ERP021 - Education w/ Dr. Ray

Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. So last week when I was talking with Dr. Ray Sue, we were talking about how VR is going to potentially impact education. And the use cases for how education could change in leveraging some future technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality. At one point in the conversation, we touched on the idea that education itself probably needs some evolution as well. And after we finished recording, we continued to talk a bit about that topic and found that it was actually a really interesting idea that both of us wanted to explore a little further. So we decided to set up a second conversation and we'll now lead into our part B or part two conversation with Dr. Ray Sue on the evolution of education. I think you'll find this one interesting and I hope that this is something that strikes a chord with people and we can actually begin a bit of a movement on the evolution of education. Enjoy. Okay, so one of the reasons why it's Okay, I'll be really frank. A professor's job may not be to teach. Okay, now, what do I mean by this? At a fancy university, one that prides itself on world experts of all different stripes. What is a professor rewarded for? A professor is rewarded for research, for running a lab, um, and not for teaching in the classroom. If a teacher under this kind of system, or if a university professor under this system, this incentive system that prioritizes research, takes time to care about teaching, takes time to replace those crumbly old notes with something that's more innovative that might be able to connect with more students, be able to um, better learning outcomes. In fact, the university professor is penalized for it. is penalized for caring about teaching. Every minute that is taken away from doing one's research, could be seen as a penalty. You know, so every minute that is spent on teaching could be a penalty to spending time on research. And that's one of the problems with the incentive system. People from the outside think that the role of the university professor is to teach students and to prepare the next generation for the world outside. When in fact, professors may not see themselves as having that for their primary task. So this is one of the reasons why collaborations are absolutely necessary. Because we need to understand what the incentives are for professors under this kind of system. It's not necessarily the professor's fault. Because as I say, they are penalized for spending time thinking about teaching. For caring about teaching. I personally think that that's wrong. You know, that's and I think that that's one of the challenges that we have within the education system. To be able to align what it is that people think the education system is for and what they say that they're for, with the people who are tasked with carrying it out and what their incentives are. So obviously research is still an incredibly important part of university life and that that is critical. Because there's a lot of things that get that get worked on that wouldn't have incentives outside of an academic environment. There's no commercial not a near-term commercial application for it. So you can't take away from that. But maybe it's a division of the role and that the teacher, the more the the the student educator acts as a facilitator and and almost like a tour guide. Of of the the the kind of the the education realm and the curriculum. Uh and maybe it doesn't make sense that the the professor is both research as well as a student tutelage. Maybe they are separate roles, you think that that that could be something that that would be useful? I think that would be a very valuable separation. And I think that one of the things that would need to we'd need to have some sort of cultural title shift um within university culture is the snobbery that is levied against people who merely teach with those who do uh research work that 40 people in the in the rest of the world can understand. You know? It's like right now, the people who are doing that work that 40 other people in the world can understand are the people who get um all the fame, all the prestige, and they get to benefit from snobbery towards the people who actually care about teaching, you know, who are tasked with the hard work that people from the outside think the university is all about. So with academia being a pretty established uh facility and faculty in modern day, how in hundreds of years of uh of tradition, how do you actually start to make a change in that? That is um practical and to be able to upset that tradition and and move towards a more modern age, which is we could argue for the better, but obviously there's going to be some resistance to that. Any any thoughts on how we move forward, any changes that we can practically make to make steps towards it? I think that there have actually been historically speaking quite a lot of recent changes, relatively recent changes that don't date back hundreds of years to the founding of let's say the lecture format or the seminar format or something. Um, I think that the financialization of the university system, um, actually has a relatively recent history. And the financialization of the university system in ways that we would recognize today, um, are huge in terms of the kinds of different incentive systems that we've been talking about. Um, in terms of how to change that, I think that maybe I'm a bit of an economist, um, in spirit when I think that incentives can actually change a lot within a relatively short amount of time. Because it ends up shaping people's