Deborah Stone opens her book Policy Paradox with a provocation: policymaking is not a technical problem waiting for a rational solution. It is a contest over values, conducted through the language of facts. Efficiency, waste, return on investment - these are not neutral descriptions. They are argume...

On Overfunctioning, Urgency, and the Administrators Who Enable the System They Resent

This piece is the other side of a coin. In January, I wrote about the invisible labor that sustains academic departments; the unspoken contract by which research administrators absorb risk, compensate for structur...

What Ben Horowitz's survival manual teaches us about the moment universities are actually in

There's a genre of advice circulating right now aimed at university leaders scrambling to respond to federal funding cuts and administrative award delays. It goes something like this: diversify your revenue...

Killing Sacred Cows — Part 4 of a series examining the unspoken norms, taboos, and protected assumptions in academic research that are rarely questioned, even when they undermine effectiveness and resilience. This series names those assumptions, puts them up for debate, and asks whether they still d...