As is the feeling,
So is the result.
The approved way to focus an organization on its mission is to decentralize its authorities, responsibilities, and assets. A network of decentralized authorities is stronger inherently, more adaptable contextually, and more agile into its self-maintenance and mission execution than is a centralized one.
About twenty years ago, when the U.S. Army resolved to increase lethality while also producing an agile and adaptable total force, they kept most traditional force unit nomenclature but pushed down through it authority, responsibility, and assets. With respect to available combat force, in effect brigades became divisions, battalions became brigades, companies became battalions, and platoons became companies.
For example, some SOF platoons deploy now without their company commanders.
These steps, and the thinking behind them, put the U.S. Army in good position for the mission given them following the Moslem Jihad attack of 11 September 2001 on US persons and property.
Last evening I enjoyed a movie, adapted from a play, named Lakeboat. David Mamet wrote play and movie, Joe Mantegna directed the movie, Andy Garcia acted in it. The move’s premise — a graduate student’s summer vacation job — is not and should not be a rare experience, although this particular job is: graveyard cook on a Great Lakes ore boat.
Mamet himself once filled the job depicted in the movie. I had a parallel experience, but on a river boat, PS Alexander Hamilton, and at the same career interval Mamet recounts of his own: between academic years at a graduate school. David Mamet’s son, Tony Mamet, plays the graduate student in Lakeboat.
Lakeboat is unlike most movies. Portrayals are uniformly superb by the entire cast of colorfully-drawn characters, cinematography is beautiful, inventive, the boat is real, music is compelling but not bumptious. The story line is real as well, and that makes Lakeboat unlike most movies. Think William Shakespeare and Giacomo Puccini rather than Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson. Lakeboat is an opera on screen.
. . . and gave me an idea. Summer job is old plot premise. Broadening experience via summer job is old didactic premise. Summer broadening experience is old social-career premise. Manual labor in daily curriculum of education is old monastic premise.
But throwing all of that time, money, and energy in the reverse direction would be a novel premise.
Its stewards — teachers, parents, students, administrators, citizens — have allowed our nation’s system of education to centralize and thereby fossilize as a playground for rent-seekers. Decentralizing the nation’s system of education would restore its focus and vitality to executing its mission. Throughout our nation’s system of education, authority, responsibility, and assets should be pushed down as near to the ground as possible.
What might that look like? Here are some thoughts.
Universe means turning to one. The mission of a university is to draw out from a nation’s pre-leaders the will and the means to turn their nation to one in the fraternity-sorority, the sweetness of love. This is done by decentralizing authority, etc.
Three Depositions On Theological Education
You may feel proud of your wealth and accomplishments, but you can not take even a single pie with you when you leave this world. Such being the case, why should you struggle to amass wealth? The money you accumulate will not follow you. To whom will it go ultimately? Nobody knows! Hence is it not better that you strive to attain divine grace? Even a millionaire has to partake of salt and rice only. Even he or she cannot swallow gold to satiate their hunger. Hence you must use wealth to undertake righteous deeds and earn merit so as to deserve divine grace. Some individuals feel proud of their youth and beauty. But they are momentary. Realising these important truths, all of you must accumulate the wealth of divine grace. When you contemplate on God all the time continuously with single-minded devotion, God will take care of all your needs.
Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, May 6, 2003 / Daily Email, Sai Inspires: Subscription
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Jim Meigs: Post-pandemic, four-year colleges need to change — or face extinction
I commented:
Decentralize. Make each department its own college, having its own self-styled authorities, responsibilities, and assets. Let each department, now as a mostly-independent college, prove attractive on their own, conduct their own affairs, sink or swim on their own intrinsic value to students, their families, and the nation generally. In Scotland this is called devolution when applied to the mix of political jurisdictions.
The central asset — formerly the college or university administration — a joint asset shared by a group of colleges, is severely downsized to function as long range intelligence (J2) and inspector general (IG) services for decision vectors generated by colleges for their own maintenance, work flows, and product designs and promotions.
This would strengthen the nation’s system of education and the nation herself, in large part by allowing rent-seekers bored into academies to self-destruct from loss of opportunities for self-propagation based on redistribution of income generated by other departments as well as through a university’s gilded bearers of golden begging bowls.