Design Economics Podcast with Vinny Tafuro

What a high impact practice is, it means that you never let a student study a discipline without also having a connection to the reality that that discipline aspires to represent.

Hello, and welcome to season one episode four of the design economics podcast, where we explore how design thinking driven by data is revolutionizing economics for the twenty first century. My name is Vinny Tafiro, a futurist, economist, and your host for this episode. Today, will be talking with doctor Eric Eisenberg, who is senior vice president of the Office of University Community Partnerships at the University of South Florida. Doctor. Eisenberg works to support the university's position as a transformational metropolitan research university to fulfill USF's strategic goal to be a significant social and economic engine by creating robust partnerships.

Our conversation explores paradigm shifts in higher education, revealing how communication can bridge academic silos and community partnerships can transform universities into innovative spaces where multiple ways of thinking flourish. So with that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Doctor. Eric Eisenberg.

Delighted to be here, Vinny. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

Thank you. Me too. I know you know, it's funny. We've known each other a number of years now, interacted in a number of different capacities, academic subjects, economics in the community. I guess, starting now, could you talk a little bit?

Because when I when I was introduced to you, you were dean of arts and sciences, and maybe explain a little bit of your background, academic journey, as well as career journey at USF.

Sure, happy to do that. So, you know, I've always known that I wanted to be a teacher. And so I went into graduate school thinking that I would study communication. Communication for me is a sort of horizontal discipline, not a vertical discipline. I've always been interested in lots of different things and pretty much any setting that you deal with in society and in human life, communication plays a role.

And so some people are intimidated or put off by the interdisciplinary nature of the field, but that was actually what drew me to the field. So I got involved in communication, had my first job at Temple University, always knew that I wanted to be in a vibrant metropolitan area. After that, went to Los Angeles, lived there for ten years and taught at the University of Southern California, and then was recruited here to Florida. And I've been here over thirty years at the University of South Florida. I have, in my studies in communication, I've mostly focused on organizations, institutions, and health communication.

That's sort of what I'm known for, and sort of established my own research and teaching record in those areas. And then I got to a point where I thought that I could perhaps be helpful in encouraging other people to do good work. And so I became department chair at USF in communication. I served in that role for about ten years. And what we tried to do there was to differentiate USF's communication program from other communication programs.

And the way we did that is we focused specifically on interpretive, critical and qualitative work as opposed to more statistical analysis and more traditional social science. After that, I was prepared to go on to the life of a full professor, but the universe had other plans for me. And I ended up serving as interim dean and then as dean for almost fifteen years of arts and sciences. And you're probably picking up on this, Vinny, that the reason that that was appealing to me is, again, because of the ability to be exposed to multiple disciplines. My view of academia is that it's not interdisciplinary enough.

But it's difficult because given the level of specialization and the exponential development of new knowledge, it's hard to be an expert in anything specific when you have to look horizontally across multiple disciplines. But anyway, Dean of Arts and Sciences, I got to know a little bit about philosophy, about physics, about chemistry. I was pretty good at a cocktail party conversation for about two or three minutes. Beyond that, I was exposed as a communication professor who was talking about lasers and physics, but not necessarily a true expert at those things. That went on until a couple of years ago, and I felt like I had pretty much done what I could do with the college.

I really, really enjoyed that job. Some people say being a dean is the best job at a university because you're not externally focused, you're still connected to students and faculty, but you also have resources to support new ideas and things like that. For a brief period, the President asked me to serve as Chief Academic Officer in an interim capacity. And as you might imagine, I embraced it because that allowed me to be even more interdisciplinary, now engaging with engineers and the College of Business and the College of the Arts. And that brings me to the present day.

So about two years ago, the President and I, we were thinking about the fact that USF had achieved most of its academic goals by becoming a member of the Association of American Universities. That was something that we aspired to very intentionally for about fifteen years. And when we got the call, by the way, you can't apply to be in the AAU, you have to wait for the call on Friday night on your princess phone sitting in your bedroom. And they called and they said, we want you to be part of the AAU. And my first thought was, okay, we're now in the top of all North American universities.

