John O. Harney: Talking about cures at the BIF

View fullsize

Last week, I was at Providence’s Trinity Rep covering BIF2015, the Business Innovation Factory's summit of innovators. It was BIF’s 11th summit, my fifth as a guest. I was attending under a quasi-media category called RCUS, standing for the BIF mantra of “Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects.”

BIF founder and "chief catalyst" Saul Kaplan opened the talks by noting that earlier in the week was the Jewish New Year, based on the Book of Life. That book is not closed. We can keep writing it by how we treat each other. A perfect opening for what was to come ...

Parked in front of the historic Trinity Rep was a food truck. It was Julius Searight’s Food4Good truck. A so-called “crack baby,” it is actually unrelated cerebral palsy that has left him with deficiencies in fine motor skills and slow speech. He told of living in foster care, getting adopted and reading far below grade level as a youngster. But that can’t hide the passion. He eventually went to Johnson and Wales University and got a degree in  food service and, after spending time with AmeriCorps, started the nonprofit Food4Good. His idea was to bring food to poor neighborhoods, so residents there don’t have to trudge to soup kitchens. Food4Good sells comfort food to those who can afford it, but also donates thousands of free meals to the needy.

Searight got a standing O. But other BIF speakers got heartfelt applause too.

Brain waves

Steven Keating is a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT, who works out of MIT’s Media Lab. In 2007, Keating, a self-described nerd, volunteered for an MRI mostly out of curiosity. The MRI revealed an abnormality, but doctors thought it was just something to keep an eye on. By 2014, he complained of a vinegary smell … interesting since the abnormality was near the part of the brain that controls olfactory senses. Another MRI showed that the tumor had grown to the size of a baseball. It was removed during “awake brain surgery.” Keating asked the doctors to videotape it. Three days later, he was back on campus and more determined than before to help patients collect and understand their health data.

At BIF, Keating showed videos of the brain surgery as well as a detailed map of his genome sequence, including the problem in the code. In the future, he wondered, could med students dissect themselves? Could they share images with researchers and others via medical selfies and crowdsource solutions? Why is it so hard for patients to get their own medical data, including genome maps? Why don’t hospitals have “share” buttons, to help patients determine the best course of treatment?

As a child, Matthew Zachary dreamed of being a concert pianist. At age 21 as a college senior and composer, he noticed his hand wasn’t working. He was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer and told he'd probably not survive six months and would never perform again. After his surgery, he wrote two CDs worth of music as if to defy those who told him he’d never be able to write music again. Zachary’s Stupid Cancer organization focuses on challenge facing 15- to 30-year-olds who have been diagnosed with cancer. It’s an age group that tends to be overlooked by cancer organizations focused on people at the two ends of the life spectrum. It’s a group that has age-appropriate challenges in terms of relationships, fertility and careers, And most of all isolation. Stupid Cancer brings them together. Incidentally, Zachary became the concert pianist he dreamed of being before the cancer.

Share and tell

Zipcar founder Robin Chase explained that in the past, when you bought a car or rented one, you were paying for a lot of time that the car was not actually being used. This “excess capacity” is what fuels the so-called sharing economy, which ascended with brands like Chase’s Zipcar and Airbnb. Chase asserted that peer collaborators are not consumers as much as co-creators. Her new book Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism flies in the face of the old advice to get a good job with benefits. Chase’s premise combines the best of people power with the best of corporate power. More networked minds are better than fewer proprietary minds. The benefits of sharing via open assets outweigh problems with sharing. (Nonetheless, the sharing economy has faced criticisms of late.)

Joshua Davis was working as a data-entry clerk when he noticed that if he keyed in something wrong, the machine beeped. As if it knew. So what was he doing there? Seeking something different, he went off to the U.S. arm wrestling championship in Laughlin, Nev. He came in 4th in the lightweight division. Fourth out of four. Good enough to make the U.S. team and travel to the world championship in Poland. Someone suggested that he write about the experience for a magazine, noting that the field has a fairly low barrier to entry. Suddenly Davis became a journalist just as suddenly as he’d become an arm wrestler. During run-up to the Iraq war, he offered to go to Iraq for Wired magazine as a war correspondent.

