Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 63
The Academy
As a young faculty member representing my colleagues, I found myself dis-
cussing a serious financial problem with the governing board. I insistently and
righteously emphasized that the academic program should be exempt from any
proposed cuts, especially the loss of faculty positions. As the conversation began
to turn sour, the board chairman offered a gentle but pointed rejoinder that still
echoes in my thoughts: “It seems that the faculty wants the board to build a little
white picket fence around the campus to protect it from danger and evil. We are
not able to do that.”
The imagery of the white picket fence brings to mind a whole set of associa-
tions and symbols for one of the traditional visions of the academy as a protected
domain, a place apart from the getting and spending of the world, one that serves
fundamental values in which the good is rational inquiry. Behind the imagery, one
finds a powerful paradigm. Even if it is mythic, it is of the structural variety that
touches deep sources of meaning because it describes the purposes of academic
communities. As we enter it, the academy seems to be a timeless place with immu-
table purposes. We see teachers engrossed in study for the joy of it, or engaged
in deep conversations with one another or with students. They are elaborating
ideas in elegant detail. Everyone assumes that rational inquiry and discourse will
produce virtue and wisdom, though its usefulness in the wider world is of little
concern. Even when they are highly skeptical of all received truths and are ener-
getically engaged in deconstructing every idea and text that they encounter, the
academicians believe that their own ideas are good for their own sake. People
enter and leave the academy as they choose; it charges no fees, and no one is
compensated. Since no accrediting society has yet tracked it down, nothing is
measured, except by the standards of rigor and originality. If anyone uses the
word “strategy,” it is to refer to warfare. As the generations succeed one another,
some teachers begin to worry about the place. A number of little white fences
have come to dot the landscape to discourage people from venturing out of their
intellectual domains and to keep away students who are not serious about the
conversations, or who are looking for jobs.
The Corporate University
For reasons that no one can remember, the academy experiences a series of
cultural revolutions and it disappears. In its place there is now a vast university
on a campus with sweeping lawns and towering buildings filled with laboratories,
classrooms, studios, and offices, all stacked with books of policies and procedures
and filled with endless rows of computers. Thousands of students and teachers
and legions of staff members are rushing to and fro or circling the campus in
their automobiles, looking for a place to park. Different schools, colleges, pro-
grams, centers, and institutes are everywhere. Each of them is expected to secure
revenues by seeking gifts, enlarging enrollment, raising prices, cutting costs, and