higher-education

Why Lesbians, Indians and Beta Males Run Today’s Universities

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Who needs a throw rug when you have a borzoi?

Note: This article is chock-a-block full of triggering models and language, and cultural relativity that many people in power will find extremely offensive. And not because it’s wrong.

I’m fresh off reading the recent university self-study for Cornell University, titled the Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University. I don’t know if I should encourage you to download it and read it for yourself — but the link is above. It’s like sitting in a 238 page faculty meeting with earnest, but clueless group of diverse/not-diverse not-so-cool kids trying to figure out how they can justify not doing their jobs and doing what they want while being incessantly bullied by a group of professional mountebanks who are using the institution to rob the public blind while policing their language. In fact, policing the language is a big part of what universities have elected themselves to do. It’s part of the destructive strategy that essentially alien agents have pursued to collapse the host that feeds it.

The report was commissioned by the Cornell Provost, an Indian woman named Kavita Bala, who happens to come from both a computer science background, and Mumbai where she received a B.S. degree. She has a Wikipedia page. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1999, which gives her something like 25 years in the Sausage Factory (my colloquial name for the academy.) What is notable is that a.) she is the head of one of the most prominent (if not THE most prominent) public/private universities in the world. Cornell has a blended background that way, and you can investigate if that intrigues you. Bala is negatively impressive in a metacognitive way — she’s no thought leader in anything, having never issued an opinion that I could find, and she’s in a fascinating, collapsing discipline — especially in higher education, and one of the absolute first educational disciplines to be subsumed by AI. She is the force who ostensibly is going to lead us out of the wilderness. Good luck with that.

The report, like so many faculty meetings, exists to reassure the disordered people running the show in higher ed, that they really are nice folks, and all they really need to do is tune up their niceness to each other a little, while riding herd over the lower castes of autists and disciplinary slaves. The fact that they are sucking up inordinate amounts of public cash interests them only in that this public largesse appears to be coming to an end, and they are mostly likely unemployable in anything other than producing their bullshit, which the public, or rather parents of the next generation and the entire business enterprise of the country aren’t buying. What is stunning is there is no awareness, self- or otherwise, how they got into this pickle. Their mommies and daddies all were profoundly congratulatory at the various gates that were necessary for someone like Bala to pass through to draw her inordinate salary, likely north of $700K/year. Why are the lower castes not bowing down?

The report’s solutions to the academic crisis are milquetoast — more experiential education, more neglected publics, don’t short the all-important research, preserve the liberal arts, and so on. A renewed emphasis on Academic Civility — as if the reason that there are no dissenting opinions at Cornell was because people just aren’t being nice enough. There’s no mention of the obvious capture of the university by the DEI apparatus, as well as NO disclosure of the endless haranguing every employee at a university must be subjected to as part of their job conditions. No mention of the devastating effects COVID lockdowns had that drove some of these changes. No mention of the effects of DEI on student admissions, nor their expectations, and the university’s desire to service those, instead of stand for something other than the endless immiseration of its adherents.

So let’s cut to the chase and resolve how we got here. It’s a collapse story, just FYI. But its origins are actually mathematical in nature. I know that won’t satisfy folks looking for the red meat of racism, or anti-racism. But it’s the closest thing to a complicated truth. The problem is to get out of the hole requires some serious modifications of the transmogrified OS that runs places like Cornell, and those aren’t likely to happen, at least from an internal, conscious perspective.

Back in the early ’90s there was kind of an awakening across academia that academia as a whole was too white. I was part of that, and participated. It WAS true that most folks across the top of the institution were white men. What was interesting, though, was that even back in the ’80s, things were different. There was increasing “administrative professionalism” that was settling in across the nation.

What does that mean? We used to have administrators, but we also had faculty at the top in key positions. Yes, there would be a formal business manager for business administration. But top VP positions were also held by older professors. The way it would work was that IF you had a successful career, and you were personable and outgoing, you, one day, would get a call from the president. He (they were almost all ‘he’s’) would say “Chuck, we need an outgoing dealmaker who understands how to collegially adjudicate some of the various issues, as well as likes students enough to make the rounds to the dorms. We need a VP for Student Affairs. The gig will run 3 years, and after that, you can return to the faculty, and we’ll make sure you have time to write your book until you retire. Are you interested?”

You had been called to service, and would assent. And then coast off into retirement with time to finally put that long, career summative manuscript together. Deal.

But by my estimate, by the early ’90s, this kind of deal was dead. In place was a rapidly expanding administrative cohort. In my own university, I’ll never forget the beginning of an early presidential search. One of the candidates looked out across the sea of VPs, Vice-Provosts and the like and said “there sure seems to be a lot of you.”

At the same time, the nascent DEI apparatus was starting to be formed. You had true believers like myself (I did this!) going out in communities with diverse constituencies (in Washington, our primary minority was, and is Latin American) and recruiting students. And at the same time, there was a push to make both the professoriate and the administration look a little less white.

And there WAS racism. But the way the racism was baked in was that even back then, to get hired as a faculty member, you needed to come from a very constrained, elite group of universities. And like it or not, THOSE places mostly had white students. I graduated from Duke with my Ph.D. in 1987. My advisor was the Dean, and he had formerly been a full professor at Princeton. Folks in the academy actually thought a Duke Ph.D. degree was an inferior degree.

