Higher education research beyond the ivory tower

We are two generations, father and daughter, in two different settings at McGill University – a professor of management and a doctoral candidate in social work – who share a perspective on the university in the 21st century. Beyond the mainstream model, which we call ‘looking-on’, from the proverbial ‘ivory tower’, lies another model worthy of comparable attention, which we call ‘reaching-out’.

Mainstream university activities are about, looking upon the world objectively, with a preference for the rigour of confirmed evidence. The alternative reaching-out model is connected to experience on the ground, for the sake of relevance. While the looking-on model maintains rather strict boundaries between the university and the so-called ‘real world’, the reaching-out model crosses these boundaries to see all worlds as real.

Researching: Exploring experience beyond examining evidence

Karl Popper’s influential book, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, encapsulates research as looking-on. In the first four pages, Popper addresses “the problem of induction”, while the rest of the book is devoted to “the deductive method of testing”. Popper wrote that the occurrence of a new idea “may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge…. Accordingly, I shall distinguish sharply between the process of conceiving a new idea, and the methods and results of examining it logically”.

But can logical analysis be so sharply distinguished from discovery? From where do new ideas come, to be examined logically? Theory must be insightful as well as credible, which means that researchers need to reach out for ideas as broadly and openly as possible, and be prepared to be surprised by the experience of reality. To quote Hans Selye, the renowned endocrinologist, about one famous breakthrough: “I doubt that Fleming could have obtained a grant for the discovery of penicillin by proposing to have an accident in a culture so that it will be spoiled by a mould falling on it, and I propose to recognise the possibility of extracting an antibiotic from this mould.”

Doctoral students who take a road less travelled, reaching out beyond the orthodoxy of an established paradigm, and are thus inclined to use alternative methodologies such as auto-ethnography or arts-based research, can face hurdles right out of the starting gate. Many choose to conform, with the intention of branching out once they complete their studies. But with the attainment of an academic position comes the need for research funding and the challenge of gaining tenure, with similar hurdles. Thereafter, too few of these scholars escape the academic orthodoxy. (Tenure was introduced to keep political and other outside influences at bay. Too often now, it keeps scholars working outside the established paradigm at bay.)

Beyond Karl Popper is Sherlock Holmes, potentially a different role model, since great researchers, like great detectives, reach out every which way, to find hidden clues in unfamiliar phenomena. They connect, and then disconnect: get close enough to their subject to uncover its essence, and then stand apart to interpret its broader consequences.

Ideally, these two models build on each other. The discovery of the double helix provides an example where looking-on informed reaching-out. Francis Crick and James Watson received credit for that discovery, using the models they built, physically, to see the helix form, but also learning from the more conventional research of Rosalind Franklin. (Franklin has been described as having had “the determination to avoid fanciful speculation”.)

Disseminating: Open source beyond closed shop

Dissemination of scholarly efforts can certainly begin with publication in academic journals and presentations at academic conferences, to reach like-minded colleagues, for assessment and advancement. But when dissemination stops there, the scholarship risks becoming a closed shop.

To realise its full potential, academics often have to convey the insights of their work to communities that can make broader use of them. Limiting dissemination to academic journals and conferences puts the onus on the interested reader to find the publications, sometimes even to translate them into lay language.

Within much of the academic world, an ‘A-journal’ syndrome has arisen whereby certain journals controlled by the academics who edit and publish in them are designated as a kind of gold standard. Such publications have even become a central criterion for evaluating performance. At the extreme, like-minded colleagues count the quantity of such publications rather than judging their quality. (Recently, a committee of business school professors that was developing measures to allocate annual bonuses for faculty proposed that three points be assigned for a publication in an A-journal and one point for the publication of a book!)

PhD programmes have also succumbed to this syndrome: manuscript-based theses have become common, significantly so that students can publish in such journals, even before they defend the final thesis. (This is like writing the overture before the opera.) Should publication really be allowed to trump consolidation, especially in doctoral theses?

Credible alternatives for publication exist that enable scholars to reach out to broader audiences, such as The Conversation and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Likewise, books can sometimes better explain and propagate particular streams of research. Their readership may be smaller than that for articles, but their impact can be greater: instead of going from one article to the next, the reader of a book devotes the time that may be necessary to appreciate its message profoundly. Other options for dissemination include blogs, podcasts, interviews and opinion pieces in the media. Photo exhibits, theatrical productions and music are also available options, especially for researchers who use arts-based or other alternative methodologies.

