Eric Tadsen
David Krakauer
Related story: David Krakauer offers some concrete ideas for how to fix the UW.
One of UW-Madison’s change agents, David Krakauer, is departing on June 30, proud of his work as head of the edgy and multi-disciplinary Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, but deeply frustrated by his dealings with the campus bureaucracy.
“They like to use the word ‘innovation’ a lot, but they don’t want to act on it,” he says. “I think this is a culture that is really intolerant of taking risks.”
He adds: “The UW is very large. Things move slowly. It’s very difficult to respond nimbly and build up roots quickly to address a particular problem.” Still, Krakauer is careful to note that the WID “had some dispensations. We had freedoms. We didn’t cleave exactly to the dominant culture. We did a lot of good stuff. It was very unorthodox.”
Krakauer offered his parting thoughts a few weeks ago at the WID offices in the gleaming $210 million Discovery Building, 330 N. Orchard St. Handwritten in crayon on his office window high above Campus Drive was an aphorism of the master Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
Prints of cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus, Raw) hung casually on the walls — courtesy of fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry, who was one of Krakauer’s unconventional (and widely applauded) recruits to the WID creative team.
Krakauer, 47, an English-trained evolutionary theorist, will become president of a far-ranging think tank known as the Santa Fe Institute. He had been an SFI faculty member for nine years when he was recruited to be the Discovery Institute’s first permanent director in late 2011.
The institute shares space with the Morgridge Center for Research in the Discovery Building. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation operates an open-door, youth-friendly outreach program called the Town Center on the main floor.
When they opened in December 2010, the three overlapping operations were celebrated as a 21st century attempt by the campus to break out of the traditional silos of academic study and speed efforts to commercialize the UW’s vaunted research engine.
Success, it would seem, has been so-so. Morgridge has had three CEOs, and, according to Krakauer, the institute’s bioscience focus has shifted away from entrepreneurialism. A retired UW administrator says Krakauer hasn’t helped by keeping his distance from Morgridge. Former Chancellor John Wiley, on the other hand, says Morgridge and WID have worked together “pretty well.”
A lot is at stake. UW-Madison may do many things well, but capitalizing on its academic research for startups is not one of them.
When I profiled Krakauer for Isthmus in January 2013, he was unabashed in seeing the Institute for Discovery as an experimental laboratory. It would be a safe haven for the university to pull together the sort of cross-disciplinary teams that increasingly seem at the cutting edge of research and product development in a high-tech world. Public outreach, particularly to business, would be part of the agenda.
“What I told John Wiley and David Ward [the interim chancellor] when I first came out here is that WID cannot be like UW-Madison,” he said at the time. “It can reflect the culture, but it cannot replicate it, because if it does it will be a failure.”
He added: “There are forces that say, ‘No, conform to our norms’ — that’s a fight I take to work every morning.” Clearly, those battles exacted a toll.
Krakauer fleshed out eight research endeavors including the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, co-led by his academic collaborator and wife Jessica Flack, who holds a Ph.D. in evolution, cognition and animal behavior. C-4, as it’s known, will relocate to Santa Fe. Epigenetics focused on the chemical triggers that turn genes on and off. The Games Learning Society cohort drew national attention for its efforts to connect video games to science learning.
WID also sponsored C-4’s monthly lectures featuring nationally known scientists, brought together business leaders and academics for brainstorming sessions, sponsored humanities hackathons and assembled a team of 403 professors, researchers, students, fellows and scholars. Total grant dollars for those researchers? More than $61 million.
What brought the biggest smile to Krakauer’s face wasn’t the bean counting but the memory of WID’s undergraduate fellows crowd-funding a wild and controversial experiment to build a microbe-powered light bulb. “It generated a huge amount of public interest,” he says. “I thought it was fantastic because it was so outrageously ambitious. Of course it couldn’t work. But along the way they made discoveries. They were doing fundamental genetic research. That made me very happy.”
Wisconsin’s bruising and debilitating political conflict isn’t a factor in Krakauer’s departure. He is, by his own description, not a political animal. “Our job is to defend empirical rationality,” he says of the scientific imperative.
But that noncombative approach puts him at odds with colleagues outraged by the Republican attack on tenure, the historic bedrock of academic freedom. They want to fight to defend it; Krakauer doesn’t. He wants to study and revamp tenure.
“I don’t think being polarized is a good defense,” he says. “I think being reasonable, rational and empirical is a good defense. I think the public would see that. That’s what we stand for. I’m never giving up on that.”
There is passion in his voice when Krakauer says this. To his thinking, the tenure system is flawed. It’s not fair to junior faculty (tenure review is a form of hazing, he says bluntly) or to women and minorities. Nor is it important to researchers like himself in the natural or computational sciences. They function as academic entrepreneurs raising grants and moving from university to university for a better position. (That’s the new norm, he argues.) Tenure is much more important for the humanities, which can tackle controversial issues that don’t bring in big research grants.
“I wish we could have this conversation,” Krakauer says.
That same frustration comes across when he talks about the campus bureaucracy thwarting his plans for WID. “If you ask me where my primary obstacles lie, it’s not with the faculty. It’s not with the chancellor either. It’s at some office — it could be HR, grants, compliance, or in the grad school. Someone at a middle-tier position who’s so fearful of an audit that without analyzing the options will simply say no.”
Those risk-averse decisions were almost all made without empirical evidence, he says, by people who feel they don’t have the authority to think through their decisions. That’s what stalls progress. It’s not even their fault, he adds. The system doesn’t allow them to experiment, and they grow complacent.
“These are people who have been here for decades, who think they know how things should run, because that’s how they ran 10 years ago,” he says. “They haven’t really absorbed what’s happening in the world.”
Krakauer says he knew his ambitions would not be realized here, and if he stayed, “I’d be neutralized. I would gradually become accustomed to the safety of academic life.” The Santa Fe Institute, nestled in the New Mexico high desert “like a Shaolin monastery,” offers him an entirely different opportunity, Krakauer says.
Founded by three Nobel laureates wanting to make a constructive impact on global culture, it draws on a faculty from all over the world. “It’s about the best leadership position I could ever have,” he says.
Christopher Bradfield, a UW-Madison professor of oncology, will replace Krakauer as WID’s interim director on July 1.
Patricia Brennan is one of the fresh thinkers Krakauer pulled into the WID orbit. A professor of both nursing and industrial engineering, she leads WID’s Living Environments Laboratory, which uses virtual-reality and 3-D technologies to improve home healthcare. “David became the kind of leader we needed,” Brennan says.
Krakauer’s skill set, Brennan says, “is in nimbleness, quick thinking and fast responses” — traits rarely associated with bureaucracies. Yet they are intrinsic to the startups that successfully spin off from university research.
“Administratively I think he stumbled with all the complexity of the campus. This is a big and messy place, and I think it annoyed him at times,” she says. “He would sometimes wail at our traditions. Some of us kind of like them even if they’re quirky and more time consuming than they need to be.”
But, she adds: “His experience in innovation pushed us in a way we could not have gotten without him.”
