Beyond academic tribalism
This is the latest in a series of articles discussing the advantages and benefits of small campus academies such as Academia Libera Mentis. To read the preceding articles, visit (and subscribe) to the Stories of Academia Libera Mentis Substack.
What problems can a small campus academy address that large regular universities cannot? In this part IV, I talk about an integrated curriculum.
An integrated curriculum is somewhat of a holy grail in the social sciences: a unified set of ideas and arguments on how humans behave as individuals and in groups. Economics, psychology, neuroscience, biology, management, marketing, history, anthropology, sociology, and leadership sciences all deal with human behaviour. Since the human being studied is the same, you would think that gradually these various disciplines would over time agree on a common view of what is going on. Indeed, the notion of a Liberal Arts education and of inter-disciplinary studies is based on the idea that there should be a unified view. Business schools, consultancies, and a few popular science writers even promise unified views.
Yet, the reality of what is happening in social sciences is the exact opposite of integration. Rather than coming together, you get more and more disciplines and subdisciplines who each make their money by disagreeing with everyone else. Some 50 years ago, there were no separate disciplines of finance, management, marketing, or leadership. Now there are. Also, within each discipline, there are many subdisciplines that also do not agree with each other. Though relatively new, management science has already split into corporate governance, behavioural, planning, and so forth. The disagreements are deeper than merely some particular type of behaviour studied (like eating or speaking in public): the disciplines and subdisciplines disagree on why humans do things, how they do them, and what humans can do to become better at what they do.
As the quip goes, if you ask five economists about human behaviour, you will get five opposing views – six if one was educated in Hungary. Subdisciplines have their own jargon, their own textbooks, and are in somewhat of a continuous competition for students and academic prestige with other subdisciplines within their overall discipline. The social sciences are thus drifting apart, even though their essential subject has not changed for 100,000 years. With more social scientists, all you get is more disintegration as each small group tries to carve out some space for itself, using new jargon to prevent others from easily ‘getting’ what they mean. Whilst the idea of an integrated view remains the Holy Grail, more and more tribes are occupying and dividing the same territory. Their research is more and more repetitive, less and less insightful, simply because they do not actually have much new to say.
At present, there hence is no social science integrated curriculum. It simply does not exist, at least not in the public domain. What poses as inter-disciplinary is multi-tribal. So, the first year of a liberal arts degree is simply made up of different tribes running a course for students, trying to convince those students to do more studies in their tribe. You get the economist talking in economics jargon, trying to convince the students to do economics in subsequent years. The marketeer and the psychologist do the same, but then with their own jargon and tribal sales pitch.
In business and management schools, it works similarly: teachers come from a recognised discipline and are trying to convince both the students and the management of their school that there should be more of them and less of the others. Tribal logic dominates.
Small academies can escape from this tribal logic whilst large universities cannot. Unlike large universities, small academies can get a sufficient degree of cooperation between the academics. They have the financial incentives to do it. And they can ignore the wrath of the disciplines.
Small academies can generate and teach an integrated curriculum
What did we do at ALM to generate an integrated curriculum?
The pictures below, taken from our recent book ‘Minds that Dare’, illustrate what we did.
The pictures in the ‘’Roof Tribe’ and ‘Tableau Academique’ illustrate the argument. In the top-left picture of the ‘Roof Tribe’ we see a tribe of academics enthusiastic about the ‘roof’ they are constructing. There is a basic structure of a roof that makes sense, but they are bolting on lots of things that make no sense: Strange contraptions with no real function except in their heads. Indeed, one of them is poised to add a windmill: More clutter. The top right shows students confused about what to do with all the junk. On the bottom left we see ALM students and academics stripping the usable idea of the roof of all the unnecessary and dysfunctional bits, leading to the bottom-right where we see a functional roof and a very irate group of roof tribe academics who are upset that their junk has been removed.
In the ‘Tableau Academique’ we see on the left-hand side the same idea applied to several areas. Apart from the bizarre roof, we see other ‘academic products’, also with lots of stuff that is in the way. A door with three key holes, a wall with a wheelbarrow and bricks sticking out, a road with signs and clutter in the middle. Those are the products of other academic tribes. On the right, we then see how the different insights of the different tribes – now uncluttered – have been put together into a nice house with a driveway. The previous knowledge tribes are no longer involved. The new construction raises new questions, like whether it would be even better with a playground and an orchard in front.
We thus took ideas and key concepts from all disciplines in social science (including biology, economics, neuroscience, history, sociology, management, and governance), stripped them of the jargon and excess fluff one finds those ideas infested with in regular academia, and then used them to illuminate all areas of human activity. It was a huge intellectual job. We called the resulting ideas and key concepts ‘anchors’ to capture the idea that students can use them to build their own worldview further, refining them and adding more specific details.