He also covered a group of undocumented Latino students from a high-poverty school in Phoenix as they designed an underwater robot out of scavenged parts that ended up beating the ExxonMobil-sponsored entry from MIT in the robot finals. His book about it called Spare Parts has been made into a movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, George Lopez and Marisa Tomei. And Davis has started a new publishing venture called EPIC True Stories and is a co-founder of Epic Magazine, publishing long-form true stories.

Crime and redemption

Moore’s Law suggests that computer power doubles every two or so years. The counterpart is Moore’s Outlaws, says security expert Marc Goodman. Criminals had cellphones before cops did, said Goodman, who has worked with the UN and Interpol. One challenge for the criminals was how to (in BIF parlance) scale up. Now drug cartels in Mexico have entire cellphone networks. Crime is fully automated. Criminal algorithms can carry out crimes. We have crimebots, but not copbots. The Target retail hack robbed 100 million people of personal info. An estimated 50 billion new devices will be on the Internet by 2030. Goodman warns that the so-called Internet of Things will just mean more to hack.

To illustrate his point, Goodman showed a 60 Minutes clip of a car’s operations being hijacked by a hacker via remote control. Moreover, he said, drones have been used to drop materials into prison yards and even spy on rival drug dealers. He showed one drone photo of a London apartment window lit up where tenants were growing pot. There is opportunity for one person to commit exponential good or exponential harm, concluded Goodman.

Catherine Hoke asked the BIF audience: “What would it be like if I was only known for the worst thing I’ve done?”

America, she said, is often not the land of second chances. Hoke pointed out that 30% of 23-year-olds already have a criminal record and 70% of children with incarcerated parents follow in their footsteps.

While earning about $200,000 at a New York City venture-capital firm, Hoke had the chance to visit a prison in Texas. She learned that a lot of incarcerated people had similar profiles as people in the BIF audience, including experience with sophisticated governance, bookkeeping and marketing (but were perhaps not so good at risk management, she joked, insofar as they got arrested). Hoke wondered what would happen if inmates applied those talents to entrepreneurship.

She started the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP) to help them do it. Under 5% of ex-offenders in PEP returned to prison within three years of release, compared with more than 40% nationally. Hundreds of PEP alumni started businesses.

Hoke returned to the theme of being haunted by the worst thing you’ve ever done. For her, it was relationships she had with some PEP graduates after a difficult divorce. She wrote to PEP people telling them about the poor choices she had made. She tried to kill herself. But in response to her confession, Hoke got thousands of emails of support. She realized people could love her as a human being, not just a machine that produces results. The venture capital firm offered her job back. She turned it down and created Defy Ventures to help people with criminal histories use their innate entrepreneurial skills to create sustainable, legal enterprises.

The recidivism rate for Defy’s entrepreneurs in training is 3%. They’re transforming their hustle into startups. Two Defy grads joined Hoke on stage, the man is CEO of ConBodym which employs formerly incarcerated people as trainers who teach the toughest prison style boot camp classes; the woman is CEO of a soul food truck. Hoke left behind a T-shirt that says “Hustle Harder.”

Dennis Whittle quipped that he was an ex-offender too: He spent 14 years at the World Bank. When told by his assistant that he was booked to speak at BIF, Whittle groused about what to speak on. Someone suggested that he prep by reading his bio. He did, and was struck by how good it was, including certainly his stint leading GlobalGiving, the largest global crowdfunding community for nonprofits, which was launched by the World Bank. But when Whittle realized he’d be in a lineup with cancer survival and other deep personal stories, he realized his resume is not how his life has actually felt. He explained that despite trips to exotic places such as Burma, his best time in the past year was touring coalmines and hills with his old friends from West Virginia. They wouldn’t know anything about subjects like BIF or crowdfunding.

But that connection says more about his life than his resume could. Saul Kaplan noted how different our resumes are from our lives. It’s a perennial BIF theme recently labeled by columnist David Brooks as resume virtues vs. eulogy virtues.