behavior and redirecting what it is that people, it ends up redirecting where they spend their resources, such as their labor and their effort and even their hearts. Yeah, and I see there's there's two components to this is how do you produce the appropriate outputs and the benefits that research can produce, which we we mentioned doesn't necessarily have um a near-term uh return on investment, but definitely has a longer-term investment. And the second part I guess would be uh the commercial interests uh would be fairly uh transparent. Um, but they may be short-sighted if you're looking for uh some ways to to incentivize the commercial end of academia. Uh it could be again corrupted by the the money the same way that that modern politics has been. I think there's how do you incent both of those but actually have them uh participate together and and overlap. It seems like a sort of a complex uh spaghetti uh to to peel apart and provide the correct incentive structure for academia as well as the commercial interests. I think I think one of the ways in which you might be able to picture academia as a kind of system that um might resemble let's see, structures on the outside is the ways in which it deals with reputation and brand. Um, universities live and die on their brand, on their reputation, on their prestige. And when, let's say, you hire a big name star professor in some obscure field, um, in let's say the humanities, the university is not looking to recoup the financial costs of that person's salary. Um, what that person brings to the table is a massive reputation, a worldwide reputation, that makes the university shinier. You know? And what is the end result of getting together so many people who have tremendously shiny reputations, um, into a small space and having them produce obscure work that 40 other people in the world within their field can understand. Well, one of the things that we might be able to look at is the ways in which it converts the kind of capital that these people bring to the table, which is you could call it cultural capital, you could could call it symbolic capital, you could call it human capital. But it's a different kind of capital than financial capital. You know, it's like when we're talking about a fancy, you know, novelist professor, who gets hired, um, they bring cultural capital to the table, um, and they get paid in financial capital. Now, what does the university then do? Well, one of the things that it can do is it can sell the naming rights to the building that these people work in. For example, at the at Simon Fraser University at SFU, they had the center for contemporary art. And one day they announced that the center for contemporary art was now the Goldcore Center for contemporary art. Um, and the naming rights were uh purchased for $20 million. And the people who were working in the building, the professors and the students and the staff were very surprised. You know, there were protests that were held about it. Um, but one of the things that we can see within the operations of the present day university as a large kind of institution is that administrators negotiate the exchange rate, if I can call it that, between cultural capital, I.E. uh reputation and prestige, and financial capital. So they are able to broker exchange rates between that by negotiating with companies. That's a great analogy, I think that that makes it crystal clear to me. And that that brokerage um in an exchange rate. That that's a great analogy. I like that one. It segues perfectly into the second half, which is the influence of that commercial interest. And how do we protect academia from an overt or self-interested commercial uh influence into into the the research space? I think that protecting it may be a lost cause. Because this is already the logic by way by which the university system works. What exactly is it that we're trying to protect? Um, I think that there are quite a few calls by people who might identify on the surface as being politically like me, you know? Um, who might say the same thing as you, um, in terms of how do we protect it? Um, and at the same time, they may be operating by the sense that it's like, oh, what I do is not bound up in money, I'm doing research in a way that is not corporatized. And I think that in fact, they're doing they're pushing the corporatism even deeper, you know, by pretending that what they do has nothing to do with money. Um, and I think that it's that it's by way of that. The feeling that in fact, we are still protecting something that is already utterly entwined within this system, um, that we are able to both fool ourselves and also push it deeper. Hmm. So the the next step that I would love to explore in this is um again on the the the financial influence. Uh and everyone knows that uh uh um secondary education and university and college has gotten extraordinarily expensive. Over the probably the course of the last 10, maybe 15 years, the the cost for for education, higher education has gone up so dramatically and and it's out paces, you know, almost everything aside from health care. Um, and you know, is that a necessity and especially if we're talking about kind of upending the current system? How do you continue to fund the university but still make it affordable, does it require more government input or is there better facilitation that could happen between the commercial interests and the universities that would help to reduce the cost and increase the practical output from from the higher education space? I think there could be uh beneficial negotiations. I think that there could be something that