The key thing to remember here is that no one group of anything is monolithic. There might be some probabilistic variation, but for the sake of this piece, it’s fair to assume that people are distributed in some kind of normal, bell-shaped curve with talents and intelligence. What racism did (or even the inherent racism of institutions) was distort that bell curve. Where it did it the worst was on the right side of the distribution. People who were talented were suppressed.

And so you could march down the phenotypes. Black, East Asian, South Asian, Mexican, whatever. But most importantly, WOMEN. White women. When that dam, that vertical wall on the right side of the distribution came down, the best got picked first. African-Americans were the most highly prized in the treasure hunt, mostly because there were so damn few of them. The best got vacuumed up at places like Harvard, and displayed prominently across the literature produced by those organizations. Women were kinda down there on the list, as well as Hispanics. Native Americans were non-existent — a college degree has always been a tough sell on the Res. Those people want to go back to their place. Asians were obviously far easier.

But it didn’t matter. The quantities favored white women. And so across academia, women started getting hoovered up into both faculty and administrative positions. Obviously, disciplines like engineering were still poorly represented — there were (and still are) almost no women to hire.

And while I’ll admit it is a generalization — who is more likely to get ahead in their career? We were still bean-counting resumes on hiring committees. Who had more beans to count? Women with kids, or women without kids? If you can’t guess that, you’re probably not going to grok this essay anyway.

And then, who is more likely to not have kids? The answer is part of the subject of this essay. Lesbians. Lots of them. I noticed this by the late ’90s. Our provost was a lesbian, though it was not talked about as freely as today. There was no gay marriage either, so there was major consternation on how her partner was going to be compensated. This was 30 years ago. Think hushed tones.

And the tide continued. Like attracts like. More and more. And as all the lesser universities attempted to move into the research game (this happened around the turn of the century — 2000) there was increased demand for students, which could not be acquired locally. But people living in Third World countries were happy to oblige. They sent us their sons, and to a lesser extent, their daughters.

With more demand from lower prestige schools, there also was more demand for technical Ph.Ds to fill those slots. And with looser financing, even white kids who wanted a delayed adolescence would be encouraged to fill up those humanities slots. They were paying their way. And whom were we to discriminate against the cultural predilections of entire minority communities? One undiscussable point is how so many of these communities a.) thrive on status, as opposed to performance, and b.) eat their young. The African-American community is terrible about this. Getting to be called “Dr.” is a big deal. I think it comes out of the faith tradition — but it’s also because the majority African-American community is very authoritarian. Lots of the Ph.Ds in the softer arts were auto-ethnographic. So if you were willing to pay the university $200K, which the government would finance, you could write a report on how you spent your summer vacation and how oppressed you were, and they would give you a Ph.D.

At the time, I was the Chair of the University Faculty Senate — kind of the political head of the entire faculty. I was given the job of university restructuring by the current president, an old Mormon leader who ended up being my biggest fan – a story for another time. I went around to all the minority faculty and talked to them. “We only have money for one thing — 20 recruiters, or 1 VP? Which do you prefer?” They unanimously said “we want the VP.” I admonished them. “A VP is not boots-on-the-ground,” what I now understand as a performance-based perspective. They were convinced that being in the room was enough to get something done — a lesson 1619 founder Nikole Hannah-Jones is learning now is utter bullshit. So they got their VP (a nice guy and friend of mine.) Which led to setting up an even larger bureaucracy. I was heavily involved — the Director of a good hunk of it was my best friend, and honestly, we did quite a bit of good. Students got through and got degrees, and got jobs.

But back to the staffing situation. After the best were peeled off the right side of the distribution, you were left with depleted pools of demographic variations hostile to the success of their own in-group members. I’ve got stories. But there still was a hiring bias for those minorities inside the university, and at some level in corporate America. But inside the university, increasingly the only white males who could be tolerated were definitely in the ‘beta male’ category. I was already a rarity as a declared Alpha male. So the LGBTQ community subversively took towards assassinating the remnants. They were increasingly in the bureaucratic caste, as well as some of the disordered humanities. They were also not stupid, and heavily recruited, especially from the first generation students, who really just wanted a degree. And if they couldn’t hack the math, they were not going into engineering.

I could go on. But the whole point is that if you think there was some conspiratorial master plan to take over universities, that’s not what happened in the beginning. It was the mathematics of memetic cascades. The end result is we’re now stuck with a lot of mediocre people in academic administration, with not very much to do, that know they could never get a job that pays what they’re getting paid now.

While things STARTED with mathematics, though, that is NOT how things have ended. And how have they ended? With a phenomenon called polyphenism. And what the hell is that? It’s the reason bees that get born in the hive differentiate into workers, kings, and that one queen. They have the same genes. But some combination of epigenetic, hormonal and environmental factors drive biological differentiation.