Overcoming obstacles

Jeff Sparr was ecstatic when his son hit a home run in a big Little League game. But Jeff couldn’t celebrate. He was having a panic attack. A manifestation of the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that creates attacks based on thoughts of his failure. Failure as a husband, as a father, you name it. It robs him of great memories like that round-tripper. Twenty years ago, someone told him painting might help. He painted and painted and painted. And he realized he felt better. He started giving his art away, when a friend told him it was not a good business model. When he sold $15,000 worth of art a few weeks later, he went to a children’s psych unit where he served on the board and had been a patient and delivered paints, brushes and canvasses ... and told his story. Sparr is another who’s scaling up. He created PeaceLove Studios in Rhode Island to train people to bring peace of mind to thousands of people.

Sophie Houser is a freshman at Brown University. She was involved in an organization called Girls Who Code, whose mission is address the gender gap in the tech and engineering sectors. Women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but just 25% of tech and computing jobs. Houser invented a videogame that addresses this and another crisis: self-consciousness among girls about menstruation. In the game called Tampon Run, girls throw tampons—which, Houser reasoned, should not be any more objectionable than the blood of shoot-them-up games. Back to coding, Houser told of how difficult it was to make the girl in the game jump up for a new box of tampons—the clichéd videogame gimmick to reload. Ultimately, she found 10 lines of code to make the girl jump.

Media outlets around the world picked up the story and, Houser and her co-inventor went to Silicon Valley and began working on a biopic. More importantly, said Houser, users said the game made periods feel normal … and some said they were inspired to code.

Tanisha Robinson calls herself an ultra-minority: gay, black, Mormon. She went to Brigham Young University, then joined the U.S. Army because she thought it was more tolerant. She became an Arabic linguist, but was kicked out under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, when she told. Then she went to Ohio State. Then Damascus to teach English. Then she returned to Columbus, Ohio, to form an organization called Print Syndicate. Her outfit sells T-shirts and other goods on the Internet branded with offbeat expressions for introverts to express social identity. Robinson says she watches out for marginalized groups. “We believe in equal pay so we pay all men 70 cents on the dollar,” she joked.

BIF likes to add some music to liven up the proceedings. Singer-songwriter and guitarist Dani Shay sang “Girl Or Boy” … a question many people were asking about Dani online. Why do they care? she asked. Shay jokes about how Justin Bieber emerged around the same time and looked a lot like Dani. Then she sang an upbeat too-happy tune mocking “all I want to be is on the radio,” following by one that she really does want to be on radio to help change the world. It’s poppy. Got the audience clapping.

Art of innovation

When Barnaby Evans came to Providence, he was stunned by how negative the people were about the city. He showed the BIF crowd slides of Mohawked hipsters on the one hand and an aging white crowd at an art forum on the other. The art world is siloed. Evans attacked both problems with his invention of Providence’s WaterFire art installation 21 years ago. All are invited. No tickets needed, Barnaby noted that a group of nuns from New Hampshire and a group of Hell’s Angels both came to a recent WaterFire, That’s a symbol of two different types of art audiences. He concluded fittingly with video of a funeral procession plying the river at WaterFire.

So much at BIF celebrates the new and spontaneous. Chris Emdin, associate prof at Teachers College at Columbia University and co-creator of #HipHop Ed, reminded the audience of the importance of things we’ve been doing a long time. For example, there’s a reason Serena Williams can be seen practicing tennis as a 5-year-old in Compton. In his work to get more young people interested in STEM, Emdin thinks back to growing up in the Bronx and seeing Black America in Stevie Wonder’s Innervision andSongs of the Key of Life. The morning of the BIF talk, news broke of a 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed of Texas being arrested because he brought a homemade clock into school and it was mistaken as a bomb. As a kid, Emdin worshiped Wu-Tang Clan and its disruption of the Grammy awards 10 years before Kanye West stormed the stage on Taylor Swift. Emdin was fascinated when a Wu-Tang Clan member GZA came to campus as a scientist. The two collaborated on a program mixing hiphop and science education for middle and high school students.

