Articles I Won't Write

Not every idea has legs

Sam Miller is a baseball writer I admire. He has a regular practice of writing about the topics he won’t write about. He, like anyone who writes regularly, has a list of ideas. But not all ideas are good ideas.

As Ze Frank famously said, the ideas that live in your head without becoming something in the world become “brain crack.” You may be convinced that they’re brilliant and the world is waiting with bated breath to hear them. But really you just need to get them out of your head in order to allow yourself to forget them and develop better ideas later.

Just like these two fine folks, I also have a list of ideas for this Substack. And just like them, I need to occasionally power wash that part of my brain in order to get better ideas later on.

So, today I’m going to write about some ideas I’ve had for The Uncommon College which are not substantial enough to merit a full writeup. Many of these have been stuck on my notes app for months. I’ll scroll past them and say “Maybe next time.”

But no. I have to admit that these ideas will never be articles. Perhaps if I have enough short, bad ideas, it will add up to one long, good article?

We’re about to find out!

1. Every college is an underdog

This is similar to the idea in sports of “bulletin board material.” Even if you’re the Los Angeles Dodgers, you need to find ways to convince yourself that everyone is against you, that no one believes in you. This prevents teams from being complacent. Ostensibly.

My idea here was that even if you’re Harvard with its $50 billion endowment, you will use the language of dearth, need, and striving against the odds. In fact, Harvard’s most influential president, Charles W. Eliot, said this explicitly over 120 years ago. His philosophy of “free money” said that colleges should always spend more than they earn. By carrying a perpetual operating deficit, you can justify soliciting more funds from donors.

This is equivalent to a baseball team creating perceived adversity for itself when none exists. In theory, both can create artificial crises of perception to mitigate complacency. The downside is that if every college uses the language of adversity to solicit support, it’s hard to discern how seriously claims of adversity should be treated. If every college is down and out, straining against the odds, then none of them are.

Anyway, that’s the whole idea, so now I’ve said it!

2. Every college is autocratic

This connects with the previous idea. While every institution will present itself as powerless against a cruel and unfeeling world, members of those same institutions will present themselves as powerless against a cruel and unfeeling university.

To be “fine” is to cease to be ambitious. It generally does not serve the interests of non-administrative stakeholders to be publicly satisfied with their state. Faculty are better off being outspoken in their frustration because it helps give them leverage in the informal bargaining that undergirds college as a collective enterprise. The power of alumni or students or staff to influence institutional policy is predicated on their capacity to express dissatisfaction.

Just as the relative adversity of institutions is hard to assess when all parties claim to be facing adversity, expressions of dissatisfaction are hard to measure when expressions of satisfaction are so muted. I am not saying that institutional stakeholders never have anything to complain about. But it can be hard to tell, even internally, the scale of those issues when “adversity” is the predominant language for public discourse.

This, however, is not unique to college life. And my conclusion of “good vibes are good” is not particularly novel.

3. The university is not a school; it’s an education-themed federation of money-generating enterprises

I thought about this because of a trend in baseball (can you tell what other topic I spend most of my time thinking about yet?). Most new stadiums are not just baseball parks anymore. Instead, they are keystone properties for development of whole neighborhoods coordinated under that team’s ownership group.

Why would the Cubs want to just own a baseball team when they can also own a hotel across the street? And all the other properties nearby?

This is similar to how a place like Indiana University does much more than just offer classes. They also have the largest stadium in this half of the state. They run a network of clinics and hospitals. They host touring Broadway shows. And, of course, they maintain the endowment.

But the fact that they’re still offering classes (or playing baseball) lends a perception that the institution is not strictly focused on economic ends. It adds a pleasant flavor to the massive economic enterprise.

The reason I’m not writing the article is that “colleges are kind of like baseball teams” is just me saying “organizations which operate like businesses tend to operate like businesses.” Also, the same point has been made many times.

4. Simon Fraser

The NCAA is composed of American university athletic teams. And also one from Canada. Simon Fraser University in British Columbia is part of Division II for many NCAA sports. Isn’t that weird?

That’s about all I wanted to say. Also, this video on the history of their football team covers most of the relevant ground. Having NCAA programs could be a way to recruit different students to the university, but I don’t really have much else to say about it beyond “How odd!”

5. Two mantras

Pursuing a doctoral degree is a long process. I have two phrases that I think about a lot to help remind myself why I’m doing what I’m doing.

The first is “I want to ride all the rides.”

Years before I started my PhD, I was asked whether I would ever want to go to graduate school. I said that I couldn’t imagine not going eventually. I know how much I love school, and I knew I would regret not trying to surmount this “final” academic hurdle.

The same goes for other tasks while I’m in graduate school. Why be a teaching assistant? Why do journal reviews? Why be a peer mentor? If it’s feasible for me to do these things, I want to do them at least once to see what they’re like. I have a few years in the scholarly theme park called graduate education, and I want to ride all the rides.

The second mantra is “I have no goals.”

Now, this does seem to contradict my last point. One goal I have is to ride all the rides, right?

What I mean by this is I try to not hold tightly to goals that other people control. I can control whether I drop out of school, so “write a dissertation” is an “internal” goal over which I have primary influence. But something like “get hired by X university” is something I have almost no power over. It’s external to me.

I can’t control whether someone would let me be a “professor” on their terms, but I can control whether I become a “scholar” on my own terms.

Similarly, I cannot guarantee that an academic journal will want to publish my writing. But I can guarantee my ability to submit writing to that journal. So I have no “goals” for getting published, only a desire to submit material for publication.

Even if I do have dreams which depend predominantly on the influence of other people, I try to hold them loosely. Or at least I tell myself to do that, even if it’s impossible to really have “no goals.”

This also helps me prioritize the process of graduate school over its ends. I want school to be enjoyable in itself, not just a means to an end. So my “goal” is the process, and the end will take care of itself somewhere down the line.

6. Teaching relies on self-doubt

How does pedagogical or curricular change happen? I contend that it can’t happen if you are sure of your own expertise. Whether as an individual educator or an institution of education, if you think you already know the answer, you won’t look for a new answer.

Being open to change in education means having a basic disbelief in the essential value of your own practices and traditions. It means believing more deeply in the experiences (and even the preferences?) of your students than in your own. The dialectic about teaching method cannot be top-down with a teacher telling their students how to learn and it cannot establish its own “correct answers” in advance.

I do, however, think there’s something to be said for focusing on student engagement as your metric of success. But it’s probably also true that some part of teaching is how students adapt to their teachers. Especially when encountering new subjects, students don’t always know the best way to learn and may not be responsible guides for their own development.

That said, I think we are more likely to give too much authority to the educator and not enough to the student than vice versa. So even entering a course or program with the intention of divesting pedagogical authority could be helpful for setting any measure of balanced influence.

For many students, their most memorable learning experiences were those in which they took control of their own education. These sorts of student-led projects can be exceptional moments in which learners see themselves as empowered and in control of their of education.

The question that I’m not sure about is whether students remember these moments primarily because they are moments. Does there need to be some balance with instructor-led material in order to highlight the value of student-led experiences? Do we only appreciate it in contrast?

Anyway, the reason I’m not writing this article is that I have too many question marks in it. I’m not really sure what I think. But it’s something I’m thinking about.

Thanks for reading along! Hopefully six half-formed idea amount to one sufficiently-formed article.

-Matt