What Leaders Know—but Cannot Fully Say by Melissa Morriss-Olson
The hidden discipline of leadership is not just transparency. It is knowing when, how, and how much to say. In an earlier reflection, I wrote about the cost of what we don’t talk about in leadership. Silence, shaped by culture and expectation, can limit how effective we are. In my recent conversations with college and […]
University Design | Educable By David J. Staley
Leslie Valiant, The Importance of Being Educable: A New Theory of Human Uniqueness (Princeton University Press, 2024). Leslie Valiant begins his book with an extraordinary claim: “We live in an intelligence-driven culture.” (xiii) By this, he means that intelligence is everywhere in our vocabulary. We seek to measure it — as in an Intelligence Quotient—we […]
The First Leadership Habit of Innovation by Melissa Morriss-Olson
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing dozens of college and university presidents on the IngenioUs podcast. One insight keeps resurfacing in those conversations: the leaders who succeed at innovation rarely begin with bold ideas. They begin with something much quieter—listening. Why listening—not vision—is where meaningful change begins. Not long ago, I was […]
University Design | Interestingness By David J. Staley
Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (Springer, 2015) Jane Jacobs, the great urban theorist and activist, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, did not start out with the goal of becoming the foremost writer about cities. That is, it does not […]
The Cost of What We Don’t Talk About in Leadership by Melissa Morriss-Olson
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about leadership—especially in higher education—is how much of it is shaped not only by what we say and do, but by what we learn to leave unspoken. Every institution has a version of this. Topics that generate discomfort. Questions that are technically allowed but subtly discouraged. […]
University Design | The AI Symposium By David J. Staley
Four years ago, we were blindsided by the unleashing of LLMs into educational spaces. Faculty in the humanities and qualitative social sciences have responded with a mix of bewilderment and resistance, some pledging to ban these tools outright, fearing that students would rely on them to generate essays rather than do their own thinking and […]
Why Innovation Fails: Reflections From Where I Sit
By Melissa Morriss-Olson Innovation is a word we use easily in higher education. It appears in strategic plans, presidential speeches, accreditation narratives, and fundraising priorities. We talk about it as if its importance is self-evident—and perhaps it is. But despite the rhetoric, innovation fails far more often than it succeeds. I don’t make that claim […]
University Design | Underemployment by David J. Staley
The core argument in Peter Turchin’s book “End Times” is that social and political upheaval results from what he identifies as “elite overproduction.” Looking throughout history, Turchin claims that: when a state such as the United States has stagnating or declining real wages (wages in inflation-adjusted dollars), a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction […]
University Design | Universities and Intangible Capitalism by David J. Staley
In the Spring of 2021, during the closing moments of the pandemic lockdowns, after a year spent teaching classes over Zoom, an exasperated student, a graduating senior, quipped at the beginning of my class: “This sucks.” He was referring to the setting of my class and of his other classes. While grateful, on the one […]
University Design | The Soloversity By David J. Staley
The Economist recently reported on a new Silicon Valley trend: the “solopreneur.” They give the example of Sarah Gwilliam, who started a business offering grief counseling and the management of family affairs after the death of a loved one. (The Economist quipped that the business is “wedding planning for funerals.”) Gwilliam is the only human […]