Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education

Michael Lanford, William G. Tierney

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438487649
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Higher education institutions have traditionally nurtured artistic and scientific development and served as catalysts for innovative ideas and products. However, contemporary discourse too often relegates the concept of innovation to the private sector, where the rhetoric of "disruption" frequently reduces innovation to economic terms. As a result, innovations that could benefit society instead exacerbate existing inequities, and the environmental factors that stimulate long-term innovative progress are neglected. Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education offers a different vision by identifying the conditions that enable college and university administrators, faculty, and staff to promote an innovative institutional culture. Mindful innovation is defined through six central tenets: societal impact; the necessity of failure; creativity through diversity; respect for autonomy and expertise; thoughtful consideration for the dimensions of time, efficiency, and trust; and the incentivization of intrinsic motivation and progress over scare tactics and disruption. Michael Lanford and William G. Tierney offer a clearheaded analysis of the challenges and opportunities in creating a culture of mindful innovation and argue that the institutions that do so will be poised to lead entrepreneurial endeavors, scientific progress, and greater social equity in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Mindful Innovation in Higher Education

As the newly hired Chair of Institutional Support and Effectiveness at Valley State College, Nathan’s passion was described as “infectious” by his colleagues. When discussing one of his favorite topics, such as the untapped potential of predictive analytics in education, Nathan could stop abruptly in mid-sentence, pull out his tablet, and call up any number of statistical tables and graphs to solicit your spontaneous opinion. “Look at this—we used to know so little about the lives of our students. But now we have a consistent stream of data about their performance over the first six weeks of the semester. Isn’t this amazing? And we’re just at the tip of the iceberg here!” Staff who worked in Nathan’s department said there “was a new excitement” and that ever since he arrived “change was possible.” One staff member shared that “I was so used to thinking that my work had little meaning or impact. Now that Nathan has arrived, I feel there’s real purpose to what I do.”

The President of Valley State College was happy about the publicity Nathan generated: “It’s an honor for us to have a real innovator on campus,” he professed during one Board of Trustees meeting. “But I don’t know how long we’ll be lucky enough to keep him here. I just hope we’ll start to see the impact of his initiatives before he gets snatched up by someone else with more money.”

After one administrative meeting, the president huddled with a couple of Board members who were well-known entrepreneurs in the community. He glanced across the room at a small group of English professors who had attended the meeting to voice their objections to changes in the college’s medical plan. With a furtive gesture, he added:

Like over there—we desperately need new ideas in the English department. I beg them to take on a bigger share of our online course offerings. I plead with them to meet with Nathan. He has fantastic tools they could use to make the first-year classes more effective and exciting to the students. They just won’t do it, though. We’re really missing an opportunity while Nathan is here.

The head of Valley State’s English department was Charlotte, a well-regarded veteran who had taught at the college for over 25 years and served as section chair for nearly 15. The walls of her office had not seen sunlight in nearly as many years, as they were concealed by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with texts, folders, and monographs on Shelley, Byron, and other Romantic poets. Charlotte’s desk was piled high with stacks of papers. They included retention data for all 86 sections of the college’s first semester writing class; requisition forms for a new office chair; the contracts for Valley State’s stable of 15 or so adjunct faculty members; and dozens of applications for a recent faculty job advertisement.

The framed certificate associated with a teaching award often served as a paperweight for an endless stream of student papers, the output of three classes Charlotte taught in the fall and spring sessions. Her duties as department head allowed for a relief of two classes each semester. From Monday through Thursday, Charlotte could usually be found in her office from 7:30 a.m. until 8 or 9 p.m. On Friday, she left “early”—at 4:30 p.m.—to spend weekends with her new granddaughter whose family lived 2 hours away by car.