What is going on now in universities is the cultural variant. Cultural polyphenism is what we’re dealing with. We may have inadvertently selected, through mathematical memetic cascades for more women without kids, which then turned out to be lesbians. But once the lesbians aggregated, we saw a profound political bias that directly came from putting all of them together in a group. We did NOT select for gay males — there is no equivalent on the masculine side of the system. And gay males tend to be more politically spread out than the female side. So we ended up with a hyper-feminine system, that not only sucked in the LGB side, it also gave the gender shape-shifters, the TQ part, the ability to mimic (lots of personality disorders in that crowd, along with narcissistic mirroring) and seize control. Which they did.

At the same time in tech., the demand for research faculties in lesser universities, and the plethora of grad students from places like India, Pakistan, and China, created faculties that are minority white. But they aren’t JUST phenotype-problematic. That’s an easy diversion. People like the provost of Cornell only recently came from India. They are not American, and especially in tech., they do not function the same once you pass a threshold of aggregation that once again triggers cultural polyphenism. It’s gotten so bad, with the decline of at least second-generation Americans in the faculty, that the Indians and Chinese faculty are publicly fighting with each other.

I’m glad I ended my academic career when I did. Why? I had great relationships with my Indian and Chinese colleagues. I toured China, and met with the Dean of Peking University’s engineering college, who we then ended up hiring one of his graduate students. I’ve mentored notable Indian and Chinese scholars myself. But what is going on regarding values will lead to the downfall of the university. Every system has some ability to absorb a certain number of cultural variants. But if you think a primarily Indian faculty is going to service, and more importantly predict the future needs of Americans and American students, you’ve got another thing coming. Their cultures have too many overlaps with the dynamic drivers of university collapse. And while I’ve always felt like my various projects of mentorship were wonderful people, I never counted on servicing the inherent biases in their backgrounds. It’s not just some pick-and-choose smorgasbord, culturally, out there. Core American culture is far superior than most of the homeland cultures these people derive their baseline OS from. And for the majority, that culture is NOT why they came here. They came here for the money.

I could also go on that some of it, towards the end, was a cultural clash with core American values, emblematic in my dogs, which I would take everywhere. If you think a dominant Muslim culture likes dogs, I’ve got news for you. But I digress. Trust me — they trash the bathrooms. It’s gross.

The deeper problem is that all these constituents are authority-driven identity structures. We’re so stuck on phenotypes that we think that kind of thing actually matters. But it doesn’t. The primary commonalities that exist between South Asian and Chinese cultures, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, is that there relational modes are externally defined. The Muslim/South Asian cultures relate to different people inside their communities, as well as the LGBTQ+ communities exactly in the same memetic framework. You are a declared external identity. Agency is low. And because agency is low, folks in the beta male cucks cohort fill out the rest of the hierarchy. And no one could be happier about the collapse of the larger, more genteel hierarchy established literally 100 years ago by their white male forebears. Few of any of these constituencies preserve the passion for particular discipline. They’re happy to declare themselves as professors – the status is what really matters, and if there’s another group out there who’s separate, realms can be established and peace uneasily maintained. In fact, destruction of the overall hierarchy maintains the neo-tribal social structure that makes sense to them. And sense of larger commitment to the larger university prospect is really foreign to the majority. And if the LGBTQ+ group is trying to Queer everything (that’s their term, not mine) all the better to be left alone — especially in the technical disciplines. That collapses the overarching controlling hierarchy anyway, leaving some loose association of confederate states, free to do whatever the hell they want.

The problem is that you end up with the perfect storm. These people do not care about undergraduates hardly at all. Or in a condescending way — servicing them is alternately equivalent to servicing the lower castes, and there’s baked in discrimination there, or in the case of the LGBTQ+ folks, getting them into some frame for perverse sex or genital mutilation, all in the name of reinforcing identity — sometimes permanently.

There’s more to write. But these are the problems that have to be fixed. And the only way they will be fixed is to realize that these problems are real. And they will only be fixed with human evolution of the agents involved.

I do want to end this on a somewhat positive note. I have had a minority of folks in each of these groups who realize there are problems exactly like I describe. Some of them have turned into champions who at least call out the bullshit at the local level, in a way that culturally cuts like a knife. They KNOW what perdition awaits. But we have a policing system inside the university that even squelches those voices. The people in control have divided up the pie. And you’re supposed to be happy and sing for your supper.

Information Dynamics and Memetics in Laggard Organizations

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Son Conor wrapping up his first ultra-marathon — the 50 mile Bryce Canyon Ultra.

One of the more pathologically interesting facets of institutional evolution is how institutions who are behind, stay behind. Business analysts toss around the word ‘culture’ constantly. But what is Laggard culture? And how, if we inherit such an institution, do we do a meaningful turn-around?

In order to understand where to start, you have to understand what are the primary characteristics of a Laggard organization. A Laggard organization is one that consistently falls behind its peers, and seemingly is inured to meaningful change that would alter its status-based relationships with its peers. What this means that, especially in its upper-level administrative ranks, decisions are only made after other, more intellectually progressive orgs. have moved on from past historical patterns that may have provided success. It’s only when those other leaders have established a pattern of accomplishment that laggard organizations will then move in behind the leaders and adopt the ostensibly new successful patterns of operation.

