“I need a reason”
First published: September 29, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
I am thinking about institutions and change. Evolutionary change, revolutionary change. System change and systems change, to borrow a phrase that has acquired some contemporary currency.
Colleges and universities continue to be the case study. Change is in the air, on campus and near campus, change motivated by educational and research interests in part, by social and cultural need in part (read: labor markets for university graduates), by technologies and “technosocial” design in part (read: Generative AI), by finance and economics in part (read: demographics), and by politics and political actors in part.
For the moment I am not particularly interested in taking apart and analyzing the motivations. I am interested in what colleges and universities might do and, more importantly, the “how” and the “when” and the “who” behind the possible “what.” The demand for change is real and sincere, mostly. At different scales and in different contexts, surely, change means different things. But stay with me.
A framing anecdote is drawn from fiction, an exchange from a popular film. The remade “Ocean’s Eleven” from 2001:
Rusty (Brad Pitt): (as the two friends leave an architect’s office having stolen the blueprints to the Las Vegas vault that they plan to rob): “I need the reason. Don’t say money. Why do this?”
Danny (George Clooney): “Why not do it?”
“Because yesterday I walked out of the joint after losing four years of my life and you’re cold-decking ‘Teen Beat’ cover boys.” [pause] “Because the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the house.”
Rusty: “Been practicing that speech, haven’t you?”
Danny: “Little bit. Did I rush it? Felt like I rushed it.”
Rusty: “No, it was good, I liked it. ‘Teen Beat’ thing was harsh.”
Danny Ocean gives me the punch line. One college or one university might change or might not, but one institution’s changing usually does not move the system; one has to understand not only incentives and inspiration at the local level but also system-wide feedback loops, accountability mechanisms (and the lack thereof), and the roles of standards, standardization, and gatekeeping mechanisms of multiple sorts.
One needs resources (first), actors (both individual and institutional) second, and some cultural syntax (third): between “here” and “there” (wherever “there” might be), which both helps the actors maneuver relative to the resources and also helps observers, critics, and advocates understand whether the institutional maneuvering is going well or poorly relative to the system as a whole. Is the needle moving? Which needles? Whose needles? When? In what directions? The system is where the action is and where the need seems to be clear. So how does one change the stakes, to beat the house?
(Here, I gave a first answer to “how and why that might be happening already.”)
Ideas, game plans of a sort, and prompts of multiple sorts have been hitting the recent headlines. In this and some future posts, I’ll catalog the ones I’ve noticed, with some commentary by me.
To start with: official university reports.
The most recent of these is from Cornell University: the “Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University,” September 22, 2026. The accompanying announcement from Provost Kavita Bala makes it clear that Cornell aims to go back to the future.
MIT came out in August with the “Report of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training.” This one is less grand; “carefully but steadily MIT should proceed with AI ” is sort of the theme.
Last Spring, Yale University took its swing, with the “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.” This one came from a commission by the university’s president, who issued this statement in support of the report.
No one will confuse any of these with their most influential historical antecedents, such as Newman’s “Idea of a University,” or the Yale Report of 1928, or Clark Kerr’s “The Uses of the University.” But it’s nice that the incumbent elites are trying their best to stay afloat and right their ships, conceptually speaking.
Meanwhile, American universities are far from alone in trying to lay the foundations for their futures.
Just in, from RMIT in Australia, is this report: “Creative Work and the AI Frontier: Implications for Higher Education,” drafted by Professor Ellie Rennie. The abstract is worth quoting in full:
This report examines how AI is reorganising creative work and what this means for higher education. Prepared for RMIT University’s College of Design and Social Context, it draws primarily on economics and computer science, with examples from media, design, architecture, advertising and art, across six areas: work, platforms, value creation, organisations, robotics and governance.
It argues that task-based accounts of AI’s workforce effects are incomplete and instead treats practice–arrangement bundles, rather than discrete tasks, as the unit through which to understand change. It also builds on the author’s research on contribution systems, which record how creative work is received and built upon without turning every influence into a proprietary claim, and on Artificial Organisational Intelligence, the capacity to make organisational knowledge legible and governable.
The report identifies two key challenges. First, automating entry-level work erodes the pathways through which novices become experts, and recursive training on generated output risks model collapse. The second is legibility: making practices machine-readable enables credit, interoperability and accountability, but also extraction, so who governs that infrastructure becomes a central distributional question. The report concludes that universities should reconstruct apprenticeship, including through material and situated practice, and develop graduates’ capacity for judgement, organisational literacy, machine-readable governance and institutional agency.
That’s some heavy lifting, jargon-wise, but the Report does some useful things that are too often missing in US-centric accounts from Ivy-plus institutions. One is that it lays out at least the skeletal version of an action plan for the future of the institution and its programs. Two is that it acknowledges the complexity of contemporary university life. Three is that it speaks in the language of systems.
A great deal of what attracts academics to critiques such as Chad Wellmon’s recent book, “After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work,” is that we are, as a class, attracted to a romantic ideal: the university is where “the life of the mind” can be practiced, conserved, and shared with colleagues and students. (To be clear, it’s a terrific book, if more elegiac than prescriptive.) The mind is a singular thing, both the internal and external representation of a unique human. The university is a place, and a space, and a time, that is “other” so that the unique human can mature and become whatever version of a “critical thinker” and fully differentiated person that a field or discipline shapes them into. The place, space, and time are distinctively slower. Reflective. Trans-generational. They are not “of the market”; they are not “of the state.” Or should not be.
