The Dangerous Lure of the Research-University Model
26th March 2011
There are more than 150 former normal schools like Winona, educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Nearly all followed an identical progression: They became teachers colleges, then dropped the “teachers,” then dropped the “college.” Usually, they are medium-size, relatively obscure, and located away from central metropolitan areas. That’s why directions on how to get there are often embedded in their name—Northern Iowa, Eastern Michigan, University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Most of the rest, like Winona, are stamped with the reassuring label of “State.”
Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That’s where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn’t have them, a copy would do.
That pattern, documented by Christensen in scores of other industries, begins with new organizations’ using new technology to create low-cost alternatives to traditional products and services. Crucially, the new products tend not to be very good at first. So established firms ignore them, preferring to continue selling better, more-expensive services to well-off customers in the traditional way. The crisis comes years later, after upstart firms have used steadily improving business practices and technology to move up the industry food chain, and older businesses remain shackled by outdated organizational models and cultures. By the time the upstarts have caught up and become competitive, the old firms simply can’t change quickly enough to avoid oblivion. Once you’ve spent $20-million on a campus gym, you can’t just sell it for cash or stop paying people to work there. Once you’ve established 18 academic departments in the college of liberal arts, it’s hard to shut any of them down.