What we do next? The president's answer, my answers was that we wanna be the model metropolitan university with very, very strong connections to our communities. I said to President Law, I want that to be my legacy. She said, I want that to be my legacy. I said, can it be both of our legacies?

And so an office was born. And so that's what I've been doing. I've been essentially applying everything that I know about communication and organizations to try to shape this office and this university to become a truly great community partner and to support the growth, the innovation and the renewal of this area, this region, as we grow and achieve new things as a university.

Thank you. And yeah, that is quite a journey. And I think that's part of the draw when when we were first introduced to each other, by Amy years ago and and that that just that interdisciplinary because, of course, you know, my background came from really the private sector and programming, and I've kinda dipped in and out of academia. What I found though is communication has been the touchstone that's allowed me to stay there and relevant, but also kind of explore. So I really, you know, feel that.

So we've talked a little bit about the impact of the or the relationship between economics and especially the economics philosophies and departments with the rest of the university. I think that's part of what what our conversation here is gonna be about. How do you see and this is, you know, kind of the acknowledgment because things are changing at universities. Things are change things are changing everywhere in just an exponentially fast time.

Right.

And one you know, the primary the the first tenet of of our design thinking in economics is the fact that paradigms have a lifespan, and and there's been a lot of resistance to acknowledgement that paradigms change. And so going to see, like, when we looked in some of the literature, like, how you see universities adapting to go, oh, wait a second. We have to evolve over time and and how paradigm change is being approached now compared to maybe earlier in your career.

Well, you know, it's funny. I think that there was a time in the social sciences and in communication and in the humanities where I would say there was almost a decade or two of what were considered almost like paradigm wars, where there was the, it was almost, in a way it sort of echoes the Cold War, right? Kind of a bipolar world. And I don't mean that in the mental health sense. Mean, you know, and sort of the two paradigms that were up there were sort of logical positivism, kind of hypothetical deductive models, kind of logical sort of positivist approaches to doing social sciences, which were essentially modeled after natural science models, assuming that human behavior could ultimately be explained, predicted and controlled in the way that physical forces could be.

And there was this huge turn in the 1980s or so, which is sometimes called the interpretive turn. And the interpretive turn said, well, wait a minute, what is the purpose of research on human behavior? Is the purpose to explain, predict and control, which is sort of the traditional approach from the natural sciences, or is the purpose to better sort of understand and appreciate people's motivations or possibly to make social change? And so you have sort of interpretive studies, cultural studies, critical studies that emerged as a response to more positivist traditional scientific studies. And I would say when I was in graduate school in the 1970s and 80s, and then through the 90s, it really was paradigm wars.

And if you go to any of the journals of psychology, sociology, all those different fields over that period of time, it was sort of that bipolar world. And I think what's happened since then has been sort of a proliferation of multiple alternative ways of thinking about academia. But the institution of academia and the various kind of, I wanna say control mechanisms, but things like tenure and promotion, things about like journal policies for accepting, all those things have been extremely slow to change. And so what you have now is you have people who are trying to do things creatively, differently, to innovate, to explore new paradigms. But in order to do that, they almost have to create parallel structures outside of academia or adjacent to academia in order to do that.

It's very difficult. You know how we used to talk years ago in the 60s and 70s about, do you wanna make change from without or change from within? It's very difficult to make change from within academia. Obviously, as generations change and as we have generations retire, it becomes a little bit easier. I would say the students that are getting their doctoral degrees now and entering academia are a different type of student generationally, and also their attitudes about, and their willingness to entertain new approaches to things, I think is much broader.

And so the risk is that you don't wanna move from one orthodoxy about a paradigm to a new orthodoxy about a new paradigm. It would be nice if we could cultivate a culture where innovation around multiple paradigms was not just tolerated, but also enjoyed and explored. So I hope I'm making the point, which is that the inertia that slows change in academia is so strong that some of my favorite writers and authors have had to essentially carve very nontraditional paths and create parallel structures. I can give you examples of those as well.