In contrast to the ‘closed shop’ is what might be called ‘open source’ – dissemination made available to all potential users, who can discuss and even challenge the findings and also come up with insights of their own. Consider the impact of open-source dissemination during the pandemic, when the results of consequential research were diffused widely, rapidly and necessarily.

Educating: Social learning beyond autonomous teaching

Conventionally, the professor enters the classroom, closes the door, and imparts their knowledge to the assembled students, who sit in neat rows, facing forward. Seldom can a colleague, let alone an administrator, be found in such a classroom. Autonomous teaching is the prevalent mode of educating in today’s academic world.

In the typical MBA classroom, for example, students with little or no managerial experience sit in tiered rows, as if vessels to be filled with the theories and examples of management practice.

Case study discussions may seem to reach out – to experiences in business – except that these tend to be several steps removed from the experience in question: the cases are often researched by an assistant, written by a professor and taught by other professors, to students who are expected to have no personal understanding of the organisation in question. The problem with all this looking-on is that management is a practice, not a science nor a profession: hence, a manager cannot be created in a classroom. Management has to be learned initially on the job, much like swimming has to be learned in the water.

Alternate pedagogies in management can reach out, for example, by sitting experienced managers at small round tables in a level classroom where they can reflect on their own experience in the light of the material introduced by the faculty, and then share their insights with each other. This is social learning beyond autonomous teaching – reaching-out beyond looking-on.

A wide variety of other engaging pedagogies exist. Some can be found in laboratory work in the sciences, although here the students tend to apply what the faculty has taught. Some pedagogies do reach out further, enabling the learners to connect directly with their own interests and those of related communities.

In social work, for example, internships, field visits and role play allow students to connect theory with practice while gaining first-hand experience and building collaborative connections in the community. Co-teaching with a mentor or a colleague also encourages reaching out to each other, which can help novice faculty and doctoral students gain experience and confidence in the classroom. To an open mind, the pedagogical possibilities are unlimited.

In universities, professors typically devote approximately 40% of their time to educating, 40% to researching, and 20% to administrative duties. Yet how much attention do doctoral programmes give to training for that first 40%, compared with the second – how many require even a single course in pedagogy? Exposing doctoral students to a variety of creative forms of educating could have a major impact on the quality of educating in universities.

Administrating: Fostering communityship beyond emphasising leadership

Subscribing to the orthodoxies of administration, especially its preoccupation with hierarchy and leadership, can be especially dysfunctional in universities, which usually do not function like conventional organisations, especially businesses.

Say ‘organisation’ and the focus often turns to leadership. Say ‘leadership’ and the focus turns to an individual – in business, this is usually the chief executive officer (CEO); in the university, the most senior administrator. The effect of using the word leadership is thus to accentuate individuality at the expense of collegiality, namely looking-on, alone, compared with reaching-out to others. “Communityship” deserves greater attention.

Effective organisations are communities of human beings, not just collections of human resources. Communityship may thus be the ultimate form of reaching-out, both across departments of the university and to interested communities outside of it. When communityship is present, people do not have to be formally empowered because they are naturally engaged. They respect the organisation because the organisation respects them. But not just as individuals: communityship is about collective commitment.

This problem of excessive attention to leadership can be exacerbated by board members in the university who push for business-like measures of performance that foster management from the ‘top’. But the university is not a top-down programmed machine so much as an assembly of professionals, to whom are delegated significant power over major decisions, such as the hiring of their own colleagues. Hence, the fashionable practices of business, whether strategic planning, ubiquitous measuring and even using vernacular terms such as ‘top management’ and ‘CEO’ can be contrary to the university’s need for decentralised collegiality.

This can be poignantly illustrated in the making of strategies, which is best described in the university as a process of venturing, not planning. In an article entitled “Strategic Management Upside Down”, the strategies of McGill University were tracked over 150 years of its history.

In all that time, while the university kept adding faculties (schools), it managed to close only one (Veterinary Medicine, which lasted just 12 years). As a consequence, in its array of faculties and schools today, McGill looks much like other general education universities. Where, then, is its strategy?

