You Can’t Outsource Educational Leadership

As Einstein never said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. As they brace for the resumption of student protests and the heightened tensions of an election year, many college administrators are turning to external consultants and nonprofit organizations to teach students how to disagree more civilly. In doing so, they risk repeating mistakes made in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion and being rewarded by similarly disappointing results.

As with inequality and exclusion on campus, administrators’ mistake isn’t to exaggerate the problem. It is, rather, to believe that they can address it by a combination of outsourcing and add-ons to existing offices, policies and curricula.

The inability of students to engage in well-informed and respectful discussion of contentious political issues is not some surface-level blemish to be treated by topical lotions administered by auxiliary para-educators. It cuts to the core of the entire higher education enterprise. To address it effectively, administrators need first to diagnose how and why the institutions they lead are failing to deliver on their educational mission and then to develop responses that are built into every student’s core learning experience. In short, the problem calls for visionary educational leadership by presidents, deans and faculty. And that cannot be outsourced.

There are at least four reasons why outsourcing and add-ons aren’t the answer: reach, accountability, cost-effectiveness and relevance.

First, interventions led by outsiders typically cannot reach all students. Few such interventions are even designed to do so. More commonly, they aim to prepare small groups of volunteers to serve as leaders of campus discourse. Setting aside the empirical question of the extent to which campus discourse can be influenced by such volunteers, this trickle-down design means that only a small proportion of students is impacted directly. Even assuming that such interventions are effective, they would not fundamentally change the ways regular courses are designed and taught. As far as the routines of teaching and learning are concerned, business would continue as usual.

Second, outsourcing marginalizes. Instead of student ignorance and incivility being a problem that belongs to everyone, outsourcing transfers ownership to a particular intervention program or designated university office. To some administrators, this might seem superficially attractive. It enables them to show that something is being done and perhaps even to leverage evidence of it being done to raise additional funds. But this comes at the cost of accountability, absolving deans and faculty of responsibility for educating students about such fundamental skills as how to apply standards of evidence and argumentation required of them in their coursework to real-world controversies, or how to discuss differences of perspective respectfully. In short, outsourcing can become an enabler of the wrong kind: a checkbox checked without progress made.

Third, and relatedly, outsourcing is often wasteful. It’s one thing for an organization to outsource technical tasks, such as printing or catering. But it’s quite another to outsource its core business, such as the business of teaching civil discourse. Savings from replacing internal departments with service providers who compete for bids can be significant. But if the internal departments remain intact, or if what is being outsourced is conceived as an urgent add-on to departmental business as usual, the costs of outsourcing can spiral rapidly. One does not have to subscribe to right-wing critiques of DEI initiatives to wonder whether the sums spent on DEI consultants and third-party trainers by American universities in recent years might have been better allocated.

Fourth, few civil discourse interventions appear to address seriously the most significant driver of student ignorance and incivility today: social media. Many of the interventions offered focus on training students in face-to-face dialogue, sprinkled with generic instruction in critical thinking and rational argumentation. But, as recent studies have shown, the ways people consume information online diverge considerably from how they consume it off-line. When students base their opinions on what unqualified influencers and devious bad actors post on TikTok, any intervention that does not explicitly compare standards of evidence and credibility taught in university courses with those appealed to on social media is really missing the point.

Beyond these specific pitfalls, outsourcing and add-ons present universities with a broader moral hazard. Much of the turmoil on campuses last year was due to a lack of educational leadership. Instead of using their expertise and professional authority to educate students and set a personal example of what civil disagreement and evidence-informed debate can be at their best, too many faculty members either melted into the background for fear of being canceled or joined the fray as partisan protagonists.

The performances of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism last December embodied this lack of leadership. What could have been an opportunity to give voice to the values of intellectual rigor and civic responsibility that drive America’s great institutions of higher learning devolved instead into a game of semantic cat and mouse, as the rattled presidents resorted to legalistic evasions and apologetic appeals to the limits of their authority.

Now more than ever, we need professors, deans and presidents to pursue their educational vocation with moral clarity, tenacity, courage and creativity. To hand off responsibility for improving the quality of campus debate to a nonprofit organization or hastily established university office of civil discourse is not an act of educational leadership. It’s the opposite.

What could the leaders of America’s universities and colleges do instead?

They could require all schools and departments to incorporate into required courses units and activities devoted explicitly to assessing the credibility of online information relevant to their discipline. They could pause business as usual periodically to hold daylong learn-ins on some of the controversial topics currently dividing society. Instead of shying away from differences in ideology and perspective among faculty members, they could exploit them to create collaboratively taught curricula that explore contentious social and political issues in intellectually disciplined ways from multiple viewpoints. These are just some examples.

I’m not naïve. I recognize that initiatives like these require a lot of organizational heavy lifting and bureaucratic arm-twisting: reallocating teaching hours, rejigging course requirements and so on. Significant change of any kind requires a willingness to put in the hours and take the political flak. But teaching students how to think and argue is what universities are for. If this cause isn’t one professors, deans and presidents are willing to fight for, what is?

Finally, I have a suggestion for what presidents could do with the money they’ll save on outsourcing: Divide it in two. Use one half to incentivize professors and deans to create first-class courses and activities of the kinds described above. Use the other half to hire the help you and your senior team need to become more savvy, strategic, courageous and effective educational leaders. If such help includes working with external consultants, so be it. Just make sure their goal is to make themselves superfluous as quickly as possible.

Universities are complex organizations, subject to numerous bureaucratic pressures, ideological disagreements, occasionally baroque processes of decision-making and incompletely articulated chains of command. There’s no shame in seeking help from outside experts to figure out how best to initiate and manage cultural change. But don’t allow such help to become a crutch or an alibi. Make sure it focuses rigorously on enabling you and your leadership team to develop your internal capacity to function independently in the future.

America’s colleges and universities have a unique opportunity to influence how the nation’s citizens form opinions and argue over them. To exploit this opportunity, the leaders of these institutions must learn from the mistakes of the past. To quote Jessie Potter’s homier (and verifiable) version of the Einstein misattribution with which I opened, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”