There is no better place to observe this pattern of behavior than in academic institutions in the new milieu established by Donald Trump. With a series of Executive Orders, the Trump administration established, under no uncertain terms that the vast Diversity, Equity and Inclusion apparatuses built up to enshrine Woke Doctrine across all aspects of university life was to be dismantled, or lose all federal funding. This was actually affirmed, pre-Trump 2, by the Supreme Court in 2023, with the case Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard.

But the universities “fought back” — some kind of idiot euphemism that they weren’t going to dismantle their various DEI kingdoms, and “somehow” the public was going to rise up to defend the various machinations the universities had developed in the name of the various terms over the years. Academics screamed “academic freedom!” as well. But academic freedom, for the unwashed, means the ability to pursue intellectual paths inside the university, as long as it was a.) scholarly, and b.) somewhat defensible as far as being related to one’s focus of the home department, or related to a collaborative effort across the university, in pursuit of knowledge. Being one of the few that has actually exercised academic freedom (this blog is just the latest instantiation) I can tell you that most academics never come up against any boundaries where one would need to play that card.

At any rate, many of the leading universities soon settled with the feds (Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Virginia) seeing the handwriting on the wall really NOT that early, but enough to be in front of a pack of very slow donkeys. Many of the others reacted almost immediately with shock — basically changing title names to conform with federal grant applications. But they mostly regrouped, except now those same bureaucracies were doing even less than they were doing before the EOs. If you do some comparison of before/after org charts in most universities, you’ll see all the usual suspects.

This is actually a key identifying element of Laggard institutions — the obvious inability to change in the face of larger societal forces, while turning the entire apparatus of sophistication present in the organization into justifying the status quo. Inevitably, it’s wrapped in some kind of Communitarian v-Meme banner (“we CARE about our people.”). But the reality is it is a deeply tribal response that more maps to the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme structures most universities operate under.

What does this mean in terms of information flow and memetics? Laggard institutions exist, with both their members and their chieftains, in a closed information ecosystem. The minute that an institution enters that state, it becomes very difficult to even get leadership to develop larger-scale consequential thinking. Prior change, often due to arbitrary whims of fashion, could easily be managed as long as that information did not provide disruption for the dominant org. chart. And once some paradigmatic comet outside streaked across the sky, while it may have startled at least some of the denizens, everyone immediately put their heads back down and started chomping away. Dinosaurs have to eat.

The other problem with closed information structures, especially when manifested at the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme level, is that there is little information exchanged in terms of rational argument, or predictive models. Information discussed is primarily represented as long time myths. And those long-time myths are very prone to institutional parthenogenesis — the analogous process to where bacteria, unable to find other bacteria with which to conjugate, start self-replicating off their original pattern. This would be fine if the old Second Law of Thermodynamics — the tendency of entropy to create increased disorder — wasn’t in play. But trust me — there’s no better place to witness this than in anyone’s faculty meeting. Inevitably, the same memetic restructuring will be brought up again to be debated — again. And instead of new data (or any data) adding to most of the decision making, there will be some tweaking of dominant myths, which further reinforces the notion that fundamental change is not necessary.

If one considers the various developmental stages of universities, much as one might human societies, it’s easy to see that while ALL universities are slow donkeys, at least some have ingratiated outreach and faculty borrowing and lending to modestly prevent the natural tendencies of the social structures they all functionally operate under. For example, MIT doesn’t feel constrained to always follow the pack, and while they are still in thrall to many of the vicissitudes of the entire academic structure, if they want to try something different, there’s no one in the wings saying “well, XXX university hasn’t done that yet.” As part of their fundamental ethos, they’re SUPPOSED to try new things.

That’s not true for any laggard institution. In these, the dominant information transfer always has to be mirroring of whom the institution perceives is in front of it. And while the superficial take is indeed problematic, what’s even worse is that decay in consequential thinking that also happens in the context of the thinking of their leadership. In the case of universities, any change often takes something like 3-4 years to be implemented. Once even a relevant curriculum change might be proposed inside a department, the timescales mean that it won’t end up as a permanent change, an incorporation into the official university catalog for at least two years. Extremely problematic in a world where the major news cycle churns weekly.

All laggard institutions, and universities, with no exception, were hit memetically very hard during COVID. If one believes the memetic principles laid out in this blog, aggregate collective intelligence is very dependent not just on social structure of a given institution, but the frequency and velocity of relational transactions between agents in that system. And there’s no question — high trust societies and businesses maintain their ability to have high information coherence through face-to-face interactions. By sending everyone home to “work from home”, especially with laggard institutions, a new, low baseline of performance was established. Most people simply do not possess the discipline to “work from home.” They require both the encouragement as well as the policing that comes from co-location with other humans. Being who I am and having the ability to talk across Pacific Northwest industry with my former students, my guess is that north of 60-70% of people really are incapable of the self-motivation necessary to do so.

The problem was exacerbated in Laggard institutions because there was a memetic sorting mechanism that also occurred. Those who were actually able to maintain a reasonable work output during the isolation proved that their job talents were NOT tied to geography. And progressive institutions further up on the developmental scale could then scoop up these performers and add them to their staff. They didn’t have to move, and they would get paid more money.