Mezzo-soprano Carla Dirlikov grew up in Michigan, the daughter of a Bulgarian father and Mexican mother. The parents never spoke a common language, so Carla learned both of their native languages and translated for them, And boy, can she sing? She delivers a beautiful opera with an accompanying pianist. Says she’s in search of duende like Lorca. (Or like George Frazier?) Opera, she reminded the BIF audience, allows the voice to focus on peaks and abysses.

Barry Svigals is an architect. Among designs by Svigals was a school in New Haven, Conn., which became the prototype for schools everywhere from 1996 forward. At BIF, he segued to a sign “We are Sandy Hook. We choose love.” He cited a friend, a former New Yorker editor who died and had stipulated that his memorial service include ponies and ice cream—a sensibility he worked into the Sandy Hook site.

Kimberly Kleiman-Lee is responsible for leadership development at GE, a company of 310,000, including 6,000 who Kleiman-Lee works with who are “responsible for shaping GE’s future.” Before she arrived, GE ran leadership meetings from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. in a room with no windows called the Pit. Kleiman-Lee created a massive sign in the style of a ransom note inviting leaders to go to a different room where their advice would be heard. She changed the vibe. The staff began serving meals family style among leaders. They brought them to Normandy and connected the daunting battle in front of the GIs with those they face at GE (and all with a straight face presumably). The No. 1 rule for corporate innovators, said Kleiman-Lee, is to give yourself permission to be fired.

Carlos Moreno, a former teacher at the Met School in Providence, is now director of Big Picture Learning. He grew up in the Bronx about five blocks from Fordham University, but had never stepped foot on the campus. He was a typical student athlete, he said, doing just well enough to remain eligible. Then one day, he was pistol-whipped and robbed for an $89 Cincinnati Bengals jersey. He knew that he should’ve gone onto the Fordham campus for help, but that felt like trespassing. His law-abiding parents from the Caribbean went and filed a report with police, but he knew there’d be no justice. His teachers and coaches were supportive, but none of them came from where he did, so could only offer limited help. There was no intervention before being thrown back into class.

At BIF, Moreno proposed addressing inequality with innovation. Schools are offering a politically correct but destructive approach that offers only one path to success. Big Picture Learning helps students find their niche and says it’s OK if they have different results. It’s OK for students to become “self-directed” and assess their own work. His advice: 1) pay attention to the whole child (including challenges and community issues); 2) pay attention to student strengths, not weaknesses; 3) be innovative in authentic assessments, so students demonstrate what they know; and 4) let students apply what they learn outside the school.

Big Picture Learning has launched a “relentlessly student-centered” Deeper Learning Equity Fellows for every student.

Alexander Osterwalder is a management guy and co-founder of Strategyzer.com. He noted that people spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime, But surveys show 70% are disengaged. Osterwalder spoke on “My Profession: Business Toolsmith.” He showed a slide of a rough, almost pixilated image of Pluto from 1997, juxtaposed with a highly detailed 2015 image of Pluto from the New Horizons spacecraft. If those tools have become so much better in that short time, said Osterwalder, you would think we could create tools to make companies better: not only to spit out profits, but also to get customers and employees excited and to make the world better. He shared his firm’s Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas and Organizational Culture—lots of diagrams and management buzz-phrases because the user interface is so important.

Saul Kaplan held a short conversation with John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific, which advanced less-invasive surgery such as stents to widen blocked arteries. Abele believes you can best help the patient by doing the least damage, so the patient can heal himself.

Self-healing, with a dose of innovation. That's BIF.

John O. Harney is executive editor of the New England Board of Higher Education's (nebhe.org) media outlets.

John O. Harney: Powering a slow recovery

The economic recovery  from the Great Recession is not jobless as economists once warned, but it is slow and uneven. Every month, the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution reports on the number of jobs the U.S. economy will have to create to return employment levels to where they were when the Great Recession began in December 2007, while absorbing people who enter the potential labor force. At the end of May, this jobs gap was 3.6 million. If the economy adds about 191,000 jobs a month—the average monthly growth rates since the jobs recovery began in March 2010 — the gap will not close until August 2017.

Meanwhile, in a recent study by the Federal Reserve, nearly half of Americans say they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.

