the iPod), mobile phones (the iPhone) or becoming book, music and movie vendors (iTunes). A read of Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson reveals a man who was able to lead and be successful through what appeared to be common sense, yet was decidedly uncommon among media and technology leaders. That is why Apple is where it is and why so many other technology companies lag behind them or simply disappeared.
The reason is that common sense in leadership looks as simple in hindsight only, not in foresight or even in the present moment. This is one of the big points that Watts makes. He uses the example of Sony’s MiniDisc system that, when introduced, had all of the hallmark features of the innovations that Apple introduced (novel, high quality, portable, smaller, visible advantages over the alternatives), yet it was a spectacular failure. Canadian management consultant Michael Raynor has called this the strategy paradox. When qualities such as vision, bold leadership, and focused execution — all the commonsensical aspects of great leaders — are applied to organizations it can lead to great success (Steve Jobs and Apple) or resounding failures (RIM?).
Strategic flexibility, making small adjustments consistently, and imaging scenarios for the future in an ongoing manner are some of the potential ways to limit the damage from common sense (or use its advantages more fully). This requires feedback mechanisms and close monitoring of program activities, developmental evaluation, and a willingness to tweak programs and design on the go (what I call: developmental design) . It’s not a surprise that this incremental approach to development is consistent with the way change is best produced in a complex adaptive system.
By recognizing that common sense is less than common and is certainly not consistent, program designers, developers, evaluators and other professionals will be better positioned to provide true leadership that addresses challenges and complexity rather than adds to the complexity and creates more problems.
Photo: Goodbye to Common Sense Space by Amulet Dream from Deviant Art
Does Solitude Enhance Creativity? A Critique of Susan Cain’s Attack on Collaboration
Posted: January 22, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »
I’ve just read a New York Times article by Susan Cain, author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. It’s the frustrated cry of a true introvert. Cain is clearly tired of everyone touting the benefits of collaboration; some people, herself included, just want to be left alone. And, she argues, those are the people who really come up with all of the great ideas. There’s a grain of truth to Cain’s claim: Psychologists who study creativity know that it …
The Complexity of Planning and Design in Social Innovation
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, evaluation, Systems science, systems thinking | Tags: complexity, design, developmental design, developmental evaluation, evaluation, health, human services, Social media, systems thinking 2 Comments »
The Architecture of Complex Plans
Planning works well for linear systems, but often runs into difficulty when we encounter complexity. How do we make use of plans without putting too much faith in their anticipated outcome and still design for change and can developmental design and developmental evaluation be a solution?
It’s that time of year when most people are starting to feel the first pushback to their New Year’s Resolutions. That strict budget, the workout plan, the make-time-for-old-friends commitments are most likely encountering their first test. Part of the reasons is that most of us plan for linear activities, yet in reality most of these activities are complex and non-linear.
A couple interesting quotes about planning for complex environments:
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy – Colin Powell
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Combat might be the quintessential complex system and both Gens Powell and Eisenhower knew about how to plan for it and what kind of limits planning had, yet it didn’t dissuade them from planning, acting and reacting. In war, the end result is what matters not whether the plan for battle went as outlined (although the costs and actions taken are not without scrutiny or concern). In human services, there is a disproportionate amount of concern about ‘getting it right’ and holding ourselves to account for how we got to our destination relative what happens at the destination itself.
Planning presents myriad challenges for those dealing with complex environments. Most of us, when we plan, expect things to go according to what we’ve set up. We develop programs to fit with this plan, set up evaluation models to assess the impact of this plan, and envisage entire strategies to support the delivery and full realization of this plan into action. For those working in social innovation, what is often realized falls short of what was outlined, which inevitably causes problems with funders and sponsors who expect a certain outcome.
Part of the problem is the mindset that shapes the planning process in the first place. Planning is designed largely around the cognitive rational approach to decision making (PDF), which is based on reductionist science and philosophy. Like the image above, a plan is often seen as a blueprint for laying out how a program or service is to unfold over time. Such models of outlining a strategy is quite suitable for building a physical structure like an office where everything from the materials to the machines used to put them together can be counted, measured and bound. This is much less relevant for services that involve interactions between autonomous agents who’s actions have influence on the outcome of that service and that result might vary from context to context as a consequence.
For evaluators, this is problematic because it reduces the control (and increases variance and ‘noise’) into models that are designed to reveal specific outcomes using particular tools. For program implementers, it is troublesome because rigid planning can drive actions away from where people are and for them into activities that might not be contextually appropriate due to some change in the system.
For this reason the twin concepts of developmental evaluation and developmental design require some attention. Developmental evaluation is a complexity-oriented approach to feedback generation and strategic learning that is intended for programs where there is a high degree of novelty and innovation. Programs where the evidence is low or non-existent, the context is shifting, and there are numerable strong and diverse influences are those where developmental evaluations are not only appropriate, but perhaps one of the only viable models of data collection and monitoring available.