That further separated workforces in Laggard institutions to people who were now testing the bottom of the work output pile. People actively were finding out how little they had to do to keep their job. And with the inherent social fragmentation imposed when entire institutions went home, there were no lateral feedbacks in the social structure. There was no one beating the drum on the slave ship, and worse — you were locked into the oars with no one. Many just quit rowing. Or rather, rediscovered gardening – and I’m not talking figuratively.

And to add even more difficulty to the problem, laggard institutions tend to index their performance relative to “close” peers. The dominant myth assumes stasis of position. And if you’re second rate, that’s where you’re going to stay. And then that turns into a major status myth that impedes any improvement in performance. “Well, we’re just not that good” turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Not surprisingly, especially when there are umbrella excuses like COVID lockdowns, any break from low performance, and return to a high performance mindset, is not greeted well by the broader members of the parthenogenic community. Now moral rackets come into play (“she has Long COVID, and you’re making her look bad!”) as well as negative targeting of higher performance individuals. There’s a natural regression downward in all institutions, from Performance-based Communities, back down into complicated Tribalism. High performing institutions, not surprisingly, attempt to have some mechanisms for rewarding innovation. Moderately performing institutions end up having praise mechanisms for the hierarchy itself, which inevitably involves praise for the non-involved. You can’t disrupt the narcissistic supply a normal hierarchy typically has for ranked actors.

But Laggard institutions are the worst of all, in that any activity outside the memetic box the institution has drawn for a given department becomes a threat to the institution itself. This is enshrined in the famous, but apocryphal “Five Monkeys and a banana” story, where a reward (a banana) is hung on a string below a ladder, and one of the monkeys attempts to get the banana, while the others are sprayed with ice cold water by the supervising researcher. Needless to say, it doesn’t take too many rounds of the experiment for all the monkeys to either a.) figure out such behavior is going to result in punishment, or b.) they better do whatever the other monkeys are doing or they’re gonna get the living daylights beat out of them as well.

The key takeaway is that once a given performance level is lowered and found permissible, and is coupled with absence from larger social forcing (as in work-from-home situations) one sinks into a very deep well that is difficult to recover. Even a visionary leader is going to have a difficult time fixing such an organization, primarily because the circumstances that caused them to assume a visionary perspective in the first place probably didn’t involve layoffs or lots of coercive Survival v-Meme thinking. The integration of an entirely different v-Meme set (“we take care of our people, no matter what!”) based along Tribal values makes it almost impossible. The moral racket turns into the Perfect Racket.

But the problem with being a Laggard organization is that you’re still the last zebra in the herd. And while herds offer substantial protection, when the going gets tough and the lion finally shows up, he’s not going to pick off the one in the front.

I shouldn’t have to state this, but Laggard institutions thrive on “work from home” or “remote work.” End it.

What can be done?

The key to fixing Laggard organizations is to realize where they are in the information space. Typically, they are grounded only weakly to organizations around them, and often not grounded to any reality at all. While all organizations operate in some public context, that does not mean that the appropriate signals actively being generated trigger any behavior modification — especially if people at the top of the organization don’t see anything like reduction in pay, or a lack of raises. One of the classic lines in Laggard organizations in decline is “we’re just not getting our message out,” or “they simply don’t understand our situation.” This is classic low empathy drumbeating — focus on one’s own victimhood, instead of doing any kind of real reflection on how the circumstances causing pain arose in the first place. And forget that connection and processing the views of the larger community. Those Deplorables have no right to judge us. They are deplorable, after all.

There are a couple of primary strategies, though, that can be executed. First and foremost is to make hard targets matter. If someone says they are going to increase enrollment by 50%, then NOT hitting enrollment should result in some physical penalty that is not just passed down the authority structure chain, but hits at the top level. Gaslighting is heavily rewarded in Laggard institutions, and rarely felt by those at the top. Readjustment strategies for targets can rapidly eliminate inflated estimates, without catastrophic measures like “if you don’t hit your target, you’re fired.” Cross-institutional transparency helps as well. Make it clear that failures will be publicized.

One of the most effective strategies for leadership for moving Laggard institutions off the dime once they’ve been told they have to move is to force yet another numbers-oriented version of “what are the deliberate, measurable steps you intend to take in order to do that?” The goal is to ground every piece of the process in reality, so that people cannot wiggle off the hook.

Since Laggard institutions work primarily on mirroring as a learning tool, setting up opportunities to visit known institutional leaders can also help. When someone is also actually doing something difficult, the excuses can vanish. Leadership has to also prepare for the inevitable “we could never do that here!” line of reasoning. Demanding some numerical number of changes after an aggregate set of visits would be a way to ground that process.

Finally, leaders in Laggard institutions must realize that they must lead from the front, with example. This is not easy in a large organization — but can be very meaningful. Volunteering budget reallocations and some number of experiments at the top sends a loud message to the rank and file that there will be no business as usual around here. Remember that mirroring matters. You are not going to evolve people to be data-driven, consequence estimators overnight.

And never forget it is authentic relationships that drive internal growth. When people are connected to other people in real ways, larger loci of responsibilities follow. The number of solutions to be generated for any problem will always be related to the interconnectedness of the social topology of your organization. That one is just the law — because it’s in the memetics.