And I think that makes sense and that resonates. Know in my last decade or twelve years or so of really getting more immersed in the academic side and having friends that have gotten their PhDs and gone that route, that their thought processing entertaining a more dynamic or interdisciplinary approach is probably different than that of others previous. One of the things that you mentioned, and now I'm trying to remember what it was, is in this kind of paradigm war. And this I think goes back to I forget which article we we we reviewed on this. But in talking about the shift from college in the eighties and nineties being a thing that taught young adults how to become adults to job training to basically outsource what companies used to do.

How is that? Is that kind of part of that paradigm war?

No, I wouldn't that's not the that's not what I meant when I was talking about paradigm war, but it's very real what you just described. I mean, I think that is a megatrend within Western higher education and particularly American higher education that we've been dealing with since the Reagan years. And it has often been described as a division between private universities and public universities. Because the place where the issue of what is college for, where the public can weigh in a strong way is in the public universities. And so you got this trend in the 70s and 80s where people would literally say, you should only major in something that will get you to a very clear career destination.

And if you want to major in something that doesn't do that, you should go to a private school. In other words, the state should not be supporting a degree in women's and gender studies, which in theory doesn't get you to a particular job. Should be a coder, you should be a cybersecurity expert, that sort of thing. Now, of course, the reality of the situation, and every employer knows this, is that a degree in English, a degree in women's studies is actually what they're looking for. It is not, especially in a time of technological acceleration, people are looking for communication skills, the ability to learn, critical thinking.

And so the argument has been flawed from the beginning. And actually, you were to poll a number of leading Fortune 100 CEOs, many of them have useless degrees. Because the fact of the matter is that it's not a simple thing. Mean, had a governor here in Florida who was discouraging people from majoring in anthropology because it didn't lead to a degree. Well, the fact of the matter is, of course it does.

It does in ways are just a little more nuanced than people want to think about. So that is definitely still an issue. I've heard some interesting things when I've gone to like Board of Trustees and Board of Governors meetings. I remember going to one, a very interesting one, where the president of FSU, Florida State University, was talking about the desire the on the part of the trustees to eliminate a particular program in his university because there were no longer jobs in that program. I think it was a petroleum type program or something like that.

And he said, well, there are no longer jobs in it now, but you have to take the longer view and think about maybe the program needs to evolve so that it can prepare people for jobs that we haven't thought about yet. So it requires you to take a less linear and a more gestalt or kind of broad view of what education is for. And with knowledge doubling as quickly as it is, education increasingly should be about critical thinking, writing, speaking, all those different kinds of things and much less about the technical stuff, which actually can be taught after and outside of the university experience.

Yeah, and now it changes so quickly.

Soft fast.

The system can't keep up. No, no, no. I did have, and so this is that that change from within, change from without. And you talked about, you know, we we both know multiple people that have had parallel systems. And I think this is a good segue in that.

Can two, you know, can two paradigms exist? You know, how how do we get paradigms to exist, as you mentioned, at the same time? But, also, how do we get things and this is, you know, I I cite Kate Raworth in my article in the fact that, you know, here she is the renegade economist, and she's at the University of Oxford. You would expect that she's the leading edge of the economics department, but instead she's over in social sciences and down a level in an institute that allows her to do this amazing work, but it doesn't influence the paradigm. How How do we not punish that creativity?

And this is that second tenet. Like, do we start bringing that together?

Boy, that's a hard question and one I wish I knew the answer to.

We'll solve it today.

Oh boy, that would be wonderful. Because I know so many examples of what you just said. And I think part of the reason that I went into administration was because I wanted to create space for that kind of diversity of thought. But the fact of the matter is that the soul of academia, the core of academia is this sort of peer review notion. And if you go with peer review or even the reputational stuff that gets done universities raid each other on their reputation, you naturally have a strong historical lag.

