Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education

Creating a Culture of Mindful Innovation in Higher Education makes a vitally important contribution to raging debates on the ‘‘crisis’’ of higher education in the United States. In essence, Michael Lanford and William Tierney demonstrate how the ‘‘crisis’’ is misdiagnosed and, accordingly, why American higher education needs a different solution than the neoliberal one increasingly popular among policy-makers and administrators. To begin with, Lanford and Tierney identify the widespread neoliberal discourse of ‘‘innovation’’ as a driving force of the ‘‘crisis’’ debates. This discourse traces the root cause of rising tuition and fees, declining public confidence, and other major problems of higher education to the inability of faculty to innovate to keep up with the changing structures of the economy and society. This inability, as the discourse goes, ultimately stems from the tenure system and shared governance that perpetuate institutional inertia and conservatism. The solution, then, is to ‘‘disrupt’’ the tenure system and shared governance—to make higher education institutions more agile, entrepreneurial, and innovative—by introducing the latest technologies and corporate practices. Lanford and Tierney comprehensively deconstruct this neoliberal discourse by illuminating how the tenure system and shared governance have in fact made American universities innovative, propelling them into global leaders in research and education. Specifically, they show how the tenure system and shared governance enable faculty to acquire deep expertise, retain intrinsic motivations, and consider diverse perspectives, all of which are indispensable for substantive innovation. They also illustrate the multifaceted nature of higher education— not simply training the future workforce but also educating citizens, building communities, and producing knowledge as the common good—to explain why ‘‘disruptive innovation,’’ narrowly technological and economic, is likely to have only limited, and often negative, effects on higher education. While delineating the advantages of the tenure system and shared governance, Lanford and Tierney also recognize that higher education nonetheless needs innovation to effectively respond to ongoing economic, sociocultural, and demographic changes. To this end, they propose a new kind of innovation—‘‘mindful innovation’’—that will empower higher education institutions to build on their unique strengths to become truer to their missions and ideals. Specifically, Lanford and Tierney elaborate on their proposal for mindful innovation in terms of the following six tenets: ‘‘(1) societal impact; (2) the necessity of failure; (3) creativity through diversity; (4) respect for autonomy and expertise; (5) the consideration of time, efficiency, and trust; and (6) the incentivization of intrinsic motivation and progress over scare tactics and disruption’’ (p. 9, p. 143). Although I enthusiastically support this proposal, I also find that it relies too much on secondhand knowledge of both ‘‘mindfulness’’ and ‘‘innovation’’ and, as a result, lacks practical details about how to combine the two into ‘‘mindful innovation’’ in higher education. Below, let me illustrate how the proposal will become more effective and serviceable if it better articulates such practical details. First and foremost, even though Lanford and Tierney use the word ‘‘mindful,’’ they devote only about two pages to reviewing mindfulness, and the review is rather superficial. Such superficial engagement with mindfulness might have compromised some of their main points. For example, they suggest that, in a culture of mindful innovation, ‘‘[c]ollegiality should not be 452 Reviews