Developmental design is a concept I’ve been working on as a reference to the need to incorporate ongoing design and re-design into programs even after they have been initially launched. Thus, a program evolves over time drawing in information from feedback gained through processes like evaluation to tweak its components to meet changing circumstances and needs. Rather than have a static program, a developmental design is one that systematically incorporates design thinking into the evolutionary fabric of the activities and decision making involved.
Both developmental design and evaluation work together to provide data required to allow program planners to constantly adapt their offerings to meet changing conditions, thus avoiding the problem of having outcomes becoming decoupled from program activities and working with complexity rather than against it. For example, developmental evaluation can determine what are the key attractors shaping program activities while developmental design can work with those attractors to amplify them or dampen them depending on the level of beneficial coherence they offer a program. In two joined processes we can acknowledge complexity while creating more realistic and responsive plans.
Such approaches to design and evaluation are not without contention to traditional practitioners, leaving questions about the integrity of the finished product (for design) and the robustness of the evaluation methods, but without alternative models that take complexity into account, we are simply left with bad planning instead of making it like Eisenhower wanted it to be: indispensable .
Merry Christmas 2011
Posted: December 24, 2011 Filed under: complexity | Tags: Christmas, design, health, personal, systems thinking Leave a comment »
Light Up This Holiday Season
As we begin to say goodbye to 2011 and hello to the holidays that greet the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, I am writing to wish all my visitors and reader the warmest wishes for health, happiness, creativity, joy and love in these times.
Christmas has been a special time for most of my life. In my family, the creative spirit is expressed most at the holidays with decorations, food, and the giving of gifts and time to each other and themselves. We read, watch movies, sleep, and care for ourselves and each other in ways that sometimes get a little neglected the rest of the year. It’s the kind of spirit that, like many of the holiday songs suggest, really should be with us all year long. It’s also a time of gratitude for the things we have, a time of memoriam for those we lost or neglected, but mostly about the joy of coming together and giving of ourselves.
CENSEMaking has been a wonderful forum for expression, exploration of ideas, and a space to share reflections on what I see as the intersection of systems thinking, design, health and the ways we learn through engaging with it all. Thanks to all who’ve share their thoughts on the posts and added to them. It’s inspiring to consider how powerful the Internet is a force for sharing ideas, learning from each other, and meeting new people and I learned that more than ever this year.
For those of you celebrating Christmas, may it be merry.
For my friends of the Jewish faith, may your Hanukah celebrations continue with joy and light.
For those who are not of any particular faith tradition, may you find much in life to celebrate just because we don’t need a holiday to make our world bright.
In the bigger system of interactions, these small acts of kindness and good intention can make a substantial impact.
Complexity science shows us how small things working in consort can produce large effects.
Design offers us the means to channel these good acts and intentions into something positive.
And the act of creation is a sign of health.
How we make sense of it all is what brings us to life.
The warmest wishes of the season to all of you. — Cameron
Advice for a Scholar Seeking a Life in Academia
Posted: December 18, 2011 Filed under: research, social systems | Tags: academia, education, learning, professor, research, university Leave a comment »
Educating the Academic
The need to train professionals, educate citizens and advance knowledge of our world has never been less, yet the academic environment where this takes place is changing at a pace where its easy to question what one is to do to contribute to its mission. In this continuing series on life in academia, I offer some advice for those seeking to join its ranks as I step away from this life after two decades spent immersed in it.
As a professor at a world-class research university in a dynamic and challenging field of study I have the privilege of meeting some of the brightest young minds around. The many roles that a professor can take — as educator, learner, scientist, advocate or activist – are highly attractive to many of these ‘bright minds’ so it is no surprise that I get asked a lot about how they can join the academy.
Not surprisingly, many of them aspire to become full-time professors. In this latest instalment of the Alien Shores series looking at the changing world of academia I provide some advice for those interested in getting into the profession that I am about to transition away from.
Shortly after I started my undergraduate studies I discovered psychology and found a “home” for the ideas I had about organizing with people and making a splash in the world. Soon after learning about the field and the opportunities I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be a professor. Throughout my career I studied to be a professor, seeking to apprentice under my advisor, not just take direction. He was the Chair of my department and very generous with his time and knowledge, sharing much (within all appropriate and ethical bounds) about life in the academy. He gave me an unvarnished, true account of the ups and downs of academic life and prepared me as best he could for the challenges ahead. I studied and learned and watched everything and even then it only did me so much good. The field is changing so quickly and professorial life is transforming far faster than anyone thought.
