When it comes to worrying about the malfunctioning of supply chains, I had a head start.
Long before container ships began piling up at ports, the Good Ship Academia bore a distinct resemblance to an immobilized container ship, loaded with valuable freight and going nowhere.
Even as the production facility called “higher education” operates as an unflagging assembly line for ideas and insights, the delivery system for these products remains far from robust. Thankfully, a significant number of faculty members persist in transporting ideas and insights to the wider world. And yet, in the bigger picture, far too many of academia’s discoveries and findings never reach the communities and the individuals who could benefit from them.
This has to change.
And, after half-a-century in higher education, I have an idea of how to change it.
The origin of the problem is easy to identify: 1) higher education has been around for a long time, and 2) every institution that has been around for a while ends up impaired by the proliferation of counterproductive customs.
The solution to this problem is even easier to identify.
The leaders of higher education must take on the joyful task of removing the counterproductive customs that block the university-to-public supply chain.
To demonstrate how easily this can work, I have picked an example that carries very little interest and absolutely no drama, on the theory that we can consider this boring example without agitation and challenge it without turmoil.
The example I have chosen is the FRPA.
Before general readers yield to the despair that academic jargon reliably produces, I will quickly decode this acronym: FRPA (pronounced “furpaw”) stands for “Faculty Report of Professional Activities.” Full disclosure — my FRPA is more than a month late — and I will now spend spring break completing this pointless task.
Aside from my own inconvenience, the FRPA deserves attention because it raises counterproductivity to its highest peak. Although it is intended to put a premium on faculty productivity, with pitch-perfect irony, the FRPA fulfills this mission by bringing all productive activity to a halt. Every February, faculty members must comply with this FRPA-ian mandate for counterproductivity, ceasing all work of consequence and devoting innumerable hours to preparing detailed notations of all their activities over the course of a year, and then placing those notations in numbered categories in very complicated digital netherworld.
All this constitutes a stunning mismatch: the spirit-deadening categories that govern the FRPA collide with the urgent need to connect the work of faculty to a society in urgent need of insights and understandings.
Will this mismatch last into eternity? Are we stuck?
Not in the least.
It would be perfectly possible to retire the FRPA and to replace it with a new, genuinely productive custom, permitting faculty members to present their accomplishments in a format that honors the vitality and relevance of the essential services they offer to their fellow human beings.
And here’s the best part.
Published, circulated, and distributed, this breakthrough in faculty reporting would itself function as an effective, free-flowing supply chain, widening access to the ideas and insights produced by the academic world.
At the same time, this reporting-system-doubling-as-a-supply-chain would convey great hope.
“Even when you feel entrapped by outworn customs,” this new practice would say to the public, “you still hold the power to ask, ‘Can’t we do better than this?’”
In fact, we can.
P.S. You can see the FRPA, in all its intricate counterproductivity, at https://www.colorado.edu/fis/frpa-help#Complete.
Patty Limerick can be reached at [email protected], and you can find her blog, “Not My First Rodeo, at the Center of the American West website.
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