Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there were no strategic plans. Then, in the 1950s, large companies began with a process called “long-term planning”; by the 1970s, the energy crisis pushed many organizations to look for planning systems that would prepare them better for volatile political and economic environments. By 1983, the year in which George Keller published his Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in Higher Education, colleges were assimilated into adopting principles similar to corporate and government organizations.
I used the passive voice just now because, like the formal processes of accreditation and assessment, strategic planning has often felt to the faculty like just another instrument of corporate culture’s hostile takeover of academe. Professors found strategic planning desirable enough as a rational tool for the systematic and intentional advancement of their cherished educational goals. But most of us object to the uninspiring linearity of goal, objective, and action taking over in the 1990s and, in the 2000s, to the mechanistic progression from environmental scan, value proposition, mission, vision, through strategic matrix, key performance indicators, and implementation benchmarks and milestones. Most importantly, faculty members distrust strategic plans because their language reveals troubling assumptions about how a lot of academic leaders view their faculty.
As early as 1994, Henry Mintzberg, in The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, identified military theory (Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Clausewitz’s On War) and early 20th-century industrialism (F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911) as influential precursors for academic strategic planning. Since then, Mintzberg’s findings have been expanded to show how indebted the language of educational planning is to metaphors of aggression, battle, and war on the one hand, and to corporate scientism on the other. Related characteristics include hyperbole, excessive Latinity, and high levels of abstraction.
Latinity and abstraction are comprehensible features for plans made at universities. Less comprehensible is the attraction of leaders of educational institutions — founded on the traditions of critical thinking, rational decision-making, and participatory governance—to the language of aggression, exaggeration, and obedience.
The recent rise of the noun “agility” and its adjective “agile” in strategic planning and educational leadership may provide a revealing perspective. According to a Google Ngram search, the use of “agility” was on a slow but steady decline from 1800 onward; “agile” had enjoyed a small-scale increase in usage between 1800 and 1920 but remained stagnant from then on. Both words enjoyed very limited popularity until the mid-1990s. The same is true for “nimble” and “nimbleness,” two other buzzwords used synonymously for “agile” and “agility” in higher education. The words’ short-lived shining moment occurred during the decade between 1995 and 2005. After 2005, their overall usage in the Google NGram category “English” has returned to pre-1995 levels, and continues to decline.
Well, except in corporate and educational strategic planning, where all four terms are now omnipresent. Private liberal-arts colleges mandate “cognitive agility and career preparation” (Amherst). Large public research universities want to educate “agile thinkers and problem-solvers” (Minnesota). HBCUs position themselves “to be nimble and agile in responses to the market” (Morris Brown College). Religious institutions look for “new and nimble ways of delivering academic programs” (Bellarmine). And land-grant colleges urge “nimbleness in the face of rapidly changing forces in higher education” (Oregon State). So dear has the concept become to strategists that they even demand employees “embrace agility” (Millersville University of Pennsylvania) just like the time-honored Latin, Greek, or English abstract mottoes and virtues into which academic institutions used to compress their original educational values and visions: Freedom and Learning (George Mason), Sapientia et Doctrina (Fordham), Progress and Service (Georgia Tech), Veritas (Harvard).
If a university were founded today, would Agilitas be its motto? It could try, but there would be stiff trademark competition from Agilitas Private Equity, Agilitas IT Solutions, Agilitas Partners LLP, Agilitas USA Inc., and hundreds of others that have already latched on to the term.
It is possible to pinpoint the precise cultural moment when “agility,” “nimbleness,” and their related adjectives gained currency. Around 2000, corporate strategy, computing, and consulting all exploded with new ideas about more “agile” processes.
In 1999, Hewlett-Packard, engaged in a fierce competition with smaller, more swiftly acting companies, founded the medical-equipment spin-off Agilent Technologies.
Hailed as “Innovating the HP Way,” the new company wanted to be known for its fast and focused response to markets, which its “starburst logo” and name were designed to communicate. HP’s communicative strategy was widely admired, imitated, and remembered, especially because Agilent raised a record $2.1 billion at its initial public offering. It became a textbook case in successful corporate communication, and “agility” entered the lingo of corporate leadership.
Less than two years after Agilent Technologies burst upon the scene, a group of 17 all-male proponents of Extreme Programming, a software-development framework that aims to produce higher quality software, met at the Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah and wrote a “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.” The self-described “gathering of organizational anarchists” and “agilites” not only wanted to revolutionize software, but to rid all of marketing and management of “corporate bureaucrats” and their “Dilbert manifestations of make-work and arcane policies.” Specifically, the manifesto valued “working software over comprehensive documentation,” “customer collaboration over contract negotiation,” and “responding to change over following a plan.”
Agilite administrators imagine themselves as “coaches” or “handlers” and faculty as obedient “athletes” or “canines.”
Here, as with Agilent Technologies, the motivation for “agility” was lack of speed when responding to the variables of markets and customers, “the failure of the standard ‘fixed’ process mind-set that so frequently plagues our industry.” At a time when traders were executing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, agilites felt shackled to painfully slow processes dating back to the 19th century.
Agility, of course, is associated by most speakers of English with sports like soccer, hockey, and football — all of which sublimate war into a game. But before sports enthusiasts embraced the notion of agility for humans, it was almost exclusively applied as a technical term in the training of dogs. New York’s Westminster Kennel Club, whose competitive dog shows attract an annual audience of millions worldwide, recognizes canines not only on breed standards but also on their performance in the related areas of agility and obedience. Agility, specifically, is designed “to demonstrate a dog’s willingness to work with its handler in a variety of situations. It is an athletic event that requires conditioning, concentration, training, and teamwork. Dog and handlers negotiate an obstacle course racing against the clock.” Agility training keeps dogs “fit, flexible, and ready for adventure,” and they exhibit “fewer behavioral problems” if agility training keeps them “properly exercised and mentally challenged.”
