The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring (review)

A few years ago, the administration at the university of alberta sent copies of The Innovative University: Changing the dna of Higher Education from the Inside Out by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring to various faculty members. Whether we were meant to be introduced to the miraculous ways of professional administration or whether they wanted to give us warning as to governmental and therefore administrative vision, I do not know. It matters little. By now, we are all aware of the growth of the corporate university, and this institution is much like many others in which the public university—and perhaps the public sphere—is coming under increasing stress from government and corporate interests. This book is one example of how platitudes and business-speak will take us to where we apparently need to go. Christensen and Eyring’s Innovative University is one of the clearest statements on how to build your own corporate university. Its bulky four-hundred-plus pages provide the kind of expert advice that administrators love to hear, since at least one author is from the Harvard Business School (they both went through it), there is the mention of dna in the title, and there are some references to high-art literature with a few quotations from Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game to give readers a whiff of erudition.¹ There is also something of a retro feeling to the book, since Christensen and Eyring never hide their affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; part of the book’s odd charm is its (to paraphrase Lisa Simpson) weird Pat Boone-ish quality, its complete, unselfconscious faith in the Church’s fathers and their beneficence. This goes hand in glove with an equally complete devotion to capital and to business models that will provide the necessary management techniques for the university. It is as though the present could be reconstructed in some computerized 1950, where few of the economic, political, or intellectual events of the intervening years would cause any concern. Clearly, it’s time for common sense and an intrepid march into a brand new kind of top-down business as usual.

The book is composed of five parts, usually with multiple chapters in each section. These are: “Reframing the Higher Education Crisis,” “The Great American University,” “Ripe for Disruption,” “A New Kind of University,” and “Genetic Reengineering.” The text tends to sprawl, and it is never entirely clear why it proceeds in its semi-historical fashion. The book compares the growth and development of Harvard with that of Brigham Young University (byu), Idaho, but by the end of the introduction readers will already know what destructive innovation is and why the authors believe in it. A much shorter text would have sufficed. The notes are sufficient but not always helpful; the index is helpful and professionally done.

it is here, amidst this confluence of religion, capitalism, paternalism, and technology that one starts to feel the chilling shift from retro to repetition. The Innovative University offers a slightly revised model of top-down management that, in this instance, is beholden to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a group at least as powerful as many industries, states, or provincial entities. And this model, designed for the creation of a four-year college with no research mandate other than that connected with teaching, is built upon the expansion of online learning and the disappearance or reduction, in presence and influence, of PhD-trained faculty. Indeed, teaching must expand here to meet perceived needs, and all-pervasive administrators and Church leaders will influence everything, thus guiding the school away from the costly research university model as laid out by Harvard. However, although the research university model may be put aside, the influence of Harvard, as evinced in...