So as I leave the profession in a full-time capacity, what can offer someone who, like me, wants to get into this line of work? To the scholar who seeks a life in academia I offer this:
1. The world outside of the university is a minefield: proceed with extreme caution and pack all the right equipment. I’ve been told by more than one leader in my field “you shouldn’t attempt community-based research until you have tenure“. They were right. But I am very glad I didn’t listen and tried it out, but then my risk tolerance is a bit skewed.In terms of logistics, CBR consumes vast amount of time, is poorly appreciated, nearly impossible to resource appropriately, has time schedules that wreak havoc on your life, and offers nowhere near the academic value commensurate with the energy involved. It is also fun, creative and connects you to the world in ways that traditional research can rarely do. When you are starting out it is very difficult to weigh the pros and cons of doing this kind of work so my advice is, if you’re going to do CBR, get a team — a good one — and find collaborators with experience who can help you along. It is very hard to go it alone.
How about knowledge translation? If you want to get your knowledge into anything other than a report, academic journal or conference presentation, you are on your own unless KT is the explicit focus of your research. Why? It is hard, has little value inside the academy and you will not be given the supports to do it anywhere close to the way it deserves. At the same time, it too is fun. Among the highest honours I’ve been given is when people — the public, practitioners, or policy makers (even other academics) — tell me that they used something that I developed to solve a problem and it added value to their work. I care far less if people find my work clever, exquisitely crafted, or even “cutting edge” if it doesn’t lead to use at the end of the day.
Like CBR, find like minds and work together. Network and build on to the communities of people who are interested in your work and pay no heed to the naysayers. I’ve been told that the Internet had no future for helping people change behaviour and now regularly get challenged on my use of social media as a legitimate tool for KT. If you are reading this, then you already know that this medium works. Is it better than other tools? That depends and that’s why we do the work — to find out.
2. Don’t believe everything you read, see or hear from leaders in your institution or field. It’s too easy (and natural) to look at the head of an organization and take what they say as representing the direction they are heading. I would take the words of a senior director with a funding agency, university president, Dean or politician to heart and expect to see the changes that they spoke of. They aren’t lying, but the mechanism they use is flawed. In academia, nearly everything is directed through peer review, meaning that leadership might define the problems, but researchers determine the manner in which they are solved.
I recall sitting on a grant review panel where one of the criteria for a strong grant was a clear knowledge translation plan and seeing proposal after proposal being lauded as excellent with KT plans that included nothing more than a commitment to write the findings in a peer review journal or present at a conference. I spoke up and challenged these as weak examples of KT and the panel review coordinator agreed, but my peers saw that as appropriate and therefore the projects were favourably rated. Why would academics see it this way? See #1.
3. Your peers are your allies and your enemy. Innovation is nearly impossible by peer review. Despite challenges and commentaries on the weakness of the system, it persists and thrives in academia. Peer review has been challenged as sexist (PDF), dangerous, and almost antithetical to innovation. By its very nature, peer review is designed to judge research based on the best current evidence and the status quo, not by what could be. Indeed, to judge a proposal by imaginaries created from possible futures, rather than evidence is tantamount to academic misconduct in the peer review system.
If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market - Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association (cited in Smith (2010))
A descriptive analysis of submissions to peer reviewed academic journals found little reason to believe that the editorial peer review process improves the quality of research presented in the literature. They conclude:
At present, little empirical evidence is available to support the use of editorial peer review as a mechanism to ensure quality of biomedical research. (Jefferson et al. (2007))
Much more research is needed on this, but the work done to date isn’t positive for those seeking to do things differently. At the same time, in actually doing research, peers can be extremely useful and even necessary to getting things done and done well (see point #1). Finding some intellectual or practice peers is a critical step towards warding off loneliness in a profession that can be extremely isolating if you let it. Many academics are saddled with being the only person that studies “X” in their department, providing few allies. Find your tribe, wherever they are in and out of academia or your department or institution. Joining professional societies and getting active in them is a great way to ‘hang with your peeps’ that have common interests and build your network.
Your peers are your allies, but they are also your enemies. And as the comic Pogo quoted:
I have met the enemy and he is us
4. It doesn’t get better (unless you make it so). The anti-bullying movement directed towards the gay and lesbian community is framed around the idea that it gets better. Maybe for them, but the same rules are far from true within academia. Too often have I see people drawn by the idea that things get better once you get a long-term contract, or a tenure-track position, or tenure, or a promotion, or a grant or a publication… and all of that is one big lie. I have watched people work just as hard if not more so with success and achieve little in the way of happiness or change in status. In my last two years as a F/T professor I had over $2M in grants and published more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers, book chapters and monographs, while supervising a team of more than 23 full-time people. I got a teaching award*, a raise, and invitations to speak at keynote events. I was as successful as I ever was going to get and I was getting more miserable by the day.
Once the initial glean of the publication or successful grant application wears off, it is back to normal. This is traditional behavioural economics research and stands up in practice.
