The Futurist Says... (The University Today, Part 1)

I've spent the past three days in meetings. I got three free lunches out of it, and did learn several good things, but a lot of it consisted of the sort of busy work, open gripe-sessions, role-playing, and "future visioning" that I'm mostly rather suspicious of. Probably any instructor at any level at any college or university anywhere in the United States can sympathize with me: meetings--with all their discussions of always changing plans and procedures and policies--are simply an unavoidable feature of institutionalized higher education today, and are to be endured. Well, endured I did...sometimes even with a little humor, though I'm not sure the numerous, well-meaning and hard-working hosts who put these programs together for us always appreciated my contributions.

Monday was the longest and most difficult of the three days, at least for me. There is, abroad not just in academia but all throughout the organizations and institutions which characterize our late-capitalist world, an often inchoate but still powerful worldview, one which is bound to be familiar to a great many of you. This worldview takes various, always vaguely defined processes--like "education," "communication," "improvement" or "teamwork"--and turns them into topics fit for evaluation and assessment, often separate from any actual content: that is, from what one is actually being educated in, or what one is actually communicating, or what one's team is actually trying to do. We're not talking, of course, about some sort of philosophical immanent critique: we're talking various commonsensical observations and truisms being brought into a meta-existence, wherein we can reflect upon "adaptability" or "problem-solving" without slowing ourselves down with hard and fast references to any specific adaptations or problems. I'm not sure this vague unreality is necessarily intended; perhaps it's simply a by-product of traveling professionals attempting to put large and varied groups of people though exercises separate from the particular contexts wherein these exercises were first imagined. In any case, the language of this worldview is quickly recognizable: technocratic, globalist, and high-tech, yet also earnest and evangelical. In our case, a good number of those who led several of our small groups had a background in Protestant missionary work, and so their frequent references to the "emergent intelligence" of the "scale-free networks" and the "infinity clusters" which increasingly characterize our "chaordic" (a combination of chaos and order), "glocal" (global and local), and "coopetive" (cooperative and competitive) world were regularly accompanied by lines from the epistles of Paul and the gospel of Mark. I confess, it wasn't a mixture I cared for.

I hasten to add that a couple of the sessions our visitors put us through were quite good: it was beneficial, for me at least, to address in a collective way some of the perennial concerns which attend Friends University's attempts to understand , honor, and make use of its Quaker and Christian heritage, whether in terms of the faculty (such as through consensus decision-making) or the students (such as through programs in faith and learning). Another session on the university's essential strengths and weaknesses as we observed them was also fairly helpful, if only to increase the sense that there is a strong consensus regarding certain key problems which we face and some resources which we share to combat them. But other sessions I have to admit I simply found annoying. Joining hands with the person next to you and drawing a visualization of the university while holding onto the same pen at the same time? Give me a break.

The longest session--and the best example of the worldview I mentioned above--was one that put us through an hour and a half of "horizon mission methodology." The conceit here is that attempts to predict the future and prepare for it accordingly always fail, because we simply end up extrapolating upon what we already know. The man running the session (a self-described "futurist" and "missionologist," meaning, I presume, that he's an expert in figuring out how to create missions towards the future, or something like that) said that such "linear extrapolation and logic" never "looks beyond the beam"--the beam being the beam of light which in our limited capacities we weakly cast upon the future. So instead, what we need to do is to place ourselves in the future, and work backwards, figuring out how we got where we are. Supposedly this is a technique that has become popular with planning teams at NASA, and who knows? Maybe it makes more sense in the context of scientific inquiries where parameters are more clearly defined. In the case of an educational future, however, we were simply given to know that it was 2023, fifteen years into the future, and that Friends University was now a provider and deliverer of a (patented, perhaps?) "Friends Global Education," a "borderless educational world" which is accessed simultaneously around the globe through holographic presentations of "content" designed by faculty whose research and teaching had been radically transformed by the universal availability of all library information everywhere around the planet, as well as the simultaneous translation services provided by omnipresent nanotechnology. And then we were asked: what obstacles did we overcome to get there (excuse me, "here")?

