Episode 407: Nicholas Dirks
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The Delicate Balance of Teaching and Research in Modern Academia
University professors have to become good at doing the intricate dance between research and teaching, as institutions have to help their faculty navigate this balance as well as maintain a good experience for the students in the institution.
Nicholas Dirks is the president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, and the author of several books. His latest book is titled City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University.
Nicholas and Greg discuss how universities have dealt with and should deal with current issues and challenges with faculty governance, and the evolution of student activism while maintaining academic freedom. They discuss the challenges of maintaining relevance, fostering interdisciplinary study, and adapting to the 21st century's demands while preserving the essence of academic freedom and intellectual debate.
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Episode Quotes:
Are universities too unique for outsiders to manage?
46:32: The difficulty you have when you bring somebody in from outside of the university to have a senior administrative position is that there's just so much about the university that is, only really possible to learn if you've been in it. And for the most part, in the corporate world, when somebody is running a company, they've worked in either that company or they've worked in that field. I've never been offered a job running Goldman Sachs or Google, but I have been offered a bunch of jobs running universities. Well, I say that because I think the presumption that universities are badly managed and therefore they need to have somebody who really knows about management doesn't fully take on board what the impediments to managerial success are in the university. And in part, it's about precisely the things we've been talking about—the kind of resistance to change on the part of the most senior, the most valuable faculty that you have, certainly as much as it is about the failure of the imagination of the administrator.
Modeling prompts institutional change
45:20: You can't change an entire institution, and you can't do it even in the corporate world. It's a little more [difficult], particularly for a long-established institution, but you can begin to change things on the edge. And as you do so, you can model how things might actually be better.
What can we learn from history and anthropology that’ll help reinvent liberal arts
01:00:25: One of the things I learned from history and anthropology is how much things change over time. And so what today are the appropriate ways for one to both justify and organize a liberal arts curriculum that would inherit some of the things that I think were so important about earlier modes of doing this, reinvent it for the modern moments, and be more appropriate for the world that our students are in and about to enter. [01:01:14] I believe that we can find something that might not be the same, and I might not have it exactly, but we'll continue to carry on the tradition of a certain kind of knowledge that doesn't become confined to either disciplinary or professional modes of knowledge that can enlighten and enable one's disciplinary and professional education in time, but can also address these issues about what it means to be human.
Rethinking institutional change
47:32: It's really critical to find new ways to think about institutional change in higher education. And I do believe that we risk serious problems in the sector if we don't take it much more seriously and then need to make this kind of collective commitment to know ourselves and think differently about who we are, how we function, who we're here for, how we contribute to society, and how we survive in the long term.