And I think that's what we're dealing with. I do think that in the fullness of time, Vinny, a lot of these people who end up sidelined, like the woman you described, my friend Buddy Goodall, who was at Arizona State University, my friend Stan Dietz, who still is at the University of Colorado, all these people have the same exact experience that you talked about. Their work was too edgy and too different for the received view in their departments, and so they had to find another way. And I think the way this evolves is that eventually they get enough acolytes or followers that people create new kinds of departments or someone has the wherewithal to include them in these broader conversations and not be threatened by that. My favorite example of this is a dear friend and colleague of mine named Carl Weich.

And I don't know if you know Carl's work, but Carl is probably the most influential and exciting social psychologist in the world of organizational behavior that's maybe ever lived. And he he spent most of his career at the University of Michigan. He was at Cornell as well. And he was always sitting on the very edge of the accepted sort of paradigm circle and never would step over that edge so that he could keep his membership card in the sort of general broad OB community and people would recognize him as one of them, but always sort of teasing and flirting with the possibility of blowing the whole thing up and stepping outside of it, but he never did. And I remember challenging him multiple times to say, well, realize what you're doing is something very, very different and new.

He would be like, oh, no, no, no, no, I'm part of the club, that sort of thing. And again, and my friend Buddy Goodall, who, you know, basically, the the fifth time he had his work rejected from a mainstream journal, he said, I'm gonna I'm gonna go publish books. You know? Or my friend friends Art Brockner and Carolyn Ellis, who said, well, we're gonna start our own conference and our own journal and our own book series, and we're going move the conversation over there. And they've done that in a big international way.

So I don't think I'm answering your question other than to say, I think universities really, really struggle with that kind of polyphony around different paradigms in the same place, because we tend to turn difference into opposition, which is a very American thing to do.

I feel that. And I think that is where the institute, and the work that we're doing here and this idea with design economics is, you know, there's enough outcasts now Yeah. That they outnumber the orthodoxy.

There you go. I love it.

And how do we then build and and this is what we're hoping is, does design economics in these three tenants become the checklist that goes, oh, does the parrot does the new paradigm or the theory or the new idea fit these things? And if so, oh, welcome to the club. We don't care which department you happen to be housed under.

Yeah. That's beautiful. That's that's beautiful. We did I will tell you about something that I did experience in my life, which was in 1981, a group of outcasts within communication started to meet in Alta, Utah, up at a ski resort. And there was an annual summer conference where we would go there.

And initially it was very much poo pooed by the disciplines. And over time, it developed legitimacy and kind of a cult status. I would say by the 90s and 2000s, it was influencing the mainstream and some of the things that initially had started out as way, way Basically, the question that was always asked was, is this really scholarship?

Yeah.

And so eventually, it did actually influence the mainstream, and a lot of the people who went to those initial conferences ended up being leaders in the field. So I do think it is possible for what you described to happen. I do think it takes a long time, though.

Yeah. I'm curious how close we are getting the long time compared to when do we have agreed upon vernacular or language. You know? Because I think that's part of the challenge is is neoliberalism or trickle down economic. You know, all they've had is very easy to to agree.

This is what the idea is. Whereas all these other ideas, they're being more holistic. There's just more pieces to them. So they're harder to kind of link together and have the same language to know you're speaking in, I guess.

Yeah. And I think that's why coming together and doing things like conferences and journals and what we have working papers is very important because you can start to work out that language. I've seen a lot of the kind of meme quality of that work as I've gone from conference to conference to conference where I hear people starting to repeat things. So instead of data analysis, they talk about crystallization and different ways in which new vocabulary can evoke new ways of thinking about phenomena is I think what I, that's what I heard you saying. Yeah.

And I do think that that follows a sort of natural pattern anytime, you sort of need to get people of influence using the same language consistently, and then one day it goes from, Hey, that's weird, to, Yeah, of course, that's how we talk about it, right?

It becomes the new normal, the new language.

Yeah, but what you don't want it to do, right, Vinnie, is you don't wanna create orthodoxy, and that does happen. I think if you look at, and it's so interesting in the context of what's happening in our country right now, but if you look at the success of critical theory within the university environment, which basically is all about emancipating people from sources of power and oppression, right? So critical race theory is an example. So the idea that the reason I do my research, let's say I study sex workers in Myanmar, right? The reason I do my research is not just to tell you what it's like, but I'm gonna do it because I'm somehow this work is gonna empower those people to take control of their lives and change the system.