The whole 90 minutes was made infinitely more tolerable for me by the presence at our table of a few fellow faculty who, like myself, are highly dubious of any kind of tech-speak, and who look askance at attempts to transform the project of educating students into some sort of unspecified, technologically-mediated process that apparently provides no substantive or practical resistance to any of the social transformations and compromises of our day, but instead can be aligned with them, and expressed in terms of presumably eternal "innovation." And so, of course, we (there were four of us) snarked. One said that said such a world would be "a nightmare," "a dystopia"; another simply shook his head, bemused at the whole thing. I, predictably, waxed eloquent with communitarian rage at the idea that anything worth saving could really be "borderless"; that we think the lure of instantaneous technical content (direct from the U.S. of A.!) could or should ever transcend the affections that people do feel and ought to feel for their places, languages, traditions, perspectives, etc. We pointed out that if somehow we--the people we are today, with all our traditionalist and neo-Luddite sensibilities, as-yet mostly unconverted to this admittedly perhaps inevitable future--were present in 2023 and were expected to "teach" into a webcam to be downloaded a day or week or year hence in Cairo, then we probably would have in fact long since quit teaching by then, which would have removed some major obstacles right there. (Certainly my rules against laptops, cell phones or any other kind of portable electronic communication devices in the classroom, not to mention my insistence that my students cite at least a few physically published books in their papers, and my rejection of Wikipedia as a legitimate citation source, would all have had to have long since been thrown away.) Then, getting creative, we spun scenarios which disregarded the whole "borderless" notion, and instead suggested that with the breakdown of the nation-state as a viable unit of socio-economic ordering sometime following the complete collapse of the global oil economy in the early 2010s, there was a huge revival of interest in a practical education, one which merged the liberal arts with vocational training--one of our number cleverly called it the "2-2 program," with two years of liberal arts studies followed by two years apprenticed to a mechanic or tradesman somewhere--and which was provided in a hands-on, personal way by faculty who lived in the same local community as the the students did (which is good, because no one could afford to put gasoline in their cars anymore). We decided that, in order to serve our students more effectively and eliminate the creeping class sensibility which characterizes much of higher education, we would get rid of the administration (thus saving a huge portion of our budget), re-institute complete Quaker-style faculty governance, buy up some new land near the campus so everyone can live close by where they study and learn, and develop some additional land into farms so fresh vegetables--farmed by students and faculty alike--can be sold at a co-op run in the basement of what used to be the administration building. Oh, and along the way, we brought back the Socratic method of instruction (that one was thrown in at the last minute). And that was it. Nothing about "asynchronous content availability," nothing about buying every student an Ipod as soon as they register, nothing at all. The fellow in charge tolerated us, I suppose. We four had a grand time playing the radical reactionary card, though.

I happily admit that much of my criticism of the "new educational world," and how one can or should turn universities into representatives of such through means of technology and organizational innovation and the streamlining of those idiosyncratic individuals and disciplines that have historically amounted to an "education," draws upon the contrarian delight of pushing against something which, as I said, may well be inevitable. Patrick Deneen has been taking on the "techno-optimists" and the negative impact their teachings are having on the ability of students to actually stay in one place and concentrate on one thing long enough to really digest and be changed by it a fair amount lately, and I concur with practically everything he says...except that I think he's able to write what he does with some confidence that he'll be able to create, in his classrooms at least, a space where more traditional notions of learning still hold sway. For the great majority of other academics--certainly for myself--it's a matter of picking battles, of submitting to and trying to find the occasional wheat in the great wave of chaff which is the modern organizational ideology of assessment and delivery and process, a wave which has long since drowned much of the older educational model, and that those of us to love teaching must therefore need to some extent to accept and swim in, if only because many of the students we'll be teaching--the interconnected, often rootless, often organizationally-obsessed students who come into this nation's universities--have been swimming in it for so long they no longer know any other way to learn. And really, it's all about the students: if I just loved politics and philosophy, but didn't care about spreading it on to others, I'd have found myself a job and lifestyle that would have given me more reading time, and fewer meetings.

Well, the next two days didn't provide nearly so much occasion for good-hearted mockery, but there were items worthy of comment in them nonetheless. I'll try to get to them tomorrow. Perhaps, then, summer blogging can really begin.