Why is this the case? Partly, because the degrees of difference between the work is so hard to perceive and the scales that people use to judge work is highly skewed, everything gets treated the same or we use conventional scales to measure unconventional products. In some places, a $500K contract is viewed less positively than a $100K peer-reviewed grant (see previous points for reasons), which is disheartening to see or experience. Also, because it is so difficult to judge the impact of a paper, they are all viewed in the same light so your Magnum opus might be treated the same as a paper you cared very little about. No one cares like you do and that is sometimes difficult to accept.
(* The teaching award was an exception, that did more to buoy my spirits than anything I’ve experienced in my career, largely because it was completely from the heart by a group of students and faculty who went out of their way to say “thanks”. That was one of those cases where simply being nominated meant the world to me. That I won was just icing).
5. Make small changes often, rather than rock the boat at once. When I became a professor, I knew from day #1 what kind of things I wanted to see different. That we have students — particularly graduate students — sitting in desks in rows listening to someone talk at them for hours is an afront to learning. Armed with educational theory, two certificates in post-secondary teaching, experience teaching in secondary school, and years of experience as a student, I was going to change the classroom. Having done lots of research, studied knowledge translation, and worked in the community, I was ready to transform the way research could be done. In both cases, I jumped in full-tilt within the means I had available.
And then the system bit back.
It wasn’t so much that anyone or thing resisted, but rather massive change at once is stressful and it was hard to handle all the unexpected consequences of making major changes simultaneously. I study complexity and teach behaviour change so I should know better. If I was to start again, I’d still do it all — but just in smaller chunks over time. But then, I knew I didn’t have much time so that might be part of the problem.
6. Figure out who you want to love you, because it can’t be everyone. Jack of All Trades is a very lonely person inside the university walls, and is loved outside of them. Academia rewards (and punishes) the expert. When you are the right fit, your specialization is golden. “Great, we were looking for someone who studies this exact ______” is wonderful to hear when you are at the institution — maybe one of a handful in the world — that is looking to hire someone with that specific set of skills and interests. There is a lot of ego-stroking in academia when you first get called “an expert” and that is a big part of the problem. We want to be loved and respected, we’ve worked pretty damn hard to be good at something, and we want the recognition. Being an ‘expert’ gives some of this to us.
But if you want to have impact outside in the world, your expertise is going to be limited. That’s OK, but one has to remember that it is indeed rare when someone presents with a highly specialized topic that is widely accessible outside of academia. Broad-based skills are useful in the world beyond the academy and are easier for n0n-academics to comprehend. Thus, people either need to be skilled communicators outright or do the kind of work that is relevant to the community from the outset, using the language of that community. The public — or other professionals or policy makers — will love you, but not necessarily the academy. It’s reasons why fields like community development, program evaluation, social design, and health promotion have a hard go of it in academia: they comprehensive fields that tend towards breadth, not depth. Yet, these skills are needed desperately to solve a certain class of problems. Both specialization and broad-based scholarly skills are useful, its just they are not appreciated equally in all settings.
Telly Sevalas’ Kojak character would ask: “who loves ya, baby?“. You need to ask the same question and accept that it won’t be everyone.
7. You can learn a lot from the military. For many of us in academia, the thought of modeling ourselves after the military in any way is a bit unpalatable. Yet, if you can get past the armed conflict part of their work, military folk have a lot of lessons to teach us faculty. Here are some of them:
- You cannot successfully fight on any more than two fronts at the same time. Thus, if you want to develop diversified program of research, it needs to have two major themes and no more. I had three major programs of research and it was too hard to manage. By program of research, I mean a series of linked projects operating under one general theme — the kind of thing that you will be asked to articulate when you apply for a career award or certain grants. I was too ambitious and excited and it was costly in terms of my mental health and wellbeing.
- “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” (see points #3 and #8 to identify the enemy — hint: its you and me). You can’t plan your career with an expectation that it will unfold as you outline. Plans are just vague roadmaps to keep you pointed in a direction, not a vision of the exact future ahead. One has to approach the work as developmental in nature.
- Protect your supply lines. From Ghengis Khan to Napoleon to Hitler, the lessons of protect your supply lines comes through in the history books (along with “don’t be a mass-murdering megalomaniac psychopath”). You need to plan for a long haul and make sure that you have the supplies — people, equipment, social support, and emotional fortitude — to operate in cycles that often go in years, not months. For example, taking on a student as an advisor means that you need to have the future supplies for the work itself (1-5 years or more of direct contact depending on the degree) and the years afterward when they apply to graduate school, jobs, grants and beyond.
Academia is designed for the tenured professor who is dedicating a life to the institution and the profession, but the reality is that there is little support for these roles. Thus, you are asked to supply a set of projects and studies that may require you respond to questions, publish papers, or support trainees and staff in various ways well beyond the funding cycle or your contract.
