Rethinking the Promotion of Adaptation in the University

Like most college professors in this Year of our Lord 2025, I sometimes think about what I would do if my position got the axe. I never come up with any good ideas, and my institution is relatively healthy, so I usually just let it go and get on with my work. Tomorrow will take care of itself.

But what is my work? I’m not sure I know anymore. For a long time, I thought my work had something to do with teaching young people how to think more clearly about certain questions together with other people and (more importantly) enjoy it. I even thought that the purpose of a university was to enable me and my colleagues to do that work, in our various ways, and that this purpose also defined the work of those whose job is not to teach but to administrate. But it seems the job description has changed.

Larry Locke recently reflected on several developments that are combining and massively disrupting what he calls the “industry” of higher education. New technology, demographic change, and shifting economic demand have combined to create a situation in which “those that prove unable to adapt may risk extinction.” Locke has both institutions and individuals in mind, but his discussion focuses on the latter – on people like me who wonder what to do about things they can’t control. And what we ought to do, he says, is adapt. This may rankle. For Locke, adaptation to disruption is Christlike: an exercise in kenosis, adapting to change by emptying ourselves of our former identities and taking on a new form for a new world. We can learn to teach online and learn to like it. We can learn to accept a loss of status and financial security. We can even learn to enjoy this new world since it brings new challenges, which are always also new opportunities.

Professor Locke is so bullish on adaptation that I wouldn’t be surprised if he suggested that adaptation itself is our job. This is a rather popular idea in his discipline (business), and it is probably a very sensible idea if your business is business. In fact, I cannot imagine many ideas better suited to the needs of business than the idea that everybody needs to be able to adapt to the needs of business. A university, however, is not a business. It is not an “industry.” To the extent that it is an industry, it is not a university. That is why plenty of our universities today are universities in name only. They have adapted themselves all too well.

I can understand and (depending on various ethical considerations) admire people who do what they must to survive a change of circumstance. If the disruptors come for me, I’ll do what I have to do. But the fact that we might have to adapt to a new circumstance tells us nothing about whether the circumstance is good or even whether it is necessary. These are the questions that Professor Locke avoids by lauding adaptation in such theologically loaded terms.

Professor Locke might reply that these questions are separate and that he merely chose to focus this particular essay on the skill of adaptation itself, without meaning to foreclose any larger discussion about whether one ought to adapt to the new dispensation, or whether the new dispensation ought to exist. That said, he does not merely write in praise of adaptability: he presents adaptation as the only alternative to extinction. This is only true if the changes in question are inevitable. If the changes are inevitable, then adaptation is necessary; if they are not, then adaptation is just another word for acquiescence.

It is certainly true that I as an individual cannot do much to stop these changes, though that is irrelevant to the more useful question of who starts them. The rhetoric of inevitability is very convenient to those who benefit from a change since it allows them to wash their hands of any responsibility for those who are hurt by it. But even if changes are inevitable, this does not show that those changes are for the better. Professor Locke seems to suggest that they are, although I am open to clarification. He says the old order provided merely “comforts and qualifications,” while the new one offers “adventure,” with “new skills to learn, new disciplines to explore, and new landscapes to navigate.” Locke wants us to think of adaptability to this new landscape as a species of humility. And it is true, in a general way, that we ought not to be so tied to our image of ourselves as “professors” that we fail to do what is good for fear of losing our identity. It is also true that, in many cases, it is good to do what is necessary, even if the fact that it is necessary is bad. But humility becomes something else when it leads us to pretend that bad is good or worse is better. “Servility” is the better term for that. Christ accepted death on a Roman cross; he did not accept Rome. That was not his mission.

There is a debate to be had here. I am open to the argument that what is emerging is or will eventually be better than what is passing away. If it persuades me, that argument will be very concrete and practical. It will provide a comprehensive inventory of losses and gains (many of which are not the kind of quantifiable costs and benefits so beloved of those who like to “move fast and break things”), and it will show that the net result is positive. Most importantly, it will define the losses and gains in terms of a university’s constitutive purpose and a professor’s proper work. It will convince me, for example, that teaching online for bad pay is a better way to introduce people to the convivial life of the mind rather than just being a faster way to dump content into brains.

I am obviously pretty skeptical. But my point here is not to engage that debate. Instead, it is to insist that Professor Locke’s approach closes the debate down. Meanwhile, we desperately need to open it up. We should indeed be talking about how to adapt, but we should not be talking as if adaptation itself is our goal. We should be talking about how to adapt in such a way that we draw closer to our purpose. I actually agree that these disruptions are best understood as opportunities. As I said, many universities have adapted themselves into a lot of bad habits: by all means, disrupt them. But everything depends on discerning the good from the bad. Giving “change” a blank check and hoping the chips fall into a better place is no way to proceed, and it is no virtue.