Author: Matthew

For my first post of the 2022-23 academic year, I’m joining with countless returning middle and high school students to write an essay about what I did on my summer “vacation.”

I’m happy to report that I was able to travel to Europe. I spent most of my time in Rennes, the largest city in Bretagne, but I was also able to spend eight glorious days in Wien, my favorite city. Sitting in coffeeshops busy with my “vacation,” I found (again) that being surrounded by people speaking mostly German has a restorative effect on my spirit. (Well, that and the Schnitzel at Café Anzengruber.)

In case you don’t know about the
Liberal Arts Gateway (LAG),
you can catch up here.

This spring, the Liberal Arts Gateway passes another milestone: We’ve reached more than 6000 students with courses redesigned and taught according to the LAG philosophical framework.

We didn’t plan it this way, but LAG figured prominently in the English discipline’s program review, and the story is great for students. Students in LAG courses are succeeding at a higher rate and are better prepared for subsequent coursework. Thanks to Susy Thomason’s support, Chris Berni received a level III Fellowship to study the efficacy of the LAG approach, and her analysis is even better news. Students are succeeding and completing at a higher rate, and students of color benefit most from the LAG experience. We have growing evidence that LAG students are persisting into subsequent semesters and succeeding at a higher rate. But the most important metric of what LAG is doing for students is what students are saying. Here one striking example:

I have not been very effective this week, and I regret that I didn’t get a winter break injunction out to you before how. But I thought I’d take a moment to chronicle my week, which may give you some insight into why.

After a reasonably productive day of deaning on Tuesday — where “reasonably productive” means that the background of interruptions was punctuated by getting some work done — I sat down to a lovely dinner. I was enjoying a very spicy batch of habanero guac, and, as I often do, I leaned on the table, placing my jaw on my hand. I was surprised to find a very large, painful bump about the size of a pingpong ball just behind my left jaw. Naturally, I was a bit alarmed, especially because, in a mirror, I looked like I was trying to pass at the Fall Chipmunk Convention.

So, I did what any reasonably rational animal would do: Headed for the ER.

Of course, I don’t mean we should stop talking about our students’ successes. I mean, Can we stop talking about “student success”? What do those quotation marks signify?

For a start, students don’t enroll in college to be counted as “successes” by us. We’ve defined “student success” in terms of metrics that matter to us, for a variety of reasons. We care about persistence, right? We care about completion. We care about mastery, surely. But let me propose that we, for our own reasons, have reduced each of these worthy notions to metrics that matter to us — whether those beans we count matter to students or not. And we all know why we count those beans: There are reports to send to the state, there’s marketing and messaging to get out. Behind all these priorities, there’s that issue that often seems to be in the background: educating people.

So, let’s take a moment to stop talking about “student success.” What should we be talking about instead?

The Liberal Arts Gateway initiative is one of the most successful course revitalization projects I have seen in more than 35 years in academia, and I firmly believe that its success is largely due to two key elements in the LAG philosophy: If you want to revitalize courses, you must (1) empower professors around (2) a core set of guiding values.

Empowering professors doesn’t mean asking them nicely to revamp courses or look at some outcome data. It definitely doesn’t mean ordering them to implement the latest fad some administrator picked up at a weekend conference and then label them as obstructionists because they might be a bit skeptical that a two-hour workshop trumps the lifetime they’ve dedicated to the excellence of their disciplines.

In the previous series on mission, intention, and trust, I laid out a framework for identifying patterns and improving organizational functioning for the sake of our mission. Let’s turn now to applications of this MIT framework to specific decisions, large and small, throughout the college, starting with the search for a new provost.

My focus is the search process itself, taken as an institutional activity. I want to look at how that process is structured, rather than any specific decisions or recommendations by anyone in particular. This involves analyzing how we approached the process of searching for a provost, from the perspective of mission, intention, and trust. One goal is to use the MIT framework to reveal patterns that can explain specific symptoms that arise in the institution; another, of course, is to suggest a way to improve.

One way to avoid the consequences of decision-making principles is to mistake them for goals. No doubt, you’ll recognize this move when I provide a typical example:

I was in a guiding pathways conversation with an upper administrator about the need to differentiate workforce students from transfer students early, so that we can help students move forward efficiently. I was in the middle of explaining how students often come in with particular goals but are not always clear about the best pathways to reach their goals, given their educational and life experiences, and the sooner we can get students connected to instructional leaders to help sharpen the pathway, the better. Perhaps realizing (or imagining) the implications of this strategy, this person interrupted me with that knowing-pitying look, and said, “You know, Matthew, all our students are actually workforce students.”

what’s wrong with acc

and how to fix it

Matthew’s previous
post in this series

Just after I defended my dissertation and was pronounced a doctor, I went to visit my mom. At one point in the afternoon, I overheard her talking with her long-time friend.

Friend: Well, Matthew got his doctorate — now he’s a doctor! You must be proud.

Mom: Yeah, well, I guess.

Friend: Aren’t you proud? That’s such an accomplishment!

Mom: Well, yeah, he’s a doctor, but not the kind of doctor that can do anybody any good.

Maybe a philosophy doctor it’s not the kind that can do this institution any good either, but it’s not gonna stop me from trying.

what’s wrong with acc

and how to fix it

Matthew’s previous
post in this series

Part 3: Intention

Having looked at mission and trust, let’s turn to the institutional structures and processes that make administration possible. “Structures and processes” is a way of drawing attention to the features of our organization that accomplish the work of the college. The three most important functions of administration are forward planning, decision-making, and codification of processes. Obviously these functions overlap, but let’s just say that forward planning is about strategic planning for the future, decision-making focuses on managing the affairs of the institution in the present, and codification is about establishing and maintaining the “how-to manual” for our functions and operations (including planning and decision-making).