The jobs recovery has been one of the measures that has preoccupied the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) in recent years.

NEEP is a member-supported nonprofit that provides economic analyses and forecasts. Historically, NEEP published macroeconomic forecasts of the New England region and its six individual states and held semi-annual “Outlook” meetings packed with colorful content about the economy in our backyard: which industries and occupations are expanding, which are shrinking and so forth.

The meetings used to begin with a national context set by big economists such as Moody’s. This was typically followed by state-specific forecasts from New England academic and corporate economists who volunteer to offer a report focused on each state’s economy, but tied to the particular conference theme: in the case of spring 2015, energy. The forecasts always rated a short report in the big daily New England newspapers and AM radio news—mainstays of taking the region’s economic pulse.

But these are somewhat leaner times for the economists' organization that always was a bit unsung. Last year, NEEP decided to do only one forecast per year, though forecast managers offered to do their own updates for this special conference focused on "Building the Backbone of Energy Efficiency" and held in June at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The spring 2015 conference was co-sponsored by the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and Brandeis International Business School, the latter of which has become something like NEEP’s guardian since the New England Council (NEC) ended a short-lived sponsorship in 2013, and Brandeis Prof.  John Ballantine became NEEP president. (The NEC, meanwhile, in partnership with Deloitte Consulting LLP, published a study on the promise of New England’s advanced manufacturing sector to provide jobs to middle-class workers.)

This year, NEEP broke with tradition, skipping the usual national forecast and going straight to the energy theme and the always-informative state forecasts—but this time without one of the six states: Rhode Island.

The energy discussion featured talk of a perceived abundance of oil and gas, much of it drawn from shale, as well as ambivalence about fracking, interest but underachievement on renewable resources and dreams of more pipelines.

New England’s energy prices have long been among the highest in the U.S. All six states rank in the top 10 nationally in terms of highest electric rates. Kevin Lindemer, managing director of IHS Global Insight/Cambridge Energy Research Associates, pointed out that despite so much talk about wind and solar, the region is reliant on gas, which we don’t have enough of, and nuclear, which we have a love-hate relationship with. Indeed, Maine and Vermont each closed nuclear power plants in recent years.

The spring 2015 state gigs were done by: Fairfield University  Prof.-Emeritus Edward Deak (Connecticut); Ryan Wallace of the University of Southern Maine (Maine) in place of his colleague Charlie Colgan (the canny Maine economist whose department's dismissal from the struggling university a year ago was an ominous sign of New England economic uncertainty); Northeastern University Prof. Alan Clayton-Matthews (Massachusetts); New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies economist Dennis Delay; and Vermont economist Jeff Carr.

Deak noted that Connecticut has 1.1 percent of the U.S. population, but contributes lower proportions of greenhouse gases. Spurred by fears of climate change, the Connecticut legislature has mandated that 27 percent of the state’s energy be supplied by renewable sources (including solar, wind, hydro, fuel cells and biomass) by 2020. Right now, the renewables portion is less than 5 percent, Deak said.

Deak added that Connecticut’s housing market is still suffering from the distresses of the Great Recession. (Nationally, the Labor Department reported that builders broke ground on new homes in April at a faster rate than at any time since November 2007.)

Wallace reminded the audience that Maine is the nation's oldest state in terms of residents' age and observed that the state is energy-intensive because of its traditional industries of paper (which is in free-fall) and shipbuilding. Fully half of Maine’s electricity comes from renewable sources—hydro, biofuels and wind. The big issue in Maine, Wallace said, is transmission: pipelines and high-voltage power lines to carry energy to and from Maine.

Clayton-Matthews said that while the Massachusetts economy has been outperforming the U.S., youth unemployment is disturbing—nearly 12 percent for people under age 25. And the number of people who want full-time work but have only part-time is more than twice what it was in 2007. Also labor force growth will decline to almost zero by 2018.

Delay reported that the Granite State added jobs, but the problem is job quality: two of three added jobs pay below state average wage. Moreover, Delay pointed out, the Market Basket worker protests of 2014 hit New Hampshire especially hard.