In comparison to Nathan’s bold vision for Valley State—which includes Chromebooks in every classroom and an online portal modeled after Khan Academy that will allow universal access to professors’ lectures—Charlotte expresses a more modest goal for her department: “I would just like to provide a full position with health benefits to some of the adjuncts who have been working here for 10-plus years.” She pulls out a sheet of paper from one of her desk drawers and invites a closer examination of its contents. “Look at this. It’s an email from one of the writing instructors who has taught here longer than most of my full-timers. We have paid her $2,500 a semester for each class she’s taught for—I don’t even remember how long—and she’s apologizing to me that she can’t teach here next year because she now has her middle school teaching credentials. We have let her down for years by not offering her a permanent position, and now she’s worried about letting me down!”

Charlotte’s eyes twinkle at the suggestion that online coursework, similar to that proposed by Nathan, might alleviate some of the staffing problems in her department. “Yes, I hear that all the time from the administration,” she acknowledges. And then continues:

They really want us to have larger sections—“innovate, scale”—I hear it all the time. But you have to understand, my understanding of teaching, and especially the scholarship associated with that, has been accumulated on the job. Real, substantive feedback is not easily scaled. Plus, there are new challenges every year because the students aren’t the same. Real students pay real money to go here. Something like half of our students live in poverty. A lot of them don’t have computers at home. I don’t lecture anymore because I’m responding to students’ needs, and neither do most of my colleagues.

Notably absent from Charlotte’s desk is a computer. It is sequestered to a corner of the room where Charlotte can keep an eye on the stream of emails that accumulate in her Outlook folder. When they reach “critical mass,” she slides her chair over and answers them as quickly as possible, eschewing formal salutations and grammatical conventions.

Charlotte flashes a smile and adds, “They probably think I’m a hopeless Luddite. Maybe they’re right.”

Innovation: Necessary Consequence or Overused Buzzword?

If Nathan and Charlotte appear to be polar opposites in terms of personality, interest in technology, and overall approaches to education, then good, because that is our intent. Many discussions about innovation in higher education have become polarized between those who agitate for rapid change and those who contend that a more measured response to education’s contemporary problems is obligatory. For some, innovation is a necessary consequence of a competitive, globalized environment where educational institutions are engaged in a zero-sum game for resources, faculty talent, and measurable indicators of success. For others, innovation is perceived as little more than a buzzword in danger of being rendered meaningless due to overuse and a lack of critical interrogation about its appropriate place in educational discourse.

Over several years of research across the United States, from Florida to California, we have encountered many individuals like Nathan and Charlotte. They are similarly passionate about improving educational outcomes, especially for traditionally marginalized populations. They often make personal and financial sacrifices because they deeply believe in the mission statements of their respective institutions. They find real inspiration in the work of their immediate colleagues. And, when problems surface within their departments or programs, they are equally creative in how they draw upon personal expertise to develop ingenious, even innovative, solutions. Despite these many similarities, we are distressed to discover—time and time again—that very little discussion and negotiation occurs between the varied proponents and critics of innovation. The potential for innovation within institutions is all too often shortchanged, as well, by a lack of engagement with several organizational factors that can either promote or inhibit an innovative idea.

We believe that individuals like Nathan are not just promoters of technological progress and innovation. They are also guided by a vision to improve education that can, at times, be perceived as “too entrepreneurial,” yet is grounded in the realities of a contemporary neoliberal environment that prizes the blending of financial and societal gain. We also believe that individuals like Charlotte are as innovative as Nathan. Their commitment to fundamental academic values, such as academic freedom, tenure, and an obligation to serving the public good, is not antithetical to innovative progress; rather, individuals like Charlotte can stimulate innovative activity and create the conditions for mindful innovation that we will outline in this book.

