Some people still cling to the idea that an academic department is a tight box on an organisation chart, but those days are fast dying, and now a department is more like a clump on a network diagram with an increasingly diverse range of connections to other disciplines and institutions. It is true that for a long time to come, most of our students will still come to a physical campus and sit in a lecture room for 24 hours of teaching, but that is just cultural inertia. A range of forces now mean that the academic units which prosper will be those which can survive best in the Bazaar rather than the Cathedral.
I’d like to think this insight and what follows from it, is original, but of course it isn’t, and I was reminded of that this morning looking at Stephen Downes excellent presentation from Hawaii. What I do want to talk out though are the local implications.
We no longer have the old model of department = discipline = budget, having switched to school = budget and includes related disciplines. Separating the budgetary unit from the academic is a minor step now, but is very meaningful. When a discipline is no longer a budgetary department, it becomes clearer that a discipline a collection of approaches and tools to investigating a problem, or a lens through which one looks at the world.
Up to 2000, much research funding was controlled within the academic department, almost as patronage. Promising students could be recruited for graduate work and kept fed and watered through the part-time teaching budget. Now almost all funding comes from outside, and increasingly emphasizes collaborative projects. Now, to get funding you need at least three institutions involved, often with at least one international partner. It is not true to say that without funding you won’t get research students, but funding is driving people to collaborate. This requires us to review how we see the “silos” we work in, and how much time we need to put into working the networks.
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