I mean, what a challenge, right? So that's to me, I always thought critical theory was a very, very interesting extension of what academics could do. But critical theory in and of itself became its own kind of orthodoxy. Yeah. Right?

And so what would happen is I would go to a conference and I would talk about my studies of communication and emergency medicine, one of the things I study, and people would raise their hands and they would say, well, what about race and gender? What about power relationships? And I would say, well, that's certainly possible, but that's not what I studied. I was really looking at something else. And they were saying, no, you have to study this.

If you don't study power, you're not really studying reality. And so that's another way of doing the same thing that people at the beginning were saying, which is there's only one paradigm. If you don't use this paradigm, then you're not going be in the club. And that's, if you look across, you probably haven't had this experience, but if you look in the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, that's a lot of what some of these right wing folks are picking up on is the kind of orthodoxy around critical studies.

Yeah. And that almost so it's and this is so we you know, the the paradigm that that's that that it seems like the neoliberal order was really trying to make economics a physical science that would be unchanging.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And and we can't repeat the same mistake. It's like it's and it's not maybe that two paradigms exist at the same time, but or they do exist at the same time, but it's as as they're revolving between them. So there's never a paradigm, really. There there is always a shifting in evolution the same way, like, it really you know, with evolution. You know, where is the missing link between primate you know, other primates and us?

We don't we don't know what it is. We have examples like Lucy or something like, know, Yeah. Dinkinesh, I learned on my last episode actually on Afrofutures. Okay. But, like, so we there there's never a moment in time, and so you had these existences at the same time.

That makes a lot of sense to me.

Well, and I think the fuzziness is okay. I mean, I'm okay embracing the fuzziness. I think the fuzziness is both humane and also, as you were saying, a more accurate description of the way things happen. I mean, if you go back to Thomas Kuhn and the wonderful books about paradigm changes and things like that, it sort of gave the impression that one day a problem couldn't be solved within this framework and so another framework was born. But of course the truth of the matter is that there's tremendous overlap and it's very, very messy.

I mean, about intellectual life is like that. And I mean, I'm a big student of a lot of the Russian language theorists who say that, we don't ever own meaning, it's always rented. And the language that we use carries the paradigms of the past. I've been saying to people lately that every problem we have in our society today started out as a solution.

That's the That's the truth, we can end right there.

That's the overlap, And so you don't want to be too critical of the fact that people came to a way of thinking, because coming to that thinking may have been the most adaptive thing they could have done. But as you see new things in the world, now you begin to reexamine those solutions and saying, are those solutions still the way that we wanna go? And I think that's really what you're saying. Then of course, if you're gonna explore new ways, why not plant a garden with 10 different types of vegetables and see which grows? I mean, that would be, to me, that would be great.

Yeah. That that diversity in in in what you're producing and what you're thinking. And I I think the fuzzy works for me. I have a a colleague, Douglas Rushkoff, that I know he has a a comparison that he makes of, you know, the the binary world of the the digital world is trying to put us in ones and zeros. And because that's the only way our digital world can understand us.

Yeah.

Whereas we live in, as he says, in between the ticks of the clock.

Yeah. You know,

the ticks of the clock, that is the time keeping. Life happens in between those. And and so I really like that. The fuzzy part is what we keep pushing out.

Well, Stevie Wonder said that all the important things happen between the notes.

Yeah. So I think this is really good. The the literacy and language part of it, this is our third tenant is this, you know, cultivating economic literacy. You know, one of the things we find that economics has done over the last fifty, sixty years is by creating itself as a hard science and emphasizing math where the models may be beautiful and accurate, but the implementation in the real world is not. How do we bring economics back to, like, what you see, like, that's being done now where where we're trying to make it more tangible to the rest of society so I don't glaze over when we talk about economics?