How Innovation Is Currently Perceived in Higher Education

An authoritative explanation of innovation in higher education has proven elusive, mainly because individual disciplines conceptualize innovation in markedly dissimilar ways. This lack of consensus about innovation need not be viewed as a weakness, however. One of the attractive qualities about “innovation” as a concept relates to its transferability and reconceptualization across different disciplinary areas, time periods, and cultures. Nevertheless, for innovation to have real meaning in higher education, it must have a well-defined conceptual field that acknowledges strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. Furthermore, a lexicon of interconnected terms should be defined in order for innovation to have meaning. For these reasons, in this book we will discuss how innovation relates to creativity, disruption, and entrepreneurship, among other associated terms.

Some contemporary books conflate the concept of innovation with technology, assuming that almost all technological progress will result in greater efficiency, better student outcomes, and data that can better inform policy (e.g., Lane, 2014; Wildavsky, Kelly, & Carey 2011). Others have followed the lead of Burton Clark (1998) in asserting that an entrepreneurial mindset must pervade the culture of the university if it is to thrive in the 21st century (e.g., Ferreira et al., 2018; Foss & Gibson, 2015; Gibb, Haskins, & Robertson, 2013; Hannon, 2013; Meissner, Erdil, & Chataway, 2018; Tiedemann, 2019). We assume a more measured stance that considers whether or not technology is well suited for specific educational environments, as well as the negative implications of premature disruption grounded in dubious philosophical justifications rather than empirical evidence. Additionally, we acknowledge that scholars need to consider the entrepreneurial impact of their work, but we also reaffirm the central importance of higher education’s compact with society and underserved communities.

Business texts on innovation abound; accordingly, innovation in higher education has been defined, in no small part, by the writings of Harvard business professor and consultant Clayton Christensen. In particular, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out by Christensen and Eyring (2011) has had an enduring influence on current thinking about innovation and higher education. Nonetheless, as we will discuss in detail throughout this book, Christensen’s theory of disruption remains controversial, and his prediction that nearly half of all U.S. colleges and universities would be bankrupt or close to it has not materialized, even in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our text will not only offer insights into why disruption has been slow in higher education but also consider why different models of change may be preferable for many institutions.

At this point, it may obvious we are not “innovation boosters,” believing everything new is to be embraced and everything old is to be viewed as outdated. We are, in fact, very concerned about the promulgation of facile rhetoric surrounding disruption and innovation that shortchanges a deeper understanding of the challenges higher education institutions face today. We are dismayed that an abundance of empirical literature about the organizational conditions which promote creativity and innovation has been overlooked in favor of simplistic, yet marketable, ideas about “disruption,” “design,” and “play” that are advanced by Silicon Valley scions with little interest or regard for the role universities can play in societal progress. We are further concerned that a tacit acceptance of neoliberal values and New Public Management (NPM) philosophies are shortchanging the role higher education can play in creating a more equitable society, developing innovations that can raise living standards, furthering scientific inquiry, and fostering democratic values.

Furthermore, some texts on innovation are not well grounded in the multidisciplinary literature necessary for a nuanced understanding of innovation. Rather, they are often “how to” cookbooks with limited appeal that frequently approach the topic from a single perspective (e.g., “online classes are the future”) or offer top-down platitudes about the importance of strong leadership. Too much current literature on innovation lacks engagement with scholarly research that consistently demonstrates a positive relationship between innovation and the concepts of diversity, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and creative conflict. A deeper understanding of how the concepts of time, efficiency, and trust impact innovation is needed. Additionally, we contend that four core pillars of academic life—academic freedom, tenure, shared governance, and institutional autonomy—are not impediments to innovation, nor are they a primary cause of higher education’s financial woes, as some might claim (e.g., Vedder, 2019; Wetherbe, 2013). They are crucial protections for encouraging trial and error, fostering an organizational culture that respects expertise and welcomes critical perspectives, and stimulating creativity and innovation in the 21st-century university.