is worked out. But I also think that decision making is not evenly shared, you know, amongst all the stakeholders who are impacted by it. If you have, let's say, uh university administrators who are making decisions on behalf of a lot of the people who are impacted, it's worth asking what exactly uh their incentives are. Um, versus let's say distributing wealth more equitably. So let's say that the people who negotiate the naming rights multi-million dollar deals as to the naming rights of buildings. Let's say that they were to take this money and to um have, or no. Let's rewind a bit. Um, let's say that we had students in on the negotiations of this. And they said something like, okay, part of that $20 million is going to go towards student groups, who are going to be doing, you know, whatever it is that they feel is a just use of that money. I think that we could end up with a very different picture. Well, it's a. This is going to be interesting because I think the this this will continue to be something that I that evolves. Uh over the course of time and uh the uh you see a lot of research. In advanced technology coming through partnerships in university. And I think this is going to become a developing space where these interests and the alignment and as you've you've mentioned the incentive structures need to change. So it'll be it'll be fascinating to see uh how near term that that transition is. Do you have a sense, is this kind of a uh something that will potentially take 10 or 20 years or do you think that there'll be enough motivation and enough interest to start to readjust these alignments and these incentive structures in say the next five years? I think that there's a place for that kind of change within five years. What it'll take is people who are well positioned in order to affect that kind of change. What it'll be is an opportunity. If we wait 10 to 20 years for this to happen, um, it'll it the window for opportunity will have closed for the people to um work the border between the university system and industry. This is one of the things that I think um people who are, let's say, in precarious positions, because let's say they don't have the comfort of a tenured professorship or something and they're teaching from contract to contract. I think that by necessity, they have to have a foot both inside the university as well as outside of it. You know? Just by virtue of having work, you know? Um, and what that means is that they are well positioned to actually fess up to the fact that um, this is about money, a lot of this has to do with money. And in fact, they are well positioned to broker that exchange between prestige and reputation, cultural capital and financial capital. In ways that people who are much more comfortable within the system can pretend that it is not a corporatized system, that it is not about financial capital. Um, and they're also they're not going to be pushed in positions where they have to work with industry. And I think that if people seize that opportunity, they broker those deals themselves. You know? Then they can um do things that are for mutual benefit. You know? They can survive, they can also point a way into the future as to a better way of um having a bridge between university and industry and not leave it up to university administrators in order to broker that um on behalf of everyone. So you see this is probably something that acts uh as a change from within and not necessarily from led by the administration because in my head I was thinking that you need kind of bold administrators who are are uh coming in fresh and taking over the university's uh life direction as as it were. Uh but you're suggesting that it comes more organically from the outside and maybe permeates in, is that that what you're suggesting? I think that if we look at university administrators, we need to look at their incentives. The incentive structure. I'm not talking about individual heroic administrators. I'm talking about the incentive structure. Um, the framework within which um making a particular decision is either pushing pushing requires special effort to push something uphill, you know, in order to change things for the good. Or um it's easy because the system allows them to do it. And I think that it's the people who stand to gain the most, I.E. the people who are most disadvantaged by the system, who will be best positioned to fix it. Hmm. Yeah. Wow. And it's going to be those people who have a foot both inside the university system, and also the people who are have a foot outside of the university system. And the best place to find those people is on the border. The border between the university system and the outside. Right. Very cool. Dr. Ray, fascinating as always. Uh if this people really this really strikes a chord with people, they're they're interested to to see more and to to help participate in uh in the uh the evolution of the uh higher education space. Uh anywhere that you would suggest they check this out or or ways that they can help to facilitate this change? I think that there are initiatives that are popping up. There's one called the Ronin Institute, which is very interesting. And there's another one called Versatile PhD is to work together. If anyone wants to contact me directly in order to do this evolution, evolution, revolution, whichever you'd like, um, let's do it. Very cool. All right, we're going to we're going to leave it there. We'll definitely have you back to uh explore some further topics. This has been a lot of fun. Uh enjoy the rest of your weekend and all the best, thanks for taking the time. Thanks so much, Todd.