As the next academic year approaches at colleges and universities across the country, U.S. higher education faces a number of cliffs.
Recently, three institutions — Wittenberg College, the University of New Orleans and Western Illinois University — announced devastating cuts attributed in part to long-range trends in decreasing enrollment.
In his 2018 book “Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education,” economics professor Nathan D. Grawe identified what he called “the demographic cliff.” He predicted that due to contracting birth rates in the U.S., student enrollments would drop by as much as 15% by 2025. Though his study did not anticipate COVID-19, it was attuned to the long-term financial setbacks produced by the global economic downturn of 2008. His argument was not that institutional collapse was inevitable, but that colleges and universities needed to recognize the patterns and strategize accordingly.
As alarming as this prediction is, there is another problem much less talked about by higher education administrators, if it is acknowledged at all: the innovation cliff. Before they can strategize, university leaders need a wake-up call about the inevitably steep drop-offs that follow once innovation projects are no longer shiny and new.
The relentless quest for innovation is the driver of the U.S. university complex. It motivates everything from its research and teaching missions to its internal and external investments to its reputational strategies. No one questions it. Remarkably, there’s simply no debate about it except around how best to pursue it, compete to achieve it and sustain it at whatever cost.
“Innovation” is a broad term, and it can refer to everything from big-tech projects, such as the pursuit of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence toolboxes, to bioengineering solutions to medicine and health science, as we saw in the real-time response to the development of COVID-19 testing.
But it is routinely about “the new,” “the newest, “the next.” Though federal dollars are likely to support some of the expansions involved, significant institutional investments are also required to jump-start them and keep them going.
Combine the capital expenditures needed to fund a stream of new endeavors and enterprises with regular operating costs, contracting tuition revenue and inflation, and it’s a formula for what we have seen with accelerating frequency across the higher education landscape in the last several years. Budgetary collapse, the closing or merging of institutions and the slashing of academic programs — these are the bold-type consequences, with humanities and arts departments bearing the brunt.
As Michael T. Nietzel and Charles M. Ambrose note in their 2023 book “Colleges on the Brink: The Case for Financial Exigency,” some institutions have righted the ship through painful reorganizations aimed at sustainable fiscal health.
They also suggest that the culture wars that have dominated the headlines, especially since the events of Oct. 7, are a red herring when it comes to the precarity of higher education in America. What’s most important, they argue, is tending to the structural questions that affect the bottom line.
But understanding university culture is crucial to helping explain why structural crises recur. And for the last several decades at least, belief in the culture of innovation as the rationale for U.S. higher education — indeed, as the primary justification for its value and its future — has become so embedded that we scarcely notice it, let alone talk about it.
At least not inside the academy. When it comes to the innovation cliff, the companion piece to Grawe’s study of the demographic crisis is Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell’s 2020 book “The Innovation Delusion.” They offer a historical account of how the obsession with innovation has impelled politicians, CEOs and academic leaders alike to chase growth, by relying on federal funding and borrowing money since the postwar period.
This “growth at all costs” mentality is rapacious at best. At worst, it’s a careless disavowal of the price — to workers, communities, families — of what happens after innovation goes bust or runs its course, leaving unemployment, ravaged cityscapes and even toxic remains behind, with poor and minority communities typically the most ill served.
As historian Davarian L. Baldwin has shown, some of this innovation-at-any-price activity happens “in the shadow of the ivory tower” — i.e., through a university’s real estate or entrepreneurial development in its own backyard.
Critique of innovation is not a rejection of growth, per se. Vinsel and Russell are the founders of The Maintainers, a global network of research and practice that focuses on co-producing innovation-and-maintenance mindsets and methods. Its premise is that otherwise, innovation is not just a delusion, but also a steep drop into costly and even failed undertakings that exact a real price from people and polities.
At this juncture in the history of higher education, the U.S. university itself is potentially among such failed ventures.
The innovation delusion may be an American specialty, but it has precedent in histories of imperialism and global capitalism. In her 2019 study of resource extraction and exploitation in Southern Africa, anthropologist Julie Livingston calls this phenomenon “self-devouring growth” of planetary proportions.
When it comes to diagnosing the crises besetting colleges and universities, the pursuit of innovation is not even on the list, so naturalized it is in the identity that higher education has crafted for itself over the past half century. Key to avoiding the innovation cliff in the coming decades is to name the innovation delusion as one of the root causes of crisis in the academy.
So as the new academic year begins, let’s make room in public conversation for a discussion about this hungry ghost in the machine.
To use a favorite term of innovation-speak, let’s develop strategies to disrupt it. And work up metrics that account for its true costs in order to plan accordingly.
Antoinette Burton is a professor of history and director of the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an alum of The OpEd Project.
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