Decision Tempo and Performance

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Friends are where you find them – Ginger and Mike, Costa Rica

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen, in my long career as a university profession, is the total ungrounding in time and space that happens in university decision making. One of the most prized possessions inside any given department is space inside buildings, and this is only modestly divided rationally. Seniority matters, and as such, if you’ve occupied a given space for a really long time, it really is your kingdom — regardless if your kingdom is coming apart, or came apart years ago. As a professor, you literally get to hold onto this until you retire or die. A further extension of this is the constant construction cycle that also happens on university campuses. Find me a campus where a new building is not being built, and I’ll show you a campus on the edge of collapse.

To be fair, universities must be modernized regularly, and lots have been around for over 100 years. But a lot of this is memetic construction of mindset that the entire social system feeds into. “Pharaohs need pyramids” is what I’ve told every person puzzled by the phenomenon. It’s deeply baked into the incentive structure as well. You’re not going to become a provost (head of many deans) from being a dean if you haven’t supervised a large-scale construction project.

And when it comes to making timely decisions, or having any sense of rationality in that decision making, good luck with that. You’d think in a fast-paced field like engineering, we’d be constantly updating our course curriculum. Not so fast. Even if we wanted to revise our curriculum in engineering, there are myriad committees that are university-wide that exist to review and approve various changes. Certainly, some review is warranted. Though every University president alive lies through their teeth about this, the university actually sells reliability — not innovation. But there are days when we fall increasingly behind, and for those of us attempting to stop the plane from crashing, it feels like we’re out on the wing of the B-29 with a wrench, desperately cranking away to fix an engine, and hoping we can hang on and not get blown into the propellor.

I’ve been attempting to put into words what this affects — to name something is to at least start to tame it. I came up with the term “Decision Tempo”. How long do we take to make a decision of particular scale? There is no official formula for any of it. Inside an academic department issues are topically assigned to various committees, who are supposed to ruminate on them and then bring them back to a faculty meeting for a vote. Faculty meetings are the butt of every joke in academia for reasons. They allow nit-pickers to, well, nit-pick. From a memetic perspective, what this means in a Legalistic v-Meme organization, where status matters, individuals can argue endless exceptions to generalized rules, to fix smaller and smaller problems, in the pursuit of completeness. What’s more interesting is that history in most of these decisions is only contained in an oral tradition – a true Tribal/Mythical v-Meme flex. We’ve cycled back, even in my department, which is modestly functional, to various overall curriculum changes multiple times. As now one of the two most senior faculty, I’m often the only person that can even remember where we were 20 years ago.

With Decision Tempo, the term, I can at least start the conversation with younger faculty about what theirs might be. Swimming in a static world without time, there isn’t even any consideration of how long most decisions take. There are tons of decision-making frameworks (of course) and if you can’t come up with your own, you can always use Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Google it.

If there’s a larger lesson, the first step of transitioning out of emergent, v-Meme, unconscious strategies is to name and make conscious something you’re attempting to optimize. As with Decision Tempo, you’ll find others have thought about it. Then you’re at least part way towards changing the memetic structure of our organization. Because once you confront Decision Tempo, you can then have a discussion on how you view trying new things, and the cost of failure. Which is THEN the root cause of innovation. As discussed in this article on SpaceX and the Boeing Starliner.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 4 – Filling in The Liberal Arts

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Boo Boo at the Dinner Table — Always Polite

One of the things we don’t discuss much, when deciding what courses students should take, is the selection of core university requirements that our students are subjected to. The quality of these courses varies wildly, primarily dependent on their age since inception.

What does that mean? Having spent so much time in the academy (37 years as a professor at WSU) I’ve had more than one chance to witness the cycles of course development. The short version is that new courses roughly follow the demographics of Rogers’ Theory of Innovation. The Pioneers and Early Adopters show up and invent the courses. But, not surprisingly, they move on, becoming bored over time with any repetition in teaching. Early Majority does OK, but it’s not too long until any course, created with the best of intentions, ends up being taught by Late Majority or Laggards, with all the problems you might imagine as far as creativity goes. The worst classes are in the required core, which the Liberal Arts faculty largely have shifted to the contingent workforce, which are literally slaves on the plantation.

I hate to criticize the slaves directly, because some of them are obviously paying for bad karma in a past life they had no control over. And there is nothing more saintly than doing a reasonable job teaching Freshman English Composition. Students aren’t taught really how to write in high school, and they show up needing their papers bled red upon. It’s really a historic problem that’s gotten worse, and is likely to continue to decline. I owe my ability (or at least the trajectory) to write on my first community college professor, who taught the science fiction literature class I took. He had both the grace and temerity to tell me frankly that I sucked. And I am forever in his debt for that. Because I did.

I have far less sympathy for the other courses (various history, sociology and psychology courses) students are forced to take. Many of these are “woke”, and my white male students in particular suffer. They supposedly exist to teach students critical thinking, but it’s of the Cool Hand Luke variety. If the students don’t get their mind right, they are treated harshly until they do. To be fair, I have not gone up to these classes, and sat through them. But the students complain. And the advice I give the students also hasn’t wavered much. Sit tight, it’ll be over soon. Kind of like a root canal.