What does all of this mean for academic strategic planning? A vast body of linguistic and psychological scholarship, from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s classic Metaphors We Live By through Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s The Way We Think, suggests that even the most quotidian human metaphors, analogies, and conceptual blends reveal underlying perceptions, desires, and motivations. Just as metaphors of war, battle, and aggression — first among corporate organizations and then in the academy — bring to light the military-style leadership principles abounding in strategic planning, so the widespread embrace of “agility” uncovers a strong desire among academic leaders to act more quickly, without cumbersome processes and restraints. The current generation of senior academic leaders, especially today’s deans, provosts, and presidents, was entering the formative phase of its administrative career path when Agilent Technologies and the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” began to be praised for disrupting traditional industry processes. Together with the future industry leaders and educational consultants of the same generation, those academic leaders became naturalized into thinking of agility as a foundational element of strategic planning.
For this influential group of agilites, traditional academic processes and the faculty members who perform them are the enemy. Agilites desire to emulate the accelerated pace and efficiency of corporations, but democratic governance, tenured employment, pedagogical and intellectual priorities, and robust deliberation impede quick progress. Such values are representative of the loathsome Slow Professor who, according to Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, deliberately resists the culture of speed in the academy. In their discomfort with what keeps them from moving as nimbly as their corporate counterparts, agilite administrators imagine themselves as “coaches” or “handlers” and faculty as obedient “athletes” or “canines” who, if properly trained and drilled, can become more efficient.
Once these trained human and canine resources will have become sufficiently agile, all that’s left to do is to unleash them. The Dish Network’s plot description of the 2005 movie Unleashed, starring Jet Li, Morgan Freeman, and Bob Hoskins, is instructive here: “A captive man is trained to be a personal attack dog for a vicious loan shark.” If this sounds too violent and mixes animal metaphors, consider the University of Kentucky’s promise to “launch aggressive growth initiatives designed to prepare and unleash armies of fearless problem solvers.” In a similarly combat-ready mood, Emory University is “Engaged for Impact,” ready to “unleash Emory and Atlanta’s shared future.” Even a religious institution like St. Peter’s University is poised “to unleash the full potential” of its employees into the world; the University of Virginia has created a service, UNLEASH, that matches undergraduate students with faculty mentors; Charleston Southern University says that “servant leaders,” too, can be unleashed; Stevens Institute of Technology thinks it will reach ad astra per aspera only if it can “unleash” the school’s “full potential;” and the University at Albany condenses its entire branding initiative into the slogan “Unleash Your Greatness.” And the University of Cincinnati, in a particularly botched effort at agilite rhetoric, recommends we “unlock our mission and unleash our vision.” Finally, educational consultants, not to be outdone by their academic customers, declare: “THE DIGITAL UNIVERSITY IS NOW THE UNIVERSITY. WE UNLEASH THEM BOTH.” Leash laws be damned!
The message of these images and metaphors is loud and clear: Only if higher education can release itself from the shackles of time-consuming, deliberative, intellectual, and democratic processes will it survive the challenges of the brave new world summarized in Baba Prasad’s 2018 book, Nimble: Make Yourself and Your Company Resilient in the Age of Constant Change. One of the endorsers of Nimble reminds us of the “agile dog eat not so agile dog” world we live in: “Prasad unearths a fundamental truth posited by Darwin and connects it to business — namely, that agility and emotional intelligence are as vital to business as they are to human survival.”
The biggest obstacle: Faculty members just won’t play the Darwin game. If they could only abandon their set ways and embrace the promises provided by software-development industries and management sciences, higher ed would rise to ever new heights of productivity. Proponents of the new brand of Agile Faculty are surprised that, so far, “very few people outside of computing sciences and management journals” have written about agility academically. I am not surprised, because the concept is part of a culture that misunderstands — though mostly without malevolence — what it takes to produce sound and evidence-based academic work.
For too many academic leaders, good professors are like agile canines. Conversely, dealing with bad professors is like “herding cats.” As Rob Jenkins once reminded us:
Like cats, professors tend to be highly intelligent, deeply self-actualized, and fiercely independent. They need to be stroked occasionally, but only on their own terms and in their own good time. Mostly, they just want to be left alone to do their own thing. They might not come when called — perhaps because they’re suspicious of the caller’s motives — but they may very well show up on their own when least expected. In fact, the real question isn’t whether or not faculty members are like cats. The real question is, “What’s wrong with that?” Perhaps, instead of constantly trying to rein in faculty members, we should be cultivating their catlike qualities.
Because it is meant to train the faculty to be high-performing within a prescribed obstacle course, the concept of agility has no place in academic planning. It inhibits the scholarly skepticism necessary to challenge existing paradigms. But it’s worse: Existing paradigms about scholarship, research, and education (e.g., conceptual schemata, theories, research techniques, bodies of data, and embedded criteria and processes for the validation of results), as even Thomas Kuhn would allow, were at least subject to years of testing and intellectual negotiation. Agility, however, is a complete chimera, a public-relations stunt that has failed, despite 20 years of aggressive propaganda and corporate support, to convince even the most innovative and entrepreneurial academic thinkers and practitioners. Finally, as the Modern Language Association has pointed out, “agility” is among the concepts that highlight and perpetuate the systemic ableism that plagues the academy.
Institutions of higher education aren’t fighting wars, they don’t need armies, and they sure don’t need agility drills. Instead of herding, handling, or unleashing faculty, academic leaders should encourage their tried and proven qualities, and trust them as true partners.
