The Chapter 10 Problem

Over the weekend I read Yascha Mounk’s new book, The Great Experiment. It’s about the challenges and prospects for democracy and the rule of law in a period of relatively rapid demographic change.

I came away a bit disappointed over all—though the topic is more than worthy, the treatment was relatively pedestrian—but it included an aside that I couldn’t shake. Mounk breaks the fourth wall in chapter 10, to the extent that there is a fourth wall in a nonfiction book, and admits that many policy-oriented books suffer a “chapter 10 problem.” That’s when they’re supposed to turn from description to prescription, offering solutions to the issues the first nine chapters examined. As Mounk correctly noted, those sections often fall flat for one of two reasons. Either the solutions presume a universe other than the universe that exists, or the author is so careful to avoid that charge that they undershoot and wind up with proposals that, even if enacted, wouldn’t make much of a difference. The sweet spot is maddeningly hard to hit.

It isn’t just about books.

Part of the “initiative fatigue” that many campuses suffer, I suspect, stems from a variation on the chapter 10 problem. Go through too many cycles of “this will change the world!” followed by incremental progress and it’s easy for even well-intended folks to become cynical. When the aspirations and the methods are orders of magnitude apart, and the implementation of those methods is halting and/or partial and/or difficult, it can be easy to lose the narrative. (“Why are we doing this?”) That’s more true when some sort of external force majeure, like a pandemic or a major state funding cut, comes along and overwhelms even well-executed plans. Gradual gains in retention may be real, but pandemic-driven enrollment decline can make them nearly invisible.

In theory, a strategic plan can offer the connective tissue between grand aspirations and department-level tactics. But I’m not sure how many people actually read strategic plans. And many strategic plans aren’t particularly strategic, which doesn’t help. To my mind, a strategic plan implies a strategy. That assumption is not universally shared. Over the years, I’ve seen some that were based entirely on hope and that were promptly shelved, never to be consulted again. I’ve seen others that were agglomerated to-do lists from the various departments on campus, apparently on the assumption that a coherent strategy would emerge organically.

At the peak of enrollments, around 2010, I remember being in a planning meeting in which an exasperated staff member who was overwhelmed with work asked plaintively, “What’s the goal of all of this growth? How much is enough?” Nobody had an answer. The president at the time seemed content with growth for its own sake, which worked until it didn’t.

Part of the task of leadership is translation. That involves making legible the needs of one constituency to another and back again. Those constituencies aren’t only on campus: they include the larger community, employers, high schools and prospective students, as well as current students. Keeping the big-picture strategy in mind, and making it legible to all, can help with the chapter 10 problem. Ideally, it can even set a context in which folks can suggest improvements to tactics that are both realistic and helpful. It’s a difficult task on a good day, made all the more so when something big and external changes the game on its own terms. But when it’s missing, people notice.

So thank you, Yascha Mounk, for giving me a pithy formulation for something I’ve noticed over the years but couldn’t quite encapsulate. The chapter 10 problem is real.