The primary goal of this book, then, is to offer a different vision for innovation in higher education. To wit, we begin by explaining why a deeper engagement with innovation is necessary; our argument is grounded in the notion that higher education occupies a central role as a catalyst for innovative ideas, products, and artistic and scientific development—and as a nurturer of human talent that can create and support innovation. We further suggest that higher education needs to remain central to discussions about innovation because a viewpoint that relegates innovation to the private sector is liable to reduce innovation to purely economic terms, exacerbate inequities for traditionally marginalized groups, and minimize the contributions that innovations can make for all of society. Afterward, we define the concept of innovation for higher education through a review of pertinent literature from the disciplines of business, psychology, sociology, and education, as well as the emergent field of innovation studies. We have three additional goals for this book. First, we identify the conditions that enable college and university administrators, as well as faculty, to promote a culture of what we shall define as mindful innovation in their institutions. Second, we mitigate irrational exuberance about innovation and instead offer a clear-headed analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, as well as the challenges in creating a culture of mindful innovation. Third, we make a case for our framework of mindful innovation as a more substantive and more pertinent vision for higher education than the rhetoric surrounding disruption and the prescriptive concepts advanced by neoliberal actors in today’s higher education environment.

Why Mindful Innovation?

Similar to our conceptualization of “innovation,” our use of “mindful innovation” is deliberate and requires a precursory explanation. “Mindfulness” has been subject to ubiquitous commodification in recent years, from mindful eating (promoted by Weight Watchers) to “mindful mints” (which is a candy that purports to reduce stress) (Gelles, 2019). As a result, mindfulness has evolved considerably from Buddhist roots that encourage the use of meditation and conscious “moment-to-moment” experiences as a way to relieve stress and establish clarity of vision (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). And like innovation, the idea of anything being “mindful” is perilously close to existing as an ambiguous Zen-like buzzword prized more for its presumed positive connotations rather than any specific meaning that can helpfully foster individual or institutional progress.

The construct of mindfulness, however, has also been attentively studied by psychologists interested in measuring, often through clinical interventions, how participation in mindful activities (such as social support groups or meditation) impacts individual change (Baer, 2003; Brown & Ryan, 2003), as well as physical health and cognitive performance (Crane, 2017; Creswell, 2017; Tang, Hölzel, & Posner, 2015). Shapiro and colleagues (2006) have formulated a “model of mindfulness” that is helpful to envision how we see “mindfulness” merging with innovation. The three axioms associated with mindful activities are “intention,” “attention,” and “attitude” (2006).

INTENTION

As defined by Kabat-Zinn (1994), intention is “enlightenment and compassion for all beings” (375), and is an essential state for understanding “why [one] is practicing in the first place” (32). We similarly believe that a focus on innovation requires two essential considerations relating to intention: (1) a concern grounded in social justice for how an innovative product or process impacts different groups of people, especially those who are traditionally marginalized, and (2) a robust institutional awareness for why the development and/or implementation of an innovation is necessary. It is not enough to innovate for innovation’s sake, or for the pursuit of financial reward. Innovations in higher education should be useful to a targeted population and fill an identifiable, specific need in order to have positive, appreciable impact on individuals and society.

ATTENTION

Attention, in the context of mindfulness, pertains to the ways in which an individual consciously understands their own internal and external behaviors in a given moment. A couple of reliable arguments for innovation in today’s higher education context is that “the world is moving at an increasingly rapid pace” or that “institutions need to keep pace with a globalized environment or else they will be left behind.” While we appreciate the importance of decisive leadership—and the necessity of responding to global forces and exter...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 An Introduction to Mindful Innovation in Higher Education
• 2 Understanding the Need for Mindful Innovation in Higher Education
• 3 From Creative Destruction to Disruption: Evolving Perceptions of Innovation
• 4 How Higher Education’s Problems Have Been Analyzed
• 5 Conceptualizing Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship
• 6 Stimulating Mindful Innovation
• 7 Planning, Developing, and Implementing a Culture of Mindful Innovation
• 8 Not So Fast! The Shortcomings of Current Rhetoric on Innovation
• 9 Moving Forward with a Culture of Mindful Innovation
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover