“We will need to identify challenges bigger than ourselves—bigger than our discipline, our training, and our own paradigm of thinking,” writes Baruch President S. David Wu. Grand challenges like mitigating climate change create synergy between teaching and research, connect to institutional mission, and allow the College “to fully leverage our intellectual horsepower and prepare our students to do so as well.”
In continuing our conversation about the future, this blog will focus on my thoughts regarding a culture of creativity, curiosity, and engagement through institutional learning and collaboration.
I am thrilled to see a dialogue beginning to take shape after my last blog—some of which directly touches on the topic I would like to explore next. Two critical questions recently offered by members of the Baruch community provide the starting point:
- How do we bridge the pragmatism of solving immediate problems and the optimism inspired by dreaming a better future?
- How do we fully leverage our intellectual horsepower as an academic institution?
Bridging Pragmatism and Optimism
As we formulate grand ideas for the future, I recognize the hardships and challenges many in our community are suffering, the social disparities that are amplified by current circumstances, and the feelings of anguish—even outrage—as the College struggles to catch up with the new reality that was thrust upon us. While we have learned lessons of resilience from these experiences—not just as passive recipients but as collaborating architects of a more robust future—we need to pay close attention to the pitfalls within our system that could stymie our future progress.
Professor Arthur Lewin shared the importance of planning our short-term future while keeping in mind our long-term aspirations—“for what is good in the short term may hamper us in the long run.” He also articulated the need to devise medium-term adjustments that would bridge the two as we “stabilize to a new normal.” Indeed, there is power in attempting to envision and predict the future, and by creating a conduit for our immediate solution to the envisaged, we find ways to shape that future.
Fully Leveraging Our Intellectual Horsepower
While I have spent a great deal of time addressing the socioeconomic context of Baruch’s mission, as an academic institution our core mission remains teaching, research, and scholarship. It is through our creativity and intellect that we provide the substance of our contribution. This is why I appreciate the keen observation by Professor Thomas Teufel, who said that we are not, at present, fully leveraging our world-class intellectual horsepower with the unique combination of expertise from business, public affairs, arts, sciences, and the humanities. He attributed this to a lack of institutional self-awareness and institutional inertia. The latter is particularly crucial to be reckoned with if we are to translate big-picture ideas of the future into “purposeful, structured, sustained, and effective action,” as he articulated.
I believe the familiar framing for a learning institution offers useful insights. Stemming from organizational theory, institutional learning occurs when people in the organization continually learn how to learn together, where new ways of thinking are nurtured, and where shared aspiration is articulated and formulated—this, in turn, allows the institution to expand its capacity to create the outcomes its members truly desire.
As an example, strategic planning can be considered a form of institutional learning. In fact, the term “planning” is a means to an end, and the end is rarely the plan it generates; it is the act of collective thinking and sharing aspiration that lead to buy-in, action, and sustained change. We are due for a new strategic plan in the near future, but let’s not wait for the formal process. It is an institutional muscle that requires flexing and exercising—on a regular basis, not just every five years. That is not to suggest that we overhaul our strategic plan each year but rather regularly engage in thoughtful reflection and calibration. Consistent attention to where we are going as an institution ensures that the collaboration process remains energized and at the forefront of who we are and who we can be.
Learning to Bridge, Learning to Leverage
What if we think of institutional learning as the conduit that connects our present state of localized individual brilliance to the future state of a fully-leveraged intellectual powerhouse? We can do this because collaboration is a learned skill that requires intentionality, persistence, and practice until it becomes ingrained in the culture. Because there are both structural and psychological obstacles to be overcome—be it the difference in workload rules across schools, be it the different values and reward systems across disciplinary norms—some elements of “institutional inertia” can be addressed immediately, some will take longer, and some we may not be able to overcome.
We can, however, make intra- and cross-school collaboration possible before we make it easy. But we cannot wait for the world to be perfect before stepping outside—we must start now. I know this can be done because I spent a significant part of my career building these bridges, stone by stone, with lots of help from others. We failed enough times to learn valuable lessons, but often we succeeded—once we captured the imagination and excitement of colleagues—and that’s when the magic happens.
Learning to Find Challenges Bigger Than Ourselves
To achieve our long-term vision, we will need to methodically tackle the short-term issues as well as intentionally conceive institutional learning adjustments for the medium term that bridge the two. We will need to find new ways to interact, learn, and create—beyond how we have transformed over this last year. We will need to combine efforts where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We will need to identify challenges bigger than ourselves—bigger than our discipline, our training, and our own paradigm of thinking. It helps if we address subjects that we are in a unique position to address, such as urban centers and underserved communities. Finding topics that create synergy between teaching and research, while simultaneously connecting to our institutional mission, will allow us to fully leverage our intellectual horsepower, tackle grand challenges of our time, and prepare our students to do so as well.
While I would like every member of the Baruch community to help define the substance of our collaboration, I will start the conversation by providing a few examples, umbrella topics that seem to meet the above criteria:
- Mitigating Climate Change
- Justice in a Changing Metropolis
- Interventions in the Physical/Digital Entangled Evolution
These areas consider science, economics, policies, and the humanities as integral parts of a whole. They also reflect the powerful position of Baruch in offering a liberal arts public education with a professional school mindset. But most importantly, each allows us to come together as a whole to make a difference.
Learning to bridge, learning to leverage, and learning to find challenges bigger than ourselves—let’s move toward a true learning institution and expand our capacity to create the future to which we aspire. Let’s start the conversation today.
19 Comments
We need more learning communities in our college. If we teach more about the connections between our departments it will strengthen our knowledge and interdepartmental disciplines.
Ensuring that our curriculum is interdisciplinary is a beginning way to bridge learning for our students. Knowledge is connected in the world. We may isolate subjects/topics so that we can study each in detail. But if we fail to help students reconnect this specialized, focused knowledge to the broader world, then I think we are missing a big and crucial learning opportunity to see the bigger picture of how the world is interconnected.
Agreed 1000%, President Wu. And our alumni can help be that bridge.
I view your comments and aspirations with some interest. I have a long career in research in industry and academia. I currently work at UC Berkeley in a program management capacity for a transportation (automation) and formerly worked in energy research (electricity). I have a couple of thoughts to share:
Aim to solve real problems.
The opportunity to collaborate with industry to address long term (this is a subjective descriptor) societal challenges, that require creative, out of the box thinking, are limited. Industrial research is about ROI on a 5 year time horizon (yes, an over generalization) that is consistent with their strategic planning. In addition, industry will want to control all IP and limit publications. Universities (especially public, research) occupy a completely different space. You will never get through the contract negotiation process.
In contrast, public agencies have a long term planning horizon. For example, the USDOT requires all transportation agencies (that receive their funding) to have and publish a 35 year plan. This is provides a good start. But there must be public policy (federal, state, local) that aspires to address long term challenges (climate, equity …) otherwise public planning will not include it. Public agencies also must take ownership of societal challenges, as well.
All problems require interdisciplinary solutions. The current design of the city university includes campuses with a focus on specific disciplines (my perspective when I was a Baruch student). And knowledge generation (PhD) has it own division, itself. This design has the potential to create silos, stove-pipe thinking and barriers to a processes that are fundamentally organic (knowledge sharing) relationship building and discovery (needed to build awareness in challenges, emerging solutions, gaps). Perhaps some of the tools used in remote learning / remote work can be used to build bridges, relationships and awareness across CUNY colleges.
How can we address a corporate attitude which tells newly-hired college grads on their first day of work: “Forget everything you learned in school…I’ll show you the REAL world.” I’ve heard multiple managers say this over the last 30 years. I see it as a big challenge.
Connections, bridges, learning communities, interdisciplinary approaches and solutions are all excellent suggestions. Yet, we need to envision the road there, prepare for obstacles and the ever-changing landscape that is our world.
Though many are exhausted of hearing it, COVID is yet another event which has drastically changed that landscape, our very way of life; and it is here to stay. There must be room for planning for such events; part of the reflection and calibration Dr. Wu has mentioned.
Dr. Wu’s call “not to wait for the formal process” is a call to action. I propose we begin by listening. Let us hear from our Professors, ask, “What one thing they feel would make a significant difference in their course offering and why?” “What would make a difference in their classroom teaching experience and why?” “What connections can they foster or would like to foster and why?
Whose voices speak louder than our students? Everywhere I go, I hear people engaged in conversations and want to know, “When is the University going back to in-class instruction?” Students ache to return to the classroom, for a variety of reasons. They also long for a challenge and for people to challenge them. I would have thought the challenge of on-line learning would open a whole new world for them. Yet, this is not the challenge they are looking for and we need to discover what that is so we may shape and begin the construction on the road that will take us in the direction of our vision. So, let us ask our students; those whom we aim to serve. “Name the one thing you would like to learn at Baruch and why?” “How do you see learning this one thing will improve your future, the world around you and world beyond you?”
The goal of education, for me, has always been to help students become life-long learners. Thoughtful and reflective calibration our mission to achieve that…well, it means students will not have to “Forget everything they learned in school…” (LaManna). A mission worth the undertaking.
Thank you, Elizabeth, for your thoughtful comments. I am particularly grateful for the set of questions you posed for members of our community. Starting a dialogue by asking then listening to the answers of these questions help us to appreciate and understand the perspectives and nuances that is so critical in tackling complex issues facing our future–an important first step in institutional learning.
It is my pleasure, and I am honored by your words. I have no doubt gathering data on how others envision learning in the 21st Century and beyond will supply the necessary framework on which to build and steer our course.
I thank you for opening this dialogue and embarking on this bold mission and all that is to come. I look forward to the outcome with much anticipation and participation.
Finding our way forward is like writing a book, or a term paper. You begin with an outline, a path. And as you follow it, you see that you have to adjust it, continually. And when all is said and done, the final outline is quite different from the one you began with, and so is the book or the term paper or the way forward for Baruch College. Elizabeth Arango offers a suggestion as to how to help fashion the initial path. Doubtless there’ll be fits and starts. But, as the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.
Thank you Dr. Lewin; my sentiments exactly.
As I read your blog, you want us to honor commitments we’ve made, be open and forthcoming about our activities that affect the community, and subordinate our basest impulses to the good of Baruch. Does the Chancellor know you’re preaching this heresy?
The balance between existential issues that must immediately be addressed, and an integrated planning approach that asks, “where do we want to be in 10 years?” is an important one to configure. And, we are doing so at an accelerator moment – which makes this exercise all the more urgent. I applaud President Wu’s willingness to open this conversation at Baruch, and welcome his thought leadership and partnership with the College academic and research enterprises.
Before COVID the college was urging a reluctant staff to move more toward online and hybrid, setting target percentages that few departments had met. Now, though, things are reversed, there appears to be a great demand for online and a reticence for in person.
Thus, there are three possibilities:
The demand for online exceeds the demand for in person.
The demand for online meets the demand for in person.
The demand for online is less than the demand for in person.
The third possibility seems unlikely. But we should not automatically assume the first to be true, that the demand for online exceeds the demand for in person. We need, to as accurately as possible, discern which of the three possibilities, is in fact, true.
Keep in mind that the level of demand of the students and the level of demand of the faculty for online vs. in person instruction are not likely the same. We need to discern the discrepancy between the two and resolve the difference. ( The administration could use a wide variety of inducements to attain this. )
At any rate, one thing for sure, many faculty are eager to get back to campus and many students are too, and those that do will have a quieter, less hectic, more contemplative campus. And we’ll not have the lack of classroom space that plagued us pre-COVID. We can offer more classes than ever before.
I see that we have announced a completely online BA degree. There will likely be a great demand for it. Over time, as the program ramps up, more and more faculty who prefer online instruction can be shifted to it, thus, naturally resolving any discrepancy between the demand for in person instruction by the faculty vs. the demand for in person instruction by the students.
Finally, what exactly is the scope of the fully online degree program? But whatever size is projected at present, we should perhaps consider expanding it, right off the bat, before the start of the Fall Semester, to soak up some of the demand for online instruction.
Excellent suggestion Dr. Lewin; I concur. May I add the “why” component to those questions above? It is important we understand the need from both views, students and faculty, I am quite certain common ground exists and this is where we will find the path upon which to build. Taking “why” a bit further, let us add another thought provoking question such as, “Which do you believe is easier, an in-class course or an online course and why?” Some students may opt for online learning because of convenience, however, are either not aware, equipped nor prepared for the diligence required of a student in an online class.
Thanks. Yes. I believe it’s called Supply + Demand.
I’d like to follow up on some notions that appear in this blog post, including bridging, collaboration, and harnessing intellectual horsepower. What I’m about to say isn’t an assertion of how things are, just a sense of how they appear to me. Many members of Baruch’s arts and sciences faculty think that the business school faculty are largely oblivious to them, and they compensate by turning up their noses at what they perceive as the philistinism of the business faculty. Neither of these positions hold a lot of water, but still they prevail.
It has long seemed to me that we are passing up some fertile opportunities here: Why couldn’t we devise some programming that regularly puts faculty from all three schools together to think out loud, together, about social, economic, political, and cultural issues that our country consistently fails to mitigate. I’m not talking only about obvious issues like racism, inequality, and the environment. I’m thinking about how we make the arts more widely available; how regional antagonisms increasingly define our political processes; how we improve understandings of just how central immigration has been to the country’s success; how our foreign policy exacerbates world tensions while ostensibly working to resolving them. You get the picture.
I’m thinking in terms of management consultants interfacing with philosophers. Graphic artists playing with financial engineers. Historians in the sandbox with economists. Public policy analysts and comp lit specialists pondering today’s cultural ecosystem. A starting point might be rooted in debates among widely differing thought processes, but the real goal, I think, is to search out shared concerns and bring seemingly opposed perspectives into some sort of productive symbiosis.
Thank you, Professor Petersen. Your comments represents, precisely, the kind of conversation I would like to start around campus. Not only did you call out a subtle but important element of “institutional inertia,” you pointed out possible mechanisms to overcome that inertia, as well as concrete ideas about the substance of collaboration. The dynamic you have pointed out is all too familiar in academic institutions (sadly), and often represents the most significant obstacle for open minded collaboration. To “break the ice” requires courage, a bit of luck, and a great deal of persistence. But it is necessary and it absolutely can be done–perhaps with a little help along the side, which we will put ourselves in the position to provide, before too long.
Thank you for putting your thoughts into this important conversation!
Stellar ideas all, Professor Petersen. In addition, how about a cost-benefit analysis of shifting specified percentages of police expenditures of a given city to social services. Also, not just inter-School collaboration, but also intra-School collaboration, needs to be fostered. For example, a few years ago Professors Gadner (Communication Studies), Teufel and Schwartzenbach (Philosophy) and Lewin (Black + Latino Studies) put on a forum “Was Socrates Black,” an examination of whether or not, and to what extent, Greek culture was an outgrowth of Egyptian civilization. It was quite well attended, and many were students.
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