Energy prices in New Hampshire are very volatile, Delay said, noting that what used to be Public Service of New Hampshire is now Eversource. And in an effort to contain energy costs, proposals have surfaced that would pull New Hampshire from the nine-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative designed to reduce carbon emissions.

Carr said that Vermont has very energy-intensive industries form computer chips to famous food businesses including cheese, ice cream, craft beer and coffee. Vermont’s Comprehensive Energy Plan would have 90 percent of the state’s energy use coming from renewables by 2050.

TDI New England wants to build a 1,000-megawatt transmission line to carry electricity generated by Hydro Quebec in Canada to markets in southern New England. The so-called “New England Clean Power Link” would pass under nearly 100 miles of Lake Champlain, and the developer promises to include phosphorus cleanup, habitat restoration and recreational improvements.

“To be competitive in the future, New England must find ways to invest in a flexible grid and a mix of less expensive energy sources—gas, hydro, wind,” said Ballantine. “This requires a coordinated energy policy across the six New England states and investment of billions of dollars to modernize our infrastructure."

Lindemer observed that 60 percent of oil goes into transportation worldwide. Despite all those gas guzzlers you see out there, Lindemar claimed oil and gas are not “exhaustible” like fish and trees, especially with the cost of fracking going down as people learn how to improve the environmentally controversial practice—even pursuing so-called superfracking to crack more and deeper fissures in the earth to release more oil and gas. Talk about cracked.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (nebhe.org), on whose Web site this piece originated.

John O. Harney: Getting ready for the sixth mega-extinction

BOSTON More than 250 higher-education leaders from campuses across the U.S. met last week in Boston for the 2014 Presidential Summit on Climate Leadership.

The summit was organized by Second Nature, the supporting organization for the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). Almost 700 colleges and universities have signed the ACUPCC and committed to achieve carbon neutrality by balancing the amount of carbon released with an equal amount offset or buying enough carbon credits to make up the difference, but boosters voiced frustration that the number hasn’t been growing in recent years.

Registering at the Revere Hotel (still the 57 to me) I was greeted with a questionnaire that Emerson College students are using to track the summit's carbon footprint. I was proud to declare that I came by train and on foot.

On the way into town, I had tweeted about a new finding that global warming (recently sanitized as ‘’climate change’’) is wrecking havoc on fall colors. Also that day, papers were reporting on 35,000 walruses coming ashore in Alaska due to melting sea ice. Just two weeks earlier, 400,000 people marched in New York City and elsewhere to call for action on climate change. The summit seemed timely, if not late.

At the conference, Kate Gordon, executive director of the Risky Business Project, outlined her no-nonsense research focusing on climate change’s impacts on energy, agriculture and extreme heat. She and her co-authors wanted to speak in the language of business so they framed the issue as a “risk assessment” and delivered their report in the backyard of Wall Street.

Assessing economic risk of climate change is complicated. Louisiana’s gross state product fell slightly after Hurricane Katrina, but the rest of the country’s grew based partly on storm-related recovery activity.

More importantly, some of the risks of climate change will cascade. For example, there’ll be more “heat stroke days” when the body cannot cool itself off by perspiring. That will mean lost labor productivity (especially in states with lots of outdoor work, led ironically by North Dakota) as well as more air conditioning and therefore demand for more power plants, which incidentally are mostly built along rising seas.

The Southeast will be hit especially bad. And that’s where much of American manufacturing, including green manufacturing, is increasingly based. There was dark joking about moving football’s hot (in more ways than one) Southeastern Conference to the Northwest, where warming with make the weather better suited for outdoor sports. But dead seriousness about how Cargill (whose exec is among the veritable rogue’s gallery of backers who advised the work) could move its corn farming from Iowa to Manitoba to keep up with the weather, but Iowa farm families would be left high and dry.

Among other things, Gordon urged a more interdisciplinary look at sustainability. Why not make it a case study for first-year business students, she asked.

In a separate session, George Washington University President Steve Knapp and American University President Neil Kerwin explained how their campuses are meeting more than 50% of their energy needs with solar energy from North Carolina.