Yeah, I think it's all about starting with the lived experience of economics in the world in the wild, you know, and not getting too enamored with either theory or method. I've always said that, you know, we fetishize theory, we fetishize method, but practice is where we all live, right? And so I think that's really where it comes down to. And by the way, what you just said could equally be applied to philosophy. I have been so baffled by many of my colleagues' philosophical

baffled writings, especially those that have gone down the mathematical logical kind of thing. When I think of philosophy, I think of, okay, what's a good life? What's a good society? Those kind of And I think economics needs to be the same way. It's like, you know, what are the different experiences of economic life and then build backwards from there. I had a similar conversation when they started the doctoral program here in aging studies.

And they said, well, what should the core curriculum be for aging studies? And they had all these ideas about anatomy and all that and attitudes towards aging. And I was thinking, well, I think you need to spend the first year sort of living with and studying old people and see what their lived experience is. And then you can begin to develop a theory about that. But I think that's where economics went wrong.

And that's why you get all these jokes about, you're in a hole, so you have a ladder. All the jokes about economics is a science. You know, and honestly, I think economics should actually be one of the most practical fields that there is. But it seems to have really, it gets bounced around a lot. When I came here, when I was first dean, it was in the business school.

And the business school got rid of it. They gave it to me in arts and sciences. They thought it was a better fit. And I wonder to this day what that meant. You know, why did they do that?

And, you know, why does economics sometimes get seen one way and sometimes another? Maybe you know. I mean, maybe you could shed some light.

I don't know. I think it's something to explore because I believe naturally it belongs under arts and sciences. I think it probably Because it's not a physical science. Business is an execution. Economics is somewhat a philosophy.

It's household management. Right. Right. Right. So I find that that very interesting.

Actually, your your comparison to philosophy is really, really smart. You know, you look at the research, you know, so the same people that might say, don't go to school, don't go to college for a degree that doesn't pay off. Mhmm. Are huge fans of Marcus Aurelius and stoicism, but they would never wanna study it in college. Right.

Right.

And so there's been this this, you know, plethora of writing on philosophy in the market sector Mhmm. That is not that is is is high readership. And so, you know, could we does economics need a similar renaissance where where true economics the the economics that's read by the general population by by the political leaders and the business leaders is the economics that's published outside of the orthodoxy.

Yep. Yeah.

That might that's an interesting thing as we talk about the literacy thing. Like, so what do you see happening there? How you know, when did the shift for the the school of economics happen? And how has maybe the business school changed since then?

Great question. It's been a while. I it's been at least it's probably almost twenty years ago And quite honestly, the biggest challenge I had in absorbing economics into arts and sciences was the fact that they forced them to move out of offices with windows into offices without windows. Which, you know, in the world of daily life so what I did is I hired a designer to paint windows on their because I'm a creative guy. Anyway, I think what's happened is the business school has doubled down on data analytics, basically.

Think data analytics has become the touchpoint in business education that has replaced a lot of the older ways of thinking, predictive analytics, big data, data analytics, some cyber stuff. But I don't see a lot of the philosophical questions. I do occasionally run into design thinking in the business school, which is good. Obviously the business school needs to deal with globalization and the ways in which global changes affect businesses, because a lot of the kids who go into major in business want to do things internationally, and a lot of even local businesses have international things. So there is a little bit of that.

I'm not so sure how well economics has really kind of found its partners within arts and sciences. I lamented that fact when I was dean, and I don't know that I've seen much of it change since. I know our economics department here at USF has focused a lot on health economics.

Okay. Makes sense.

Sort of choices that people make around around how you pay for for health and that sort of thing.

So I'm kind of curious on that the the business school side because, you know, the the first place I started brushing up when I got involved with conscious capitalism and the stakeholder movement and all these things, you know, early on in this was the idea that, you know, USF had a visiting professor of social entrepreneurship. You know, I met with the dean at the time of the Patel's, you know, the college of sustainability. So, like, these things are there. So is that part of what you what you what you're explaining there? Like like, as they were going into those things to talk about, you know, I guess the data analytics side is is really evaluating the market today to make decisions Mhmm.