Generative AI intrudes on that imaginary university in uncomfortable ways. (New technologies often have.) Intrusions are far from new. “Workforce development” and career-ism by and for students intrudes. Budget pressures intrude. Scale intrudes. Administration intrudes. Standardization intrudes. Naive boards intrude. Politics intrude. Athletics intrude. Alumni intrude. Clinical health care operations intrude.
Not everyone agrees that these things are “intrusions” as much as “the ordinary institutional complexity of the modern university.” Perhaps the fairest thing one might say about the thousand-year history of universities is that they have never always been about one thing, “life of the mind” or “the pursuit of knowledge” or whatever phrase one might attach to the romanticized university. Instead, universities have last as long as they have by being vessels that are endlessly adapted to the variable purposes that societies have deemed appropriate to put into these “other” spaces.
Not surprisingly, that view does not show up in the reports by Cornell, MIT, and Yale. Universities rarely prosper by declaring that they are in the business of system-level change; Clark Kerr’s “multiversity” vision died not long after he shared it. (In California, the battles of the 1960s have become the battles of the 2020s; California community colleges have won the right to offer bachelor’s degrees.) The reports they have issued don’t have much to say about the crockpot of histories and demands through which that the “intrusions” listed above have manifested in practice.
But … while I don’t have much to add as a critique of what Cornell, MIT, and Yale have “said,” Professor Rennie’s work suggests to me that contemporary colleges and universities across the board might consider less conventional approaches to institutional change and the future than the usual “central leadership appoints a committee, and the committee reports” strategy that is mostly on offer so far.
When the president or provost commissions a report, it may take years for some echoes of that report to make their ways down to unit-level and faculty-level operations. (In a later post, I may explain how I know, via an anecdote or two.) But most faculty citizens of most colleges and universities have observed that college and university presidents, chancellors, and vice-chancellors often have much less “executive” authority than their private sector CEO counterparts do. And when they do wield their “executive” authority, administrative inertia and the faculty’s often natural tendency to resist anything that strikes them as interfering with faculty autonomy mean, combined, that not much happens very fast, at least in the domains of teaching and research.
This, it seems to me, leaves proverbial money on the table when it comes to institutional change – assuming, as I do, that system-level institutional change addressed to teaching and research is timely and appropriate.
The university – any university – is a magnificently decentralized, polycentric institution. Why speak from the top down? Why not borrow from that decentralized character?
Set aside the obvious riposte that at most universities, the usual formal mechanisms of decentralized university decision-making – “shared governance” and “faculty governance” – have been diluted almost to nothing. I have no interest in steering large scale, system-level institutional change through those doors. Not now and not yet, in any case.
Instead, at whatever organizational level one imagines – the president talking to the provost and various SVPs and directors; the provost talking to deans and directors; deans talking to department chairs – imagine the convening of a voluntary cohort of volunteer change agents and tall poppies (“positive deviants” exercising “positive deviance,” in management-speak) to build a blueprint for institutional reinvention at the “local” level. Central administrators and senior faculty organized centrally – convening positive deviance in their own right – might start by building and circulating a lightweight “template” for that local units would build on, as they wish; the template would – in the best of worlds – offer a mechanism for alignment institution-wide. Instead of a single university report purporting to speak for the entire organization – a soloist singing an aria, in front of a chorus – the result would be polyphonic but harmonic: multiple voices singing different lines, from the same score.
Don’t ask each Dean and department Chair simply to appoint a faculty committee on the unit’s future; that is likely to lead to a lot of box-checking compliance by people who may be only marginally interested in the real work of institutional design. Instead, find the people who are already pushing past the borders and boundaries of “proper” academic life and give them an institutional environment that endorses and supports their work and encourages them to scales it to a system-level and system-wide degree. In a way, let the proverbial inmates define the asylum.
This is a radically incomplete and radically optimistic view of institutional design, re-design, and governance, fraught with risk: opportunism, rent-seeking, turf-protecting and other usual sorts of academic mis-behavior.
It is, however, a way for those of us who look downstream and see only rapids getting larger to exercise some modicum of agency in our current institutional environments. Hollis Robbins wrote six months ago about something at the University of Pittsburgh that I have been helping to build locally that might – perhaps – turn into the sort of larger scale governance intervention that I have sketched above. The enterprise is called the “Ethics and Economics of Expertise” project, or “E3,” and we are just now getting started with year two. I cannot promise that anything concrete will come from E3 even in my own backyard. E3 is entirely informal, voluntary, and dis-connected from formal governance processes. But grass-roots academic organizing FTW?
Here’s the thing:
If colleges and universities don’t figure out better ways of making decisions about their own futures, and the futures of knowledge and expertise (plural on both accounts), then other folks will come along and make decisions on their behalf.
Speaking of which, did everyone see this announcement of the “Horowitz Andreessen Academy”, “a private, full-time, in-person school in San Francisco for young people coming out of high school”?
From the announcement:
Our mission is to nurture the best young people in the world, and equip them with the tools to shape it.
The campus will be humming. Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Travis Kalanick, Mira Murati, Ali Ghodsi, Patrick Collison and countless other luminaries in tech will visit and give lectures. Students will be excitedly sharing their projects, workshopping ideas with their mentors, and constantly pushing their peers.
Never mind that there are not one but two world-class universities within 25 miles of San Francisco where “the best young people in the world” are given essentially any world-shaping tool that they wish and put in close proximity to global money and power.
Take away the systems and practices that have for centuries tried to assure a modicum of independence of college and university teaching, learning, and research from market-related and government-related pressure.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’ll have more on this theme, in the future.
Thanks for sticking with me.