D.C. is promoted among the best college towns in America, but Knapp and Kerwin agreed that colleges in other places could forge collaborations for this purpose. Though some experts are skeptical about locking in rates because energy costs could go down, Kerwin said the ability for the colleges to come together allowed their supplier Duke Energy Renewables company to go to capital markets for better deals. Knapp and Kerwin also credited politically savvy students with the success and urged other higher ed leaders to prepare the ground with trustees in advance.

A panel moderated by New England Board of Higher Education President Michael K. Thomas explored how sustainability champions can get their message to national audiences. Portland State University President Wim Wiewel suggested more emphasis on foundation support in the face of a tight federal government as well as forming a committee to focus on “partnership creation.” Millersville University President John Anderson noted that he is using his appointment to a hospital board to advance AAUPCC's message by reminding them how hurricanes Sandy and Katrina clobbered hospitals.

The audience provided solid observations about building national action. Cal State Chico reps observed that student associations are key. A former Second Nature employee said she previously worked at NACUBO, where staff listen most attentively to advice when it comes from presidents. Penn State's sustainability director said he gets together with counterparts via the Big 10 athletic conference. The president of Cal State Northridge noted that she is a member of the NCAA, and pondered what might happen if the national athletic association turned to sustainability. A staffer from Illinois State University asked how can colleges can leverage their alumni on behalf of climate efforts. A GW sustainability official called for more positive stories and more group purchasing. An official of the American Meteorological Society said his group has courses at universities across the nation. Another campus official noted that federal policy on sustainability is out of touch with newer thinking. Sustainability guru Tony Cortese, formerly of Tufts and a co-founder of the AAUPCC, said the time is right now for climate action, as it was when AAUPCC started.

One non-scientific observation (a rarely acknowledged qualifier on this subject) is that the audience revealed a remarkable lack of diversity, even for a meeting of New England “thought leaders.” Also some communication contamination … lots of diagrams and terms like programs and ideas being “birthed” … perhaps because these folks know the end is nigh with, as another sustainability hero, former Unity College President Mitch Thomashow warned, the human-caused sixth mega-extinction knocking at the door.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

John O. Harney: Colleges and the 'Innovation Imperative'

  BOSTON

"I was just thinking" was columnist Mike Barnicle's lazy motif in The Boston Globe. Still, it's hard not to copy a lazy motif. So … I was just thinking ...

Business leaders confirmed for the record this spring what they’ve been grousing about for years: Too few recent graduates have the skills to be good workers. That was the key finding in Northeastern University’s third annual survey on the “Innovation Imperative.” And it formed the base of a recent "summit" sponsored by Northeastern, WGBH and the New England Council.

Northeastern Pres­i­dent Joseph E. Aoun opened the summit saying he doesn’t like using the term “customer” in higher education, but that the poll aimed to find out how CEOs, students and faculty view the university and higher ed's roles. (Infected myself by the cost-consciousness disease, I couldn’t help noticing that the handouts were on very heavy stock—relatively expensive.) The polled CEOs emphasized soft skills including communication and interpersonal skills over tech skills. They also emphasized entrepreneurship skills—not to launch a business necessarily but to think on a different level about creating an ecosystem and to learn how to fail.

Jeff Selingo of The Chronicle of Higher Edu­ca­tion said he has wondered why more higher education institutions—HEIs as we abbreviate them now—hadn’t adopted Northeastern’s famous co-op model.

Aoun noted that during the recession, the number of co-ops actually grew because employers wanted to be sure to have a pipeline for talent.

So why not encourage dramatic expansion of the co-op idea as some in the Obama administration have suggested? One reason, worried Selingo, is that slews of new co-ops and internships might replace full-time jobs—the economy may not be able to absorb them.

Also working against co-ops, many students and parents today are looking for ways to cut a year off the overworked four-year bachelor's degree; co-ops sometimes add time to graduation. It's not a bad thing, but it could be grounds for penalties under the government’s controversial plan to introduce a new college scorecard. HEIs like Lesley University could also suffer under the new scorecard system because the university specializes in educating teachers, who still don’t earn that much money—one of the scorecard’s potential key measures of a worthwhile college.