Using data as opposed to philosophy or or economic philosophy rather.

Yeah, I think, well, I don't know that it's just present day focused. I think a lot of the data analytic is meant at doing forecasts and projections for sure. I do think the connectivity to things like sustainability and social responsibility is definitely a big part of the interdisciplinarity that's going on here. And one of the advantages of USF is that we don't have a lot of barriers to interdisciplinarity. So I think that work is definitely going on.

And I think it's also driven from the bottom up because I'm sure you know that students today have a different sort of burning platform around the sort of intensity with which they feel as if there's things in the world that need addressing. And so they're not that respectful of disciplinary boundaries, even if they're choosing to major in business. So you are getting, I mean, the focus on entrepreneurship and startups is huge in the business And part of what I've been doing in my new job is trying to better define the entrepreneurial support ecosystem in the Tampa Bay region and figure out how people can collaborate better in support of new ideas. And it's amazing how many organizations there are that are doing that. And it's amazing how much energy there is that is going towards creating new things, which I think is something you would support because Yeah.

You know, why why does somebody why does someone become an entrepreneur? It's because the legacy systems are not providing something.

Yeah. And that I see. You know, I I just spoke last month at USF's Connect to their entrepreneurship program about force you know, some of this stuff. And so I do see it happening. And I'm curious.

So from a university community partnership role in this conversation about how do we broaden you know, entrepreneurs are reading philosophy. They're just not reading academic philosophy. How do we engage that entrepreneurship community to understand that that economic yeah. That there's a new that there's new ways of doing things that are here at the university and available to maybe make that more accessible? Is that a word or a thing to

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's unfortunate that you have to ask the question, I think, and it's unfortunate that it's more difficult than we would like it to be. But certainly my mission when I was dean, and which continues to this day, is to try to create boundary spanners and translators who can effectively live in both worlds or at least be understandable in both worlds. Right?

And so for years I had this series called Trailblazers where I would bring people out into the community who I felt could were bilingual, like they could actually speak to the public as effectively as they could to an academic conference. And that was one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is to have executives and people from the outside world spend time sort of in residence in the university. But I think what you need to do is you need people need to have lived actual experiences in the other community so that they can begin to really understand what's there that could be of use to them. And my experience is that once you, I mean, it's a very labor intensive way to do it, but once you do that, suddenly people have much, much more appreciation for what's good and what can be used.

My own general philosophy is that there are learners intellectuals everywhere and that it's not ever in our best interest to sort of say there's, like people sometimes say about universities, there's universities and then there's the real world. I mean, oh my God, don't do that, right? Or when people ask me, what do I do? I'm a teacher. I'll be teaching at a hospital tomorrow.

I'll teach students the next day. It really, really doesn't matter. So I think it's the books that you're talking about where a leading academic writes a book that's actually something that people can read. It's having people do residencies and it's then going out into the communities. We have this wonderful group called Humanities and Hops that meets at local bars and brings humanities professors out to places like The Independent and stuff like that.

And people drink beer and they talk about ideas. And that's to me, I I couldn't be more supportive of that kind of porous boundary.

Same. I think I've been to one of those at NewRev, one of the breweries. I love the engagement that we do have in this community. I I I've been, you know, involved long enough now too to see, like, the the interaction between the different universities here, especially the entrepreneurship sector Yeah. As well.

Is there anything, you know, final thoughts that you'd like to provide on designing on on you know, if you could wave a magic wand. Like, what what thing could happen that would be challenging to happen but would make a significant change to the trajectory of higher education?

Well, it's a hard question today only because of the way in which the national debate around higher education has been going. I think we know historically that before the 1970s, universities operated essentially as institutions, which meant they were trusted by society and they were not inspected. Their outcomes were not inspected. Of, and they were not accountable to a bottom line. And that was their institutional status.

And by the way, healthcare was the same way. That's all gone out the window. And so my friend Stan Deeds talks about the corporate colonization of democracy and corporate colonization. Basically now that boundary doesn't exist. Everything is up for scrutiny.

