Q&A: Brian Rosenberg

Why can't higher education change? It’s a question that has been on Visiting Professor Brian Rosenberg’s mind for years, and why he made it the name of a class he taught twice this year. It’s also the topic of his 2023 book, Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education, based on his years working in the field of education, including as president of Macalester College. This past spring, Rosenberg talked with Ed. about the need for change, pressure in higher ed, and the next frontier. 

Why teach this class?
It’s been a topic that has fascinated, puzzled, and frustrated me for much of my career in higher education. I was a faculty member, I was a dean, and I was the president. Every stage along the way, what I saw was a very deep-seated resistance to anything more than incremental change.

Did this surprise you?
It seems paradoxical to me. Higher education has been described as a conservative industry populated by progressives. You have all these people in higher ed who, in their view of society, are looking for change, who in their disciplines are looking for change. But not when it comes to their workplace dynamic. What I thought was, this can’t be because people don’t want to be good at their job. I don’t think it’s because people are bad actors. I tend to look for answers in structures and cultures and I came to the conclusion that higher education has a lot of both cultural and structural impediments that make it really, really difficult. And so that’s what I focused on in the book and in the class.

Tell us more about the class.
The class essentially has three phases to it. The first is, why do we need to change? Higher education hasn’t changed dramatically in a long time. Why should it? Is this moment different? And I make the case that it is, that higher education is under more pressure from more directions than at any point in my career. And unless it adapts and changes, it’s going to be in even more trouble.

I talk about the financial model, which for the vast majority of institutions is unsustainable. We can’t have schools with discount rates of 60 or 70% that can expect to do that indefinitely. And it’s gotten super expensive. The sticker price this year at Macalester, where I was president, was almost $85,000. And there are fewer and fewer people who are willing and able to pay that price.

Demographics are also a problem. We’ve peaked in terms of high school graduates, and we’re going to go down and it’s not going to be small, maybe as much as 15%. You take away 15% of the high school graduates, and colleges that are struggling now have an even bigger problem. 

What’s phase two of the class?
Phase two is, what are the impediments? I look at a number of factors such as the incentive system, which I think doesn’t incentivize the people who are in positions of power to change things.

Can you give us an example of what that looks like?
Why would a tenured faculty member want things to be different? Change is work. Change is scary. You have a guaranteed job for the rest of your life. Why would you want to do the hard work of change? If you’re a president and you try to change things dramatically, you’re probably going to lose your job, right? If you’re a trustee who shows up at a college several times a year and goes to board meetings, why would you want to get in the middle of a mess? All those people have the power to change things.

I also look at the fragmentation of these institutions, particularly things like the departmental structure where you have faculty who are more faithful to their departments than they are to their institutions. It’s pretty different, by the way, between faculty and staff. The staff, I’ve found, usually tend to see themselves as part of an institution.

And change is really, really hard. Change requires those people to be going in the same direction. That’s not the way colleges and universities run.

And the final class phase?
The last is the more optimistic phase of the class: What are possible alternatives? We’re looking at the rise of mega universities — the Arizona States and the Southern Hampshires. Is that a good change? A bad change? Whether we like it or not, it’s changing. We look at what those schools are doing and the pluses and minuses. We look at people trying higher ed startups, like Minerva, which is well-funded, to underfunded experiential experimental startups. What are the opportunities or blocks to starting a new, different kind of college? And finally, we look at international models. I’ve been working for the last 48 years with the University of Africa, which is a startup and very different from the American model.

Have there been any surprise areas in the past decade that are changing in higher ed?
I think a lot of the most interesting work is actually happening at community colleges. Community colleges are starting to do a better job of connecting with employers and offering stackable credentials — things that get students into the workforce sooner. They focus on teaching and there is more use of technology and it’s making education accessible to students who can’t show up on a campus over four years. To me that’s the next big frontier.