Selingo injected a bit of sanity, noting that many faculty do not see higher ed as preparing people for jobs, but for life. Then the obligatory, but ever-shorter, tributes to the liberal arts all around.

On a different aspect of innovation, Part­ners Health­Care President Gary Got­tlieb lamented underfunding of the National Institutes of Health, the federal research program that has played a central role in setting U.S. higher ed apart from the rest of the world. The combined effect of budget cuts and the increasing cost of biomedical research have resulted in a 12% cut between 2010 and 2013. That means less for researchers and breakthroughs in treating diseases ranging from HIV to Alzheimer’s.

All the panelists talked about the transformation of higher education and hiring. The moderator Kara Miller, host of WGBH’s Inno­va­tion Hub, quipped that if you interview to be an engineer at Facebook, they sit you down for a four-hour test to do some coding and other tasks, not to talk about your Columbia degree.

Selingo added that as more focus is directed to “outcomes” rather than “inputs,” rankings such as U.S. News and World Report will be turned on their heads.

He also mentioned that more older students are accessing education they need when they need it, not enrolling in degree programs. You'll have a foundation that may not be a four-year degree, but every couple of years, you'll access more from MOOCs and other new models.

Someone from the audience asked about a finding noted at the summit’s beginning in which more than 70% of CEOs attributed their success to their personal drive. She wanted to know, understandably, is that because higher ed is now so cast as a private good that you can attribute your success at the HEI to your own grit and determination? The answer should have been, “You didn’t build that.”

****

At the summit, Aoun briefly cited the rise of "competency-based education" as a new way to show what you’ve learned, rather than how long you’ve been in a class. CBE, as it’s called, may soon be all the rage. It seems to fit the times, offering higher-quality learning at lower prices. But I learned at a recent webinar that the concept has been around since the 70s. More than 130 institutions do it. Most of the students are in their 30s or 40s. It was noted that "academic success coaches" follow an “intrusive advising model” and can activate students who seem to be just lurking. Also that it's important for HEIs to enlist their library staffs so the students in the self-paced learning environment can find the resources they need.

One proponent of Wisconsin's CBE program says the chancellor told them they had permission to fail, which faculty don’t usually feel they have. Speaking of faculty, they tend to suffer the bruises in this larger conversation about transformation—especially tenured ones and their unions, and this while NCAA football players start using the U-word.

****

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education approved America’s first statewide policy to make civics part of the curriculum at state colleges. Commissioner Richard Freeland, a historian, is concerned that public college graduates are focusing too much on job training and not learning the history of their own country. "For example, what is the history of our involvement in Asia, or the Middle East, or in Europe or in Latin America, and therefore not really having a context to evaluate what is going on in those regions as the United States tries to interact with them," Freeland told WGBH.

Just 21 states required a state-designed social studies test in the 2012-13 school year, down from 34 in 2001, according to a study released by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE), at Tufts University. To make matters worse, assessments have shifted from a combination of multiple-choice questions, essay questions, and other assignments to almost exclusively multiple-choice exams since 2000, meaning that the material tested tends to be relatively simple facts rather than the ability to apply information and skills to complex situations." That runs counter to the Common Core State Standards movement. Yet social studies as a subject has become a poor cousin, and there's little agreement on what makes sense to teach in the way of civics.

****

Gallup is always asking questions. When they asked people to rate their state as a place to live, 77% of Montanans pick theirs as good as do 77% of Alaskans. But just 18% of residents of Rhode Island did. A friend who writes in the Ocean State once unfairly and politically incorrectly damned the state as New England’s “slum.”

Another Gallup poll makes more sense though. It asked college graduates whether they're "engaged" with their work or "thriving" in all aspects of their lives. The big finding: Responses don't vary based on the prestige of their alma mater.

****

Mike Barnicle, it turns out, stole some of his “I was just thinking” material from George Carlin. The key in these gimmicky columns—as in higher education—is to think for yourself because George won’t be there with you.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education (nebhe.org), where this piece originated. The editor of New England Diary is a former member of NEBHE's editorial advisory board.