And so universities are in this funny position of at the same time trying to defend what they thought were universal and enduring values, like critical thinking, free speech, all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, it's like, well, did you make a profit? And that's why you're seeing consolidation in higher education where a lot of my friends who teach at small privates, they're all merging with each other right now, that sort of thing. So it's a difficult time. On the other hand, sometimes difficult times make difficult decisions easier.

Right? So maybe there is an opportunity. I listened to somebody who's very controversial, Barry Weiss, a couple nights ago at the JCC dinner, and she and a bunch of her heterodox colleagues just formed this new university called University of Austin in Texas. And they're doing that because they want a different paradigm. They want a different way of promoting dialogue around difficult issues.

There's a lot to be critical about there, but I have to applaud what is a response to your question, which is like, what is the audacious thing that we could do differently? And I'm not even certain that the right place to enter this conversation is at the university level. One of the things that I've, as a communication person, I have been struck by how calcified people's ways of learning are by the time they get to college. And so sometimes I think that we really need to think more holistically sort of in a lifelong learning model and say, okay, well, where are people acquiring these paradigms and these ways of thinking and these worldviews and in our ways that we can intervene earlier to maybe present some different ways of thinking? So, yeah, I'm not really sure what the answer is, but I think that in general, I'll tell you the best answer that higher ed has come up with so far.

And in our world, in our vocabulary, they're called high impact practices. What a high impact practice is, it means that you never let a student study a discipline without also having a connection to the reality that that discipline aspires to represent. So I'm talking here about internships, I'm talking about cooperative education, I'm talking about study abroad, and I'm talking about undergraduate research. So you don't just sit in the chemistry department learning about chemistry, you go out and you try to create a new antibiotic or a new molecule, right? Don't just talk about leadership, but you actually go to a foreign country and you see how leadership differs between that country and our country, right?

So I think, I know it feels very incremental and I know it's not as radical as your question suggests, but I think it's pitched in the right direction. I think those high impact practices around community engagement, anytime we engage with practice, I think learning is gonna be better for it.

I love that. And I think it's funny, it is a big shift, but it's actually a return. Like it's almost like apprenticeship was. Like you learned while you went,

you know,

and that makes a lot of sense, know, because also you learn if you like it or not. I mean, how many people leave nursing school the first time they have to inject somebody, one of their classmates? That's something they want to do,

Well, there's also the, there's an accountability to it as well because the practical world, it's like, it's one thing to learn about scuba diving, it's another thing to actually run out of air. I was interested when my son was teaching, not teaching, my son was a student at the Culinary Institute of America in Upstate New York. And their curriculum is hysterical, Betty, you should look at it. So you know what the first class at the Culinary Institute is when you enter as a freshman? Knife skills.

Knife skills.

I mean.

Whole class of knife skills. And if you don't get knife skills right, you don't go on to the next class. You take knife skills again, and then you take knife skills. And then the next class is sauces. There's the mother sauces and all these different If you don't get sauces, you don't go on.

In higher education, somebody gets a C in English or C in algebra, we send them on to the next class. And so it's not

all that

surprising that people sometimes have trouble with mastery because we're not insisting that they build the foundation. And so there are some curricular ways that we could think differently, but they're not gonna be that popular because it runs up against things like age related promotion, moving people along, graduate fees. Right now we're paid for graduation rates. So there's incentive, although I hope we don't do it, there's incentive to get people out. But why do that?

I mean, if they don't have what they need, right? Anyway, so these are thoughts there.

I love that. No. That that's very true. Well, I, you know, I really appreciate this conversation and what we had. I will probably hit you up for some links to some of the stuff we've talked about so I can put them in the show notes.

Do that.

And just appreciate your time.

Appreciate it, Vinny. Great talking to you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of the design economics podcast. We will be back next month with another engaging conversation. You can find the design economics podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Please check out our show notes on our website, designeconomics.io. The design economics podcast is produced by the Institute for Economic Evolution, and I am your host, Vinici Fioral.

Thank you for listening.