But it’s deeply problematic, as more and more students show up ungrounded with any sense of engineering outside of assembling a Lego kit. Fair or not, becoming an engineer comes with a pretty heavy set of ethical obligations. Most students have no idea, for example, that they are getting a professional degree, and that they have to take their studies seriously or they could get someone killed.

Getting changes in the core curriculum is also not easy. Major changes have to go to the Faculty Senate, which I used to preside over. In tightening budget circles, I guarantee you that there will be fights over any change in core, because core provides the biggest buck for the bang of all the classes. The contingent slave class of graduate students and clinical professors are paid poorly, but tuition per credit hour is the same. You do the math. And the faculty in those departments wear their victim cards on their sleeves. Outside a handful of them, what they’re doing inside those classrooms is not for polite company.

If we wanted to improve our engineering students, we’d teach two history classes dedicated to the History of Technology. The use of mathematics inside the class itself would be primarily disallowed, with the goal of students understanding the larger narrative structure of the history of science and technology as being the takeaway. I was recently at the Technical University in Munich, and the Germans do a great job with this. The halls of the Metro stop are painted with murals discussing all the greats that contributed to the march of both science and technology. Even as an American, I was inspired by thinking I was walking the same grounds as the German pioneers of engine and aviation science. Our students literally know nothing –even about our space program.

I would also reinstitute the language requirement, with a twist. Most language classes at the university focus heavily on grammar. The result is that students emerge with no knowledge of anything. All classes would be required to focus on conversation, so that students could actually relationally expand outside their limited circle.

All of this would displace the toxic narrative of despair that has replaced any actually critical analysis of history, or useful liberal arts-based skills. As it is, the university system exists primarily to depress our students. It’s got to stop. And the place to start is in the narrative structure of the modern liberal arts, earnestly dedicated as it is to collapse of Western civilization.

P.S. Needless to say, I’d have little problem expanding great books and classics. I refer to the Iliad and Odyssey all the time in my classroom. These classes have to be well-taught to be useful, though. An eye toward providing a foundation of Western moral principles would be key — with the expectation that professors could count on those concepts themselves in later classes. FWIW — I have few students that have even heard of great books. But the few that have actually are affected by them.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers (Part 2 of a bunch!)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Baby Coho, Windblown, Salmon River outside White Bird, ID

“Manufacturing is insanely difficult. It’s under appreciated in its difficulty.” Elon Musk

One of the things I’ve found to be profoundly curious about the debate regarding fixing our educational systems is how so little discussion occurs around the people delivering the educational content to students. Sure — we’ll argue about topical lists, appropriateness of grade level with material, and such. And then things will then diverge into polemics on the various politics of universities in general (almost always very liberal) or perhaps the politics of individual faculty members.

It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t be occurring — but they will not get at the root cause of the deep problems inside our modern educational systems — especially those in higher education. At some level, we just assume that students are going to get trained, somewhat correctly, with various holes in their knowledge because they did, or did not, take a pedagogy class. FWIW — our Colleges of Education are largely train wrecks, so if you think you’re going to fix the problems in higher education’s pipeline by having everyone take a pedagogy class, I’ve got news for you. My favorite story at my own university happened a while back — there was an “active learning” class — where students were supposed to do exercises themselves, and the classroom would be run by the professor from “the back of the room” (as opposed to the “lecture/sage on the stage” model.)

The class was delivered by lecture.

And I can tell you as well, as the former President/Chair/whatever of the President’s Teaching Academy, no young professor ever called me to ask for advice, nor sit in their classroom. Education is simply an arbitrary venture at the contemporary academy, though I think it’s also fair to say that occasionally, a charismatic individual passes through and makes a temporary difference in how education is structured.

But trust me — nothing sticks. The REASON nothing sticks is that, unless there is a conscious intervention by an individual, Conway’s Law must hold. And universities are inherently rigid hierarchies, with an obsession with titles, and there is a chronic ‘regression to the mean’ phenomenon that goes on in the vast majority of the curriculum. How you lecture can matter, and of course, with the various physical sciences and engineering, you do have labs. But overall, it’s not just the elephant in the living room. That elephant is out roaming on the savannah, eight thousand miles away.

Bottom line — if you want to really change education in general, and engineering education in particular (what this piece is about) you really have to re-think what are the guiding principles that undergird your educational factory. Students are the pieces of work that are being programmed, and at least as much thought has to go into how you are going to create the machines that make those pieces of work as you do arguing about the list of topics. Right now, we don’t do much at all. I find it pathologically fascinating that even at my own university, I have yet to be asked to give a single guest lecture on education, even though I a.) have received university-system-level awards, b.) bring in healthy amounts of money from external sources, and c.) even headed up institutional level organs for improving teaching. My passing is literally a hole in the fossil record.

The problem with even saying that is from an academic perspective, from the primary Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme that the academy operates under, even making that statement is some kind of narcissistic sour grapes. I must be butt-hurt over all of this. Honestly, I’m not. What I do in my Industrial Design Clinic, where students work with real sponsors, on real work, with real deliverables, and real expectations, is more rightly called World Creation. The idea is more like a Live Action Role-Playing game (LARP), except the participants (the students) have no real idea that they’re in a LARP. They do know it’s a class, and they do know they have to accomplish real work or they won’t graduate. At least that’s what I tell them. The reality is that I create the motivational environment, buttressed by sufficient and plentiful resources, and a customer/mentor WITH appropriate process that they are cattle-chuted through the game, learning skills and finding appropriate partners, that the statistics of them NOT getting it done are extremely low.