8. Determine how much your soul is worth and price it accordingly. Academia is not a job-space, it is a calling. If you’re thinking of clocking in 9-5 and leaving what you do at the office at the end of the day you are in the wrong business. Indeed, you probably won’t do good work because ideas come at all hours and they need attention when they ask for it. The freedom that comes from this job is a blessing and curse and how it plays out is really up to you. I personally have no problem diving in full-tilt in a period of flow to my work, but it needs to be done consciously and with permission. Otherwise, your friendships, love life, relationships with family and yourself will suffer, sometimes greatly. I know this firsthand.
While I dropped a lot of things from my sometimes unreasonable standards I did decide where my line was and stuck to it. There was one project that I steadfastly refused to rush, skimp on, reduce or limit and I held fast to that. There were a handful of people who I also would ensure they had my fullest attention whenever I met with them no matter what. These were staff or students whom I would give priority to over anything else and I hoped would never feel that I rushed them or ignored them. That was the price of my soul. When career demands started to haggle with me on this price most vociferously, I knew it was time to go. You need to know when your time to go is or be prepared to hold your price.
9. Treat your gas tank like you would handle winter driving conditions (always leave something in the tank). Going all out is something of myth — “give it 110%”, “winners never quit”, “give it your all”. It never stops. When I started, there were a few “quiet times of year” in the academic calendar. Usually early November, January and February, May and July. Now, that doesn’t exist. New Year’s Eve between 11pm and 1am is about it for quiet in the life of an academic. You can keep on going all the time if you allow work to drive your life and demand you use the full tank of gas. The emails rarely stop, the funding opportunities are never-ending, and there are always manuscripts to write, read and review. No matter what kind of joy you derive from your work, always leave something in reserve. Just like winter driving in Canada — you need a little gas left in the tank both for safety, but to ensure that your fuel lines don’t freeze (see supply lines issue above).
I, too often, gave it my all and suffered for it. By “all” I don’t mean hold back creative energy, passion, enthusiasm, or yourself, but rather make sure that you can replenish what you have in whatever way possible. Take a day (or a few) off, read for fun, or exercise (see next point). It need not be a lot, but do something to leave something in the tank and know when you’re getting low. You’ll always be asked to give more; resist.
10. Get out…a lot. Exercise. No really, do it. See movies, listen to music, watch plays, get physical with people in any way appropriate and possible. Use your body, mind and soul to extend outside of your work. See the world that you’re trying to influence even if that influence is a long way from the lab bench you work at or theoretical proposition you are putting forth. My biggest failings were letting work take over too often and neglecting the parts of myself that were important. Your important others — partners, children, friends, pets — will let you know in obvious or subtle ways that you’re neglecting them, but that message can only be heard if you are attentive. As for yourself? That’s even harder as the internal voice can be easily squelched or rationalized out. And if you lose yourself, you’re not much to anyone else.
What makes academic work so insidious from a self-care standpoint is that there are rewards for working hard – more grants, more publications, more recognition — but as you’ll not from #4, the yellow brick road only leads to Oz.
If you’ve read this far, you are either determined to learn about academia or in need of much more to read in your life. So if you are looking for something a little more inspirational, I would recommend the following:
PhD Comics. Yorge Cham’s delightful take on academia is so funny because it is so close to reality.
Dance Your PhD: There are a lot of efforts out there to make even the most arcane subject matter entertaining. Scour the web and delight in some of the most ridiculous things you’ll see tied to your dissertation topic and its a few minutes — or hours — well wasted.
An academic life is not for everyone, but it can be a wonderful space if you’re prepared. Do your research (on the job itself), be true to yourself and those close to you, and get supports. If you do and bring a smile to your day, you’ll probably do OK in this life.
(Un)Building a Mystery: Peeking Behind the Curtain in the Academic Land of Oz
Posted: December 16, 2011 Filed under: Education & Learning, research, Science & technology | Tags: academia, academic freedom, education, faculty life, innovation, research, teaching, university 1 Comment »
Mystery by UK Tara
The gap between what academics do and what those outside of the academy think they do is enormous. The mysteriousness and elite status that universities enjoy may actually serve to undermine the very values of inquiry and education that it seeks to promote. In this second in series of posts on academic life, I take you behind the curtain of Academic Land of Oz to illustrate what life for at least one professor looks like.
‘Cause you’re working
Building a mystery
Holding on and holding it in
Yeah you’re working
Building a mystery
And choosing so carefully- Sarah McLachlan, Building a Mystery, from the album Surfacing
The academic world has been my home for my entire adult life and one that I helped to build and shape along with my peers with the aim of making a contribution to our collective knowledge, the education of (mostly) young professionals, and hopefully enriching all of our lives along the way with insight drawn from research. This is what the public thinks happens in universities and, to a large extent, they are right. But the way this is done, the roles people play, and the manner in which the academic system is designed and operates is as much of a mystery you will find in our society. But perhaps its time to (un)build it**.