To answer this question, we have to look at its specific programmes because these define the university’s unique strategic positions in its context – ones that serve its particular communities.

McGill, for example, has the programme for practising managers discussed earlier, and the Dent Ma Maison programme that takes dental services straight into the homes of Montreal seniors. Such initiatives are usually championed by faculty members rather than administrators. Thus, instead of some central process of strategic planning (which hardly works even in business) is the decentralised process of strategic venturing, which gives rise to the programmes that comprise the strategic positions of a particular university.

Measurement, as we have seen, can be found in educating, researching and disseminating, as well as in administrating – for example, counting the number of journal articles, managing class size and favouring Grade Point Average scores for admission, not to mention obsessing about those ubiquitous rankings. All of these looking-on practices may be efficient, but are they effective? The rankings, for example, are sometimes managed by tinkering with immediate measures instead of enhancing sustainable quality.

There is a common expression in business that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Not true. Whether or not you can measure it, you had better manage it. This is because much that matters in organisations – culture, quality of service, even the performance of managers themselves – depends on much more than numerical evidence. This is especially so in universities, that, unlike businesses, have no quantifiable bottom line. How do we measure the consequences of a discovery in research, the impact of a published book, even what a student truly learns in a classroom? Universities need to judge quality beyond measuring quantity.

Unfortunately, administrators inclined to measure can form an unholy alliance with faculty likewise so inclined, together looking-on as they drive the university to measure like mad. But what sustains the quality of a university is not managing the numbers so much as creating a culture that fosters collaborative insight.

Administrators who see the mission of the university as a calling, together with academics who support the functioning of the university as a community, are inclined to reach out, internally and externally. For example, such a university does not hire its stars so much as nurture the development of its junior faculty in a climate that encourages deep commitment to the institution. Instead of measuring like mad, communityship serves with soul.

Synthesis for the 21st century: Reaching-out while looking-on

As we were developing this article, we realised that we were drawing ourselves into the looking-on model, by adopting an attitude of “our model is better than their model”. Swinging the pendulum from one extreme to the other is not the way forward: overreaching is no better than overlooking. Traditionally, the prestigious universities have been more inclined to look on, while the communal ones have shown a greater tendency to reach out. Instead, the university of the 21st century needs to draw these two models into a consolidated balance – in researching, disseminating and educating, supported by administrating that functions likewise.

Can institutions predisposed to administrative orthodoxy move this needle? A lesson can be learned from the experience of the Covid pandemic. Even the slowest organisations, not least the universities, after moving for decades at the pace of a sloth, were suddenly galloping like gazelles.

At the start of the pandemic, at many universities a radically changed pedagogy (virtual and online) was up and running within weeks, whereas, at McGill for example, the earlier introduction of the new pedagogy in management education required the approval of 11 committees over the course of a year. Likewise in science, pandemic-related research that would have taken years to fund, execute and disseminate was not only fast-tracked by removing many of the usual constraints, but the research was also published beyond academic journals, reaching out to wider audiences that had urgent need of the findings.

Of course, universities have sometimes engaged in rather far-reaching change within their programmes of research and pedagogy, for example, by revamping certain degree programmes, as when the Flexner Report of 1910 brought radical reforms into medical education and the Pierson and Gordon and Howell Reports of 1959 did likewise in business education. These changes, however, occurred in specific fields, without necessarily having an effect on the wider university community.

What is needed now is consolidated change across and beyond the university that renders reaching-out commensurate with looking-on. As we have indicated, reaching-out has long been present in the academic world, but has too often been marginalised by a predisposition to look on. It is time to give both models their due attention, as universities move forward in the 21st century.

We conclude by reaching back to the origins of our own collective effort in this article. This began when one of us was asked to speak at l’Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, an institution that engages with its surrounding indigenous communities. We responded by reaching-out to each other, collaboratively, across our two generations, our two roles and our two fields. We titled our talk, in colloquial Quebec French, “Shaker la cabane”. Our ivory towers may sit on solid foundations, but they do need some shakin’ up.

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Susan Mintzberg is currently completing a PhD at McGill’s School of Social Work, studying the impact of collaboration and expertise in healthcare and leadership, with a focus on family caregivers.