Death to silos - geographic, intellectual and organizational

An interesting proposal from a marketing and communications expert called for "Death to Silos" saying that academic "silos make interdisciplinary collaboration difficulty and limit opportunities to maximize resources and create highly effective communications for our audiences. They also hinder innovation, limit access to alternative perspectives and invite territoriality." While the proposal is directed at how a university communicates its academic work and impact, most of those who have served in a U.S. institution of higher education would readily recognize that the most important and debilitating impact of silos is that they allow ideas to be marginalized through asserting expert and niched knowledge while neglecting to see the multiple and interactive causes and solutions to many of the questions intellectuals and researchers seek to answer.

In an effort to bridge geographic separation, academics in Ireland have proposed pan-Irish collaboration to connect all of higher education. Gerry McKenna, senior vice president of the Royal Irish Academic, offered the opinion that "Universities are an important player in terms of promoting social cohesion, promoting political tolerance, and support for democratic institutions. This is not something that we should take for granted. A higher education system that embraces the entire island and all its regions is an important factor in promoting not just prosperity, but also peace and stability." Although Ireland is small, could its commitment to collaboration be a model for other countries on how to bridge spacial as well as other academic barriers?

One network of training programs in higher education has proposed that greater cooperation in addressing research questions would require: collaborating with the competition; redefining credit and success; and reimagining what you teach. Academic collaboration is perceived to be so difficult that guidelines about how to do it successfully were offered in lessons on teaching together and interdisciplinary research collaborations are hard. Matt Reed suggested that affinity groups, many now virtual, could foster greater academic cooperation. In Australia, the University of Sydney and University of New South Wales have committed to cooperate more than in the past. These measures would at least begin to break down the silos that so dominate the U.S. and other higher education cultures.

"Reimagining Campus Experience" proposes that the privileging walls of the extracurriculum need to be permeated in order for the broader diversity of students to benefit from it. While I do not agree with the assertion in the article that "Student life, in turn, produced campus cultures that downplayed the value of academics and glorified athletic prowess, style, parties, pranks and casual socializing," I agree with the next assertion in the article that campus life in the American model of wholistic education "explains much of college's appeal." The important point of this article is that all students should have access to full participation on campus. The ways that inclusion can become reality is by observing several principles and adopting practical strategies that complement them.

The principles are:

1. Don't expect students to become more academic
2. Maximize participation
3. Encourage a multiplicity of options
4. Blur the boundaries between curriculum and extracurriculum
5. Do everything in your power to develop audiences

The practical strategies are:

1. Take student satisfaction surveys and focus groups seriously
2. Rethink your campus' student life priorities
3. Think outside the box
4. Make faculty student life partners
5. Evaluate your student life initiatives in terms of inclusion and diversity

I often blog about issues of what I would characterize as intellectual and organizational "Balkanization" in higher education. The evolution of specialization, bureaucracy, and entrepreneurial autonomy brought us to the point where our institutions are wasteful and ineffective and it's time we get serious about fixing it.