University Design | TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) by David J. Staley
Does reading matter anymore? In Ohio, my home state, reading is a big deal…until it isn’t. Every student is expected to read at grade level by the time they complete third grade. If they don’t, there are consequences for the student, their teachers and the school. There has been a contentious political debate in the […]
University Design | The University is a Unique Organization by David J. Staley
I will confess that I am always amused when economists or social scientists formalize something most of us already understood, as if they had discovered it. In this case, I think two economists, David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, have done us all a favor with their report “How have universities survived for nearly […]
University Design | Stickiness By David J. Staley
I’m back from a consulting gig at a small university in a small city located somewhere in the Midwest. Compared to other similar institutions, this university is doing okay. Enrollment seems steady, donor relations are solid, they’ve built a raft of new buildings. The university has one distinctive major that attracts many students from around […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
University Design | The Agentic Student by David J. Staley
I caught a glimpse of the future the other day while attending a Zoom meeting. There were six of us in attendance that day: four humans and two AI note takers. Automatic note takers are not new, of course. We see them frequently pop up as one of the screens in our Zoom meetings. Before […]