And unlike the Wizard of Oz, this mystery does more to harm those both building it and experiencing it from the outside. How? In part, because times are changing quickly and public institutions along with it. When times are tight, there is little appetite to support professors sitting in their offices, thinking deep thoughts, doing research that has tangential value for society, teaching badly to undergrads and only to small groups of grad students, and taking four months off in the summer and three during the December holidays.
The first part of the problem is that this perception is widely off the mark from reality.
The second part is that universities seem to be doing a poor job of correcting this perception.
For starters, universities are investing a lot less in faculty than people think. In my six years, my university itself only picked up only a small portion of my salary. The rest was through a philanthropic donation, salary awards I earned from both government-funded research programs (e.g., the Canadian Institutes of Health Research), contracts with community service groups, or sometimes from grants. Unlike other countries, Canada doesn’t have a system where investigators can easily draw a salary from the operating grants they receive. Thus, I could afford research assistants, equipment and travel, so long as I didn’t get paid.
To cover this, I had to get separate career awards to pay for my salary and as these awards typically covered less than 50% of my wage, I needed multiple revenue streams at the same time. This meant writing 2-3 times the number of grants that a tenured faculty would have to write. To make matters worse, there are a lot more people in my position than there are tenured faculty so the competition was and is stiff.
In the current CAUT Bulletin, Tom Booth writes about this further in the context of academic freedom and the US system:
It is disturbing to note that only 41 per cent of faculty members in universities in the U.S. are tenured or tenure stream. The majority of those will be retiring in the next 10 years and unless the current trend to replace tenured academic staff with non-tenure track appointments is reversed, the next decade will likely see tenured faculty representing only 20 per cent of American university teaching and research staff.
Earlier research by Harold Bauder (PDF) on academic labour segmentation in Canada found, among other things:
In Canada, academic labour has been depreciating over the previous decades. For example, faculty salaries declined relative to total expenditures of universities, from more than 31 percent in the late 1970s to roughly 19 percent in 2004 (CAUT, 2006, 4). In addition, the faculty-student ratio at Canadian universities has changed. While in the 1992-1993 academic year there were on average only 18.8 full-time students for every full-time faculty member, eleven years later there were 23.7 (CAUT, 2006, 51).
For more on the problematic faculty math in Canada, check out the CAUT’s report on the state of university teaching (PDF).
But the research side of the equation isn’t faring much better. Last February I profiled the declining state of things in the United States, which is mirroring Canada. Scientists Johannes Wheeldon and Richard Gordon recently pointed this out in a column in the Huffington Post, stating:
The role of research funding to an academic’s career has never been more important, and yet there is an emerging consensus that the way we organize our system of research grants is broken. While concerns about Canada’s model of research funding are longstanding, in recent years they have become increasingly stark. These include perpetual underfunding, charges of bias, and an over-reliance on the peer review system, which favours orthodoxy over innovation.
In short: if you’re a young researcher your share of the funding pie is smaller than ever. If you want to innovate, your prospects are even worse.
Yes, but what about academic freedom? That does exist, for now. In all my years at my university my boss (the Chair or Director) came to visit me only a handful of times. No one checks when I arrive or leave, nobody even cares if I work from home or a desert island. As long as I show up for my teaching duties, respect academic procedures, and continue to produce good research, the university system doesn’t much care what I do with my day-to-day activities. That is a real blessing and supports creative thinking about big problems.
Yet, while I could sleep in almost any day, I never did. I could take a long weekend anytime, but instead was in the office. Visiting a cottage? Sure, so long as there was Internet access and plugs for a laptop. See the world! — just make sure you keep on top of your email. Family time is wonderful as long as there’s time to write before and after. My average workweek was 90 hours for the past two years. And while work does inspire me, too much of anything is not good for long periods of time. Oh yes, and did I mention that I study health promotion? The power of social norms, and of what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus, is akin to the Death Star‘s tractor beam, only you don’t see it; it’s deep within us.
None of these were enforced activities, but they are the norm. My faculty colleagues — young and old, tenured or not — work long hours all year. The system is set up for it. For example, the Tri-Council grants in Canada — SSHRC, CIHR, and NSERC – and many of the major health charities that fund research all have deadlines that require registration (pre-proposals) at times between August 15th and October 30th, which happens to coincide with things like: 1) summer vacation for most North Americans and Europeans (in August and the months before when you organize the research plan), 2) start of classes and the academic year, 3) orientation of new students, and 4) student awards and bursaries (for which we serve as referees to write letters of support). Just try and get a date for anything longer than lunch with an academic doing research during this time.
Grading? Our exams and papers are due at my institution on December 21, which means Hanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and New Years Day are all grading holidays. Pass the gravy on this turkey.
And we are the ones who invented this system!
None of what I am writing is meant to garner sympathy for me personally. I made these choices in my career with a hope it would lead to something good for the world, myself and those I care about. Sometimes I succeeded and others not, but they were my choices that I live with, whether wise or not. What I am doing is trying to paint the picture for others about the environment that I and other faculty and staff like me live in every day. This is not the idyllic life that the public thinks it is. And while the professor is still among the most respected professions out there, it will fall flat if times get tight and people are looking for more for less and we faculty are seen (misguidedly) as having more while others have less.
But what about pay? That’s a tricky one. I get a wage that I have no complaints about in absolute terms. I make well above the Canadian average, but not something that is anywhere close to being indexed to education. Considering I have 16 years of post-secondary education (education that I paid to have), I could have done a lot better going into other fields. But as a wise colleague of mine once said about pay in professor-dom: “you won’t get rich, but you’ll never be poor” . That counts for something.
At the same time, on an hourly basis, my pay goes downhill. And at some point, time becomes worth far more than anything I have to offer financially. I also have the support to spend money on my job. Indeed, teaching supplies, continuous learning, staff rewards (and continued education for them), and the incidentals from the job cost money for which there are few mechanism to pay from in most traditional centres. They come from somewhere and that’s the faculty member’s pocket, just as elementary and secondary school teachers often pay for school supplies. We believe so strongly in what we do we’ll do it without recognition or compensation.
We are a tribe that is as foreign to the public as the San people in Africa were to the first European explorers. But like a tribe we have behaviours that are not always pro-social.
Academia has been considered gang-like in its behaviour:
Just as members of street gangs earn most of their livelihood from theft, academics gain most of theirs from careers. Being a member in good standing of a gang and a supergang is crucially important for advancement of one’s career. There is little chance of advancement in the academy without hard work, but flaunting membership in gang and clan can certainly supplement or even substitute for talent and intelligence. Clearly and repeatedly showing one’s loyalty to these groups can be most helpful in obtaining research grants and acceptance of publications, twin lifebloods of the academic career. – Scheff, T.J. (1995), Academic gangs. Crime, Law, and Social Change 23: 157-162.
It is a strange space to be in. Alien.
While I don’t particularly like the system we’ve created, it is what it is — today. But it can change if we — all of us — stop and pay attention to what it really is and work to make it what we want it to be. Well established institutions are hard to change because the practices within them are so deeply entrenched in a culture that is often accepted as is.
As this series unfolds, I’ll explore some more of these themes in detail.
The message to my fellow academics is this:
The modern university system has a lot of problems, yet our mandate and potential to contribute to the world through our research, teaching and social consulting is as big and needed as ever. Society needs us when we’re at our best, but we are doing more to undermine our best at our peril. We need to fix the system now otherwise forces beyond ourselves will force the changes on us in ways that may not be conducive to good scholarship, equity, and effective public service.
For those who like the system as it is, let me leave you with this quote from Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s book, The Leopard:
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change..
I don’t think we want things to stay as they are. But, we do want some things to stay the same.
This is the latest in the Alien Shores series of reflections on life in academia from one who is about to leave it.
* Photo Mystery by UKTara used under Creative Commons Licence from Deviant Art.
** and yes, I know that un-building is not correct use of the English language. But deconstruct, take down, demolish or pull apart don’t work here. I am using my academic privilege to make words up 
Unravel the mystery and crank up Sarah McLachlan and think about what these words mean for our business…
Sarah McLachlan “Building a Mystery”: excerpt
You live in a church
Where you sleep with voodoo dolls
And you won’t give up the search
For the ghosts in the halls
You wear sandals in the snow
And a smile that won’t wash away
Can you look out the window
Without your shadow getting in the way?You’re so beautiful
With an edge and charm
But so careful
When I’m in your arms[Chorus]
‘Cause you’re working
Building a mystery
Holding on and holding it in
Yeah you’re working
Building a mystery
And choosing so carefully
The Alien Shores of Academia: Requiem for A Dream
Posted: December 15, 2011 Filed under: Education & Learning, research | Tags: education, learning, research, university 5 Comments »
Alien Shores, Alien Horizons
Aside from the church, the university remains among the oldest continuous institutions in our society. Like the church, universities are facing challenges from massive changes in the way society views knowledge, authority and the role of the credentialed leader. This post begins a series of personal reflections looking back on a career in academia and the start of a discussion on what its future is in light of the changing landscape for science, knowledge and training the future leaders of society.
My entire adult life I dreamt of being a professor. I loved learning, teaching, and having the honor to serve society while being around those who felt the same (and still do). No job brings those things together like a university professor. On December 31st we say goodbye to 2011 and I say farewell to this dream as I begin a life as a full-time consultant outside the university. It is one of the biggest and exciting decisions I’ve made, but is not without some mixed feelings and a sense of sadness for what was, what is, and what could be. As I transition away from this world I worked so hard to get into and dreamed of for years I take pause to consider why I am leaving and what I am leaving behind.
When I was an undergrad I chose the university as my community, volunteering on student committees, forming associations, serving in student politics, and actively engaged in health promotion through work in peer counseling, outreach and social organizing. There was a time when my entire world was the university: I lived, ate, slept, studied, exercised, socialized and worked all in one place. It felt like home. Now it feels like an alien in many respects, prompting some reflection on the reasons why.
Context
It is not surprising that I chose a course of action with my life that would keep me involved with a university through a Masters degree, a doctorate and a post-doctorate and through to a role as a professor. I have spent six years as a full-time (non-tenure-track) faculty member at a leading North American academic research university with research programs that spanned both ends of the continent and a global health program that stretched from Canada to the Middle East. Although mine was primarily a research appointment, I was highly engaged in teaching and the educational mandate of my school and had the opportunity to supervise more than two dozen Masters level trainees and many doctoral students (some of whom I am still working with). My job was funded initially through a philanthropic donation to start a program in global eHealth (3 years) and then through a combination of grants, awards and contributions from my home university (3 years). I taught exclusively at the graduate level, although occasionally was asked to do guest lectures in undergraduate courses.
My change in status was precipitated by the unavailability of funds from my home institution to continue contributing to my salary, effectively laying me off. While I could have continued to find grant funding, there were too many other reasons to decide to change and therefore I made the choice to leave the full-time academic life. The Alien Shores series, starting here, builds on reflections I’ve made over my career (and in particular the past 18 months) drawing on conversations with professors in North America and abroad from different disciplines, and senior administrators (Department Chairs, Deans, Vice-Presidents and others). While not a formal study, the ideas presented are not exclusively my own and are designed to reflect the academy in general, even if there is greater influence from the experience at one institution. All universities have their idosyncracies, but there remain common elements that are shared across them that I intend to focus on.
My journey: The great imagination
What drew me into academia was a vision that was partly a distortion and part of it a well-crafted, well-intentioned lie.
The distortion was the image of the professor engaged with her or his students, imparting knowledge gained from thoughtful research on an eager and enthusiastic student body. The reality share some of this, but was also comprised of:
…graduate courses filled with 25, 35, 45, 85 students crammed into rooms that were designed for teaching in the 1950′s;
…student supervision loads that involved taking between 5 and 10 students a year (as a primary advisor or committee member);
…minimal administrative support for teaching or research;
…administrative responsibilities that were almost Byzantine in their complexity and task orientation;
…a student body that was exhausted and struggling to balance the demands of coursework, home life and financial pressures the like no other generation has ever seen;
…an absence of clear guidelines on what was expected of me and my peers in a culture where you’re only as good as your last publication;
A joke goes like this:
FOUR REASONS WHY GOD NEVER GOT TENURE:
1. Only one major publication …
3. No references.
3. It wasn’t published in a refereed journal.
4. May be true he created the world, but what has he done since then?
There are more reasons, but these alone point to a major problem with academia and the “what is enough?” question. There are other issues, but these ones compounded on one another to the point where I questioned what kind of impact I was having and whether I would ever be granted the resources to do the kind of work that was demanded of me.
Faculty life is challenging not just on account of the demands, but that the academic world is so alien to anything else in our society. There are few professions where one is expected to develop 5-year plans with a two year employment contract or where you earn money to give to someone else who tells you what kind of conditions you should work under. Most people think of academia as a place where most faculty are paid by the university, teach as much as research, and get four months off in the summer. Nearly all of these are false, particularly in my field of public health. More than ever, faculty are bringing in their own money, work long hours, 6-7 days/week and are lucky if they get two weeks off in the summer that are not spent checking email or writing papers.
Indeed, this is an alien place and without some better understanding on behalf of the public, funders, and stakeholders, it may serve to alienate taxpayers. Universities are hallowed institutions of higher learning and research in an age where real education is hampered by a lack of instructional intimacy due to ballooning class sizes and changes in student-teacher relations and information is easily obtained through the Internet.
I thought that these two forces could be used for positive benefit in teaching and providing better knowledge translation of my research, but I was more often wrong than I was right. The ability to get it right and to bring the sense of purpose that was once a part of the university in sync with the modern information landscape and labour force market is going to be the key to the future of the university. In the coming days, I’ll share my reflections on what this future might look like by looking to both the past and the present. Stay tuned.
Stuck in the 80's? ...the 1880's?
** Photo Alien Shores, Alien Horizons by kr428 used under Creative Commons License from Flickr.