This is thus the core of what we teach. From about 100 anchors in total, ALM students learn the real dilemma’s of leaders, the reasons why all bureaucracies and large organisations are organised in divisions, the reasons why budget wars are ubiquitous and unavoidable in large organisations, the reality and uses of propaganda, the value and habits of free speech, the reality and uses of flattery, the great value of the stock-flow model in science, the do’s and don’ts of presenting to others, and the fallibility of all data and yet their great value.
Why could we generate this? For one, we had a lot of bundled expertise in the core academics building the curriculum: myself, Professor Gigi Foster, Dr Tjeerd Andringa, Dr Erika Turkstra, and several others. Together we spent over 100 years in many different universities and other places that teach others (consultancies, government, international organisations). Together, we have learned and taught economics, econometrics, statistics, biology, health, history, psychology, management, neuro-science, and all those other areas.
Much more importantly though, we were with a small group doing the integration. About five of us actually did it with another five or so involved as feeders of material. We were a tight group, a tribe of our own if you like. Moreover, we were explicitly oriented towards generating an integrated curriculum. We were not sent by a tribe, nor did we have to report to a tribe. We were truly free agents bringing our knowledge and expertise together to create the best curriculum possible for our students.
A small academy can do this if it has the right people, i.e. a few people who combine a huge amount of expertise truly willing to step out of their former tribes and work together because they want to generate the best for their own students. ALM had unusually good people to do this with – academics who were already very broad for many years even before they broke with mainstream academia – but in principle other small academies could do it as well. The academics of ALM are not the only broad thinkers in academia, nor the only ones to have broken away from mainstream academia because they felt regular universities no longer worked.
Whilst not the only ones who could do it, we do believe we are the first to actually make a serious effort to generate an integrated curriculum. In our small academy we could design a first draft, run a pilot program to see if it worked, adjust, run another pilot program to fine-tune, and write it all up. It took us two years to do it and an unusual group of top students willing to be guinea pigs.
What problems would a large university run into if it tried to do the same? One might think the resources of a large university are far greater and they can call upon top scientists too.
Consider how a bureaucratically run large university would try to do it: it would bring together, say, ten top scientists from ten different disciplines in the university and tell them to put together a truly integrated curriculum using a unified language that avoided the jargon and the fluff of their individual disciplines. The bureaucracy could even team them up with a group of top students who were told they were part of a unique learning experiment. All the ingredients you need, you would think.
But consider what one is truly asking the academics involved in such an endeavour: one is essentially asking them to betray their tribe. They would be involved in the stripping down of the core ideas of their discipline and using different language to describe those ideas, thus offending every Nobel prize winner of that discipline who got famous for bits of jargon. They would offend every part of the tribe whose concepts and ideas would not make the grade and would not even be mentioned in the integrated curriculum. They would at a stroke threaten the lecturing jobs and research program of their entire tribe since that tribe would suddenly find itself downstream from the new unified curriculum.
Would their tribe thank them for that betrayal? Would the betrayal make it easier or harder for the betrayer to subsequently publish in the journals controlled by the tribe? Or would the tribes complain about every little part of the new curriculum, mobilising against the ‘betrayal and dumbing down of science’? No prizes for guessing what the tribes would do. If there is any hint that they have been betrayed, there is no coming back into the fold for the person who betrayed them.
So imagine being one of those top scientists in the room with nine other top scientists from the different disciplines – the different tribes. One is basically fighting for the amount of space that one’s tribe gets in the integrated curriculum. One is representing the tribe. The ten would not cooperate but fight each other tooth and nail. Both ego and the wish to survive would drive the members to fight. What they would come up with would then be a monstrosity – something that preserves all the fluff and jargon of the tribes in that room. It would be gibberish, the result of a Tower of Babel.
Large universities hence cannot generate an integrated curriculum because they are themselves made up of different warring tribes.
Only entities too small to have multiple tribes can truly integrate. And when does a group of academics start to break up into smaller groups? In my experience, as soon as you have more than fifteen of them. That is about the maximum size a small ‘band of brothers’ can have. It is, not coincidentally, also the size of the larger team sports. There are fifteen rugby players on the pitch, eleven football players, and six volleyball players. Fifteen is about the maximum that allows tight cooperation between human adults (and yes, I know about the higher Dumbar number, but that does not refer to a single team). Ten well-coordinating academics is already a lot. More than that and you should expect them to break up into smaller groups, fighting with each other for students and prestige.
