Eric Tadsen
Related story: Frustrated by UW bureaucracy, David Krakauer moves on.
David Krakauer, the departing director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, offers a sweeping critique about what’s wrong with higher education.
In this week’s Isthmus, Marc Eisen spoke to him as he prepares to leave the UW for a new gig in New Mexico.
Krakauer, who received his degrees from Oxford University and the University of London before moving on to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, was named by Wired UK magazine in 2012 as one of the 50 people who will change the world. Here are examples of his thinking on changing higher education.
The creaky departmental division of universities: "Departments need to go away. They are an anachronism. They no longer reflect the structure of knowledge [which is transdisciplinary], and they are deficient in respect to training the next generation of researchers. Everybody on this campus knows that graduate education is nowhere near what it could be. That means the impediments to students taking classes in multiple schools, of professors teaching outside of their college have to go away. This is ridiculous. The faculty will tell you this. I'm not telling you anything new. The defense of departments and schools is a territorial defense of scarce resources."
Money changes everything: "Places like WID say, 'If you’re rigorous and have good ideas, who gives a shit what department or school you’re in?' It doesn’t matter. The fact that your chair tells you that you’re not allowed to teach a course or contribute to a course in another department because it would sacrifice the tuition revenues of the department is a disaster. The metric that rewards departments for student hours is counterproductive."
Tenure is in decline: "That has nothing to do with the Wisconsin Legislature. I see the trend all over. People move through on a decadal timescale from one institute to another. Consequently, they no longer have allegiance to a single institute. They are committed to their research areas. I don’t know if that's good or bad. It probably has both positive and negative implications. I do see it as a major trend."
The golden rule of administration: "To enable, encourage, promote and support faculty and students. It is our job to help find a path to discovery, however complex this might be and however many obstacles are put in our way. The UW is so full of talent, ideas and energy that it is regrettable ancient superstitions, rules and habits put us at a comparative disadvantage. The incredible adversarial nature of the local government does nothing to remedy this situation."
What Chancellor Rebecca Blank should do: "Reboot the administration to promote greater freedom and flexibility. The world is moving quickly into a far more decentralized and entrepreneurial style of governance, and UW with its amazing history should be prepared to once again become a role model for creative governance."