But I got to this very evolved form of education after serious study AND soul-searching after a ton of work. The principal ethos evolved early. But I’ve been doing this for some 29 years — longer than virtually all my students (and some of the younger professors) have been alive.

So what are we doing now? When we hire new faculty, there are really only two primary criteria we apply before we hire. First is that they have “research” prowess and specificity of the area, and secondly, that they stand out from whoever is in the pool that they’re competing with. Occasionally, there might be a nod to some DEI concerns — but honestly, not much. The faculty in my department are mostly foreign born (Chinese/E. Asian, Indian/S. Asian, and from the Middle East) and we really don’t care much at the time of hiring if they have any industrial experience. We hardly bias anything to folks being American-born. We do think about their ability (it is discussed) to bring in research funding, because without money, they will not make tenure. And then we’ll have to start the process all over again. All things considered, I feel like we’ve been pretty lucky. I like our young faculty. But if there’s any illusion that we have anything other than superficial concerns about classes they can teach, when it comes to education, let me disabuse you of that notion.

What that means is we end up with the v-Meme-NA of our own social structure deeply embedded in our activities. How that manifests itself is shown with the basic characteristics of how Legalistic/Absolutistic systems produce knowledge. It’s Completeness uber alles. One of the most obvious is the number of credit hours we require students to take. I think we’re currently at about 131 hours, whereas our accrediting body only requires something around 95. We don’t teach meaningful synthesis/design until the senior year. Teaching early in the curriculum is almost all lectures, and considered a booby prize by all faculty. What that means is excellence in education early on is highly dependent on the instructor and their own independent ethos on how they deal with a classroom, which in the first two years is very likely to be large. A class in Dynamics, which is a very difficult subject for most students, will likely have 200 students in it.

How to sum this up? We really don’t care about the most difficult part of what we do — building and staffing the factory. Especially at the undergraduate level. And because of this, our reject rate (the number of students that do not persist) is phenomenally high — often, in various classes, over 50%. Imagine a factory whose waste was 50% of the raw material brought through the door. The mind reels.

And the research on all this is appalling. One of the things I absolutely do know about student retention is that if students feel like they are connected to the program, then they’ll likely stay and finish. But instead of meaningfully and deliberately constructing environments so that students are connected, we fractionalize ad infinitum. Working together is called cheating. And the various DEI excuses now definitely come to the fore, though the reality of my classroom, where students actually befriend each other and work together, belies this. Stupid research is historically done on team size, for example, where it’s decided that four is the optimal number of members. But if you look at the actual research where that number was generated from, it was from building marshmallow straw towers in the course of an hour, between strangers. It is literally insane (see earlier comment about how educational research is largely garbage.)

If we want to build an environment that actually links industry and the university in a meaningful way, we are going to have to hire with a very different set of expectations than any current Carnegie R1 institution (the categorization for top research institutions in the US) does. In order to run my clinic, I need on any given week the following skills:

  1. Knowledge of a broad range of topics, at a level where I can sort complexity quickly.
  2. The ability to negotiate contracts and conflicts.
  3. Some knowledge of adolescent/post-adolescent psychology, and the ability to identify the symptoms of various mild pathologies so I don’t over-react if someone’s having a bad day.
  4. Actual knowledge of developmental behaviors and goals for a range of both students AND collaborators. Anyone proposing creation of an educational environment that doesn’t understand what partners need, as well as students, cannot create anything that lasts.
  5. Sales ability to continue to recruit outside collaborators into the fold.
  6. Ability to map procedural steps to educational outcomes.

The biggest has to be to think consequentially. What this means is that one must own a large sense of responsibility if students in your LARP don’t advance past a certain level in an appropriate amount of time. It means you’ve built the game poorly, and you have to own it. We’ve constructed education as a very low responsibility endeavor for teachers. If the students don’t learn it, and it’s an accepted part of the curriculum, it’s the students’ problem, and they will be graded/punished appropriately. The beats will continue until morale improves. This is absolutely counter to the high performance environment one MUST establish if you want students to move through the game over the course of a semester. Further, the more fear you use, the less likely students are to come forward quickly with what’s actually wrong with your creation. At round one, it’s your version of reality you’re creating.

If I had to hire a faculty for starting something like Elon’s Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS), I’d probably split the percentages of people with industry experience and Ph.Ds about 50/50. I’d teach people how to construct meaningful customer relationships, because everywhere you look in making a true paradigm-shifting institution, your primary job is building and maintaining a large social network that has as its priority transfer of information across all its nodes. I’d train directly to these goals as well — and at least some of this is salesmanship and deal creation on an individual level. If you want to pull something like this off, you must have people who have profound, place-taking empathy. A heavy lift. I also don’t think I’d hire all but a few under the age of 35. Younger people developmentally are simply not at the stage where they could be expected to master some of the more complex social dynamics.

There’s more, of course. And there would be coffee. Because coffee is for closers.