Actually teaching an integrated curriculum well is also nigh impossible for a large university but easy in a small academy. I am here not thinking of difficulties in having good academics with interested students in the same place, but of the limitations for students to immediately apply what they learn.
In a small academy, the students can immediately apply what they learn about diets on the meals they consume as a community. They can enact democratic principles and leadership tricks on each other when they are a single community. They can similarly do experiments, have conversations, and market to each other in ways taught in class when they are a tight community.
This is not possible in a large university because there, students are not tight communities. Indeed, the regulations of the large university invariably prevent the students from experimenting with others. So they cannot experience the value of what they learn and thus cannot easily integrate them into their own emerging worldview.
Hence, in my opinion, only independent small academies can both generate and teach an integrated curriculum. Perhaps consultancy firms and governments could also try it since they are also independent from the academic tribes and could gather the necessary ingredients, but they too would be hampered by their own incentives to please clients, populations, and vested interests. They would struggle. Large universities certainly could not do it. But small academies can.
Small academies have the financial incentives to do it
There is a huge implicit market for an integrated social science curriculum. After all, by stripping out the fluff and the nonsense, one can develop students much faster. In stead of confusing them most of the time, one would be putting their development on steroids. That has huge commercial potential, particularly at the elite level.
On the other hand, teaching ‘regular stuff’ is a financial dead end for a small academy. If one teaches the same as regular large places, one has no competitive advantage, but high extra costs. After all, teaching smaller classes is more expensive than teaching large classes. Small academies that want a lot of combined expertise in particular need teachers who are quite valuable to regular universities, increasing the costs of running a small academy. For a while one can appeal to sympathy and idealism, but those will not pay the bills in the longer run, so at some point one has to incur those costs as a small academy. One needs to find a good revenue stream from an unusual product, and an integrated curriculum is such a product.
So, small academies have the financial incentives to do it.
Large universities do not, unless they are in dire financial trouble with students abandoning them. Yet, even then, it would take years to develop an integrated curriculum of their own and gain a reputation for that new curriculum, so it would probably be too late for them.
Regular large universities though, especially the most prestigious ones, are making lots of money anyway, or have such large endowments that they don’t need to care about students. Why would they invite the difficulties of an integrated curriculum? They can simply claim to teach one anyway and keep things as they are. They are under no financial pressure, at least not at the moment.
Small academies can ignore the wrath of the disciplines
Large universities are, when it comes to what and how they teach, essentially coalitions of several academic disciplines. Each of those disciplines is somewhat like an international union, a tribe. Large coalitions of such tribes cannot openly defy those tribes without inviting their wrath. After all, the issue for the tribes is existential, particularly if a prestigious large university were to break ranks. They would not merely go on strike and write damning pieces about how a defying large university is abandoning science. No, I would expect the tribes to organise and punish such a large university.
How can tribes punish a large university that would seriously pursue and implement an integrated curriculum and thus threaten the current tribes? They could close their journals to anyone from that university. They could bar them at conferences. They could tie them up in court cases. They could ‘alert’ regulators and accreditors. They could strip them of accreditation and thereby make it difficult for that university to get visas and government grants for students. And so forth. This is even true of business schools.
So only quite desperate universities and business schools could go the integrated curriculum route in a last-ditch effort to avoid bankruptcy. Or one that would see the potential and is financially able to defy the tribes so as to be first….
Now, small academies have less to lose. So what if they bar the teachers from publishing? Those teachers can still write books and set up new journals. So what if the small academies are barred from accreditation? They start without accreditation anyway. Even if they wanted to, it would take many years to get accreditation, so they have to grow without accreditation for many years no matter what. There is simply much less for the academic tribes to take away from small academies.
Even more fundamentally, small academies are much less tied to any particular country or physical place. Unlike large universities, which have huge investments in a particular physical place and are usually fed students by local high schools, starting small academies have no super-expensive physical place. They can sell whatever building they start with and move countries, taking their reputation and curriculum with them.
It is thus much harder for authorities and academic tribes to successfully threaten small academies. They can defy the wrath of the academic tribes. Which is exactly what we did at ALM.
The same argument holds for defying political correctness and the influence of vested interest on the curriculum: large universities cannot defy mainstream politics and large commercial interests, but small academies can. ALM does not have to be woke, climate-sensitive, or pro anyone in any war. Because we are small and not in the tentacles of bureaucracies, we can avoid all the things that constrain large universities.
With little to lose and much to gain, we did generate an integrated social science curriculum that indeed does have the potential to wipe away most of the current territory of the social science disciplines. Exciting times. Read much more about it in our book ‘Minds that Dare’.
