What the MIT Dean’s New University Can Learn From Past Upstarts

Olin College

Christine Ortiz sparked a mix of curiosity and skepticism last week, when she announced her plan to step down as dean of graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and start a nonprofit university with no lectures, no departments, and no tenure.

When her as-yet-unnamed university made its way into conversation on social media, some people asked: Doesn’t this model already exist? And do ideas like eliminating departments and courses really work?

To try to answer those questions, The Chronicle spoke with administrators at two institutions that were founded with similar ambitions to shake up the standard system: Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, founded in 1997, and Hampshire College, which enrolled its first students in 1970. Both are Massachusetts-based institutions with transdisciplinary programs, and both struggled to figure out how a model without departments, traditional majors, or tenure could get funding, faculty members, and students.

For Ms. Ortiz, who plans to use MOOCs and other recent innovations at her university, the challenges will certainly be unique. But below are some lessons from once-upstart institutions.

What was the biggest challenge in starting a college with a unique model?

For Richard K. Miller, the president of Olin and its first employee, the main concern was meeting high expectations. “Once you make an announcement, ‘Hey, we have a better idea, we’re going to start from the beginning and do everything differently,’” he said, “it’s a little like sticking your thumb in the eyes of everyone and saying, ‘You’re doing it wrong, so watch me, I’m going to do it right.’ That puts pressure on.”

He added that if he were starting the same college today, he would double the estimated cost and time to do it.

How do you get students interested in something that doesn’t yet exist?

For Aaron Berman, one of Hampshire’s first students, the choice came down to chance. When he was in high school, his mother saw an article in the newspaper about plans to construct Hampshire, and his high-school history teacher happened to know the director of admissions.

He said that applying to a college without a reputation or grades presented a lot of “excitement about everything being new and experimental,” and Hampshire quickly became his first choice.

And he’s still at Hampshire, as a professor of history and a former dean of the faculty. “People have asked me, ‘Didn’t your parents care that you were going to a school that wasn’t fully accredited?’” Mr. Berman said. “The reality was no one in my family knew what accreditation was.” He added that one of the biggest features Hampshire had to offer as a new college was its participation in the Five College Consortium, which also includes Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Mr. Berman said that, both then and now, the consortium is a way to offer students a larger array of courses than Hampshire could produce on its own.

Another way to attract students is with low tuition. With the support of a $460-million donation from the F.W. Olin Foundation and a goal of recognizing students’ academic achievement, the engineering college offered all students a full merit scholarship. However, those full scholarships were cut in half for students who entered after the 2008 financial crisis because of fiscal setbacks at the college. Mr. Miller clarified that no Olin student pays the full tuition, which is about $45,000 a year.

How do you attract quality professors?

Asking scholars to teach on a campus that doesn’t yet have buildings or alumni doesn’t give potential faculty members a very clear picture of what they’re getting themselves into. When you throw out tenure, too, that leaves your college with even fewer tools to attract professors, said Mr. Miller.

However, both he and Mr. Berman said that starting a new institution in Massachusetts, as opposed to, say, Kansas, makes it easier to attract highly-sought-after faculty members. Mr. Miller went as far as to say it was a “nonissue” because “Boston is like the Silicon Valley of higher education.”

Hampshire doesn’t offer tenure, but faculty members can eventually get 10-year renewable contracts, Mr. Berman said. The college has been able to hire good faculty members because of the freedom of interdisciplinary programs, which lets professors “teach whatever they want.”

What are the challenges of having no departments or traditional majors?

Mr. Berman said that, as a student, he was attracted to the interdisciplinary model because it allowed him to work with professors to choose his concentration. At first officials thought students, in theory, could complete their entire degree as independent study, without taking courses. But, he said, faculty members learned over the years that they needed to balance projects with teaching. “When I’m teaching history, I’m more concerned my students learn how to do history rather than know history,” he said. “But you can’t do history if you don’t know history.”

Now, he said, professors see courses as places for projects to start and ultimately lead to independent study. The fact that there aren’t specific departments means students need to build close relationships with professors to talk about how they will focus their studies in a concentration.

For Olin, not having departments changed everything, but in a good way, said Mr. Miller, because clusters of people didn’t fight for resources. The bigger challenge, he said, was building trust between the college’s faculty and its governing board. “The governance board you need in the first five years is very different from the governance board 50 or 100 years later,” he said, adding that in the first 10 months of working at Olin, he spent at least two hours a day, five days a week, on the phone. “It’s a full-time job,” he said.

What are the financial challenges of starting a college like this from scratch?

Unlike most start-up universities, Olin set out with a healthy endowment, thanks to the F.W. Olin Foundation. However, Olin suffered a heavy setback during the 2008 recession, which led to the decision to cut back on scholarships.

Hampshire, on the other hand, funded its initial construction and development with federal grant money and private donations it spent four years raising before the college opened. Kenneth Rosenthal, a vice chair of the Board of Trustees at Hampshire, said each academic building had at least $250,000 in federal grants, and residential buildings were constructed with government loans, the last of which are still being paid off today. The federal money came at a time when the government had a particular interest in expanding higher education.

“In any start-up, things don’t work out as you expect, and you still need a good plan, and you need credible people to work with you on that,” Mr. Rosenthal added.

His advice to Ms. Ortiz as she starts her new university: Raise enough money for such unexpected events, and hire the right professors to heighten visibility and stick with the institution in the early years.

Correction (2/8/2016, 12:00 p.m.): This article originally included a reference to a reported $120-million drop in Olin’s endowment after the recession. That number is incorrect, and the reference has been removed.

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