Forgive me, but I read this story with a great deal of schadenfreude.

In five years, he said, the university wanted most of Austin’s students to be able to enroll in revamped degree programs. Project 2021, officials would later say, would incorporate state-of-the-art online classes. Redesigned curricula. An academic calendar that included short courses outside of traditional semesters. And researchers would dig into data to examine every aspect of the undergraduate academic experience — to measure what worked and adjust accordingly.

“Even the best,” Fenves said in his address, “can do better.”

Not two years later, Project 2021 was dead.

The story of the program’s rise and fall, based on more than 20 interviews and a review of emails, reports, and other documents, shows how universities too often pursue the elusive act of transformation: promising too much while investing too little. Campus leaders in Austin had used sweeping words to describe the potential of Project 2021: Futuristic. Next-generation. Bold. Higher education is “in the throes of a revolution,” one progress report read, and Project 2021 would meet those challenges.

Somewhere deep down inside, I still “believe” in education. Praxis-based knowledge and teaching is the way that our civilization has survived over centuries and built itself up to our current dizzying heights of engineering and technology.

Mainstream education does not currently ascribe that view. See Nassim Taleb, IYIs, and Soviet-Harvard Syndrome.

And yet, as someone who works within the mainstream higher education system, I see firsthand how things get done in the university. There’s a reason (or rather, REASONS) everyone within hearing distance will roll their eyes when they hear of the next new change on a college campus.

Navigating Austin’s maddening bureaucracy without much administrative experience had already proved challenging.

There is your first red flag—and that’s a major red flag. Even people who have titles like Associate Dean of Graduate Education PLUS know how to play the game well enough to get continuous federal funding for their lab (a huge deal in the sciences) PLUS high-profile consulting gigs PLUS a large amount of this ‘administrative experience’ have a difficult time getting a large change passed and off the ground.

The layers of bureaucracy in a university are deep. And if you think you’ve seen any of them as a student, you are wrong.

There are a few things that you have to have on your side to make changes in higher ed. These include, but are not limited to:

1. The faculty. Without faculty support, or at very least, support from key faculty, nobody will actually carry out your plan.
2. An understanding of how a university actually works.

I am unsure of how much faculty buy-in there was on Project 2021. I’d wager to guess it was largely ignored.

He envisioned a program that could be higher education’s Manhattan Project: a research team that would take on the future of learning. The group would come together, shake up campus bureaucracy, lay the foundation for long-term change, and then dissolve.

In the terms of the brilliant William Bergquist, who provided a map for the different warring cultures you’ll find in university faculty, this is a strategy favored by the “developmental” culture. Often using a consultancy model, these people (and generally identify with this) believe that change is a straightforward, rational process that be applied wherever, whenever—as long as the reasons are good.

Well, no.

People don’t like being told what to do. Especially faculty, who are the most independent of all people except, I am told, surgeons.

And the university model (Bergquist’s “collegial” culture) is built around obtaining faculty buy-in. The collegial model of governance is a series of committees on committees, who all have their favorite committee stalling tactics: the delays, the soapboxing, the subcommittees. This model of governance is built for people who don’t like being told what to do: it’s so dense that it deflects or smothers most of the people who journey into it unawares.

But anyway, enough about the faculty.

Let’s talk about money.

Charged with realizing that vision was Pennebaker and his executive team. They had a small, tucked-away office. To Pennebaker, it called to mind a bunch of FBI agents holed up in a motel room — a far cry from the university’s Star Trek sales pitch.

No matter how bad-off a university is, it will always always ALWAYS find the money to show off what it believes in. Always. Even to the detriment of the bottom line.

So if you’re in cobbled-together offices, trust me: you’re not supported by your university. You, my friend, are in the land of “We’re doing this because it sounds good, not because we actually intend to make any real changes.”

The powers-that-be within the university will find a way to show off and make their pet projects look good. Everybody else is on their own. The sooner you learn that, the easier your life will be.

(Ie, don’t expect any money and you’ll never be disappointed.)

But that leads us to my very favorite part of the article.

Early in Project 2021, Pennebaker approached the registrar with a question. What would it take, he wondered, to offer fractional-credit classes?

Such classes could make some students’ experiences more efficient. Say a student needed to take an introductory statistics course as a prerequisite for an upper-level class. Instead of delaying the advanced course by a semester, why not distill the statistics skills needed for that advanced class into a three-week, half-credit course?

The type of initiative would change the very definition of a class — a perfect fit for Project 2021.

Pennebaker quickly learned that such a change, though seemingly minute, would have far-reaching consequences. Updating student information systems cost other major research universities tens of millions of dollars each, and modernizing Texas’ aging system to handle the new classes would require a steep investment despite the various upgrades Austin had made over the years.

But it wouldn’t just take money. Making the change would touch many academic departments and staff offices, too. There could also be ramifications to federal financial aid, among other things.

This was a wake-up call for Pennebaker. Before Project 2021, he thought he understood how the university worked. He’d been a department chair for nine years, and creating the SMOC had connected him with deans’ offices and campus technology divisions. After hundreds of hours of meetings, he realized he was wrong. “I didn’t know anything about how the university functioned.”

Faculty know next-to-nothing about the inner workings of the university. Sure, they know how to enter grades online or who to tap to get a new course approved. In many senses they “run” the university by being the faces of programs and ratifying new policies.

But in terms of getting the actual work done, they don’t. Faculty usually don’t know anything about things like federal financial aid policy, or how the student information system was hard-coded back in 1992 when it was first set up, or how you actually transfer money from one service center to another without breaking any state finance laws.

Those are all the purview of staff, people whose opinions don’t count (because we don’t have PhDs) but who know everything about why courses are set up the way that they are and how to best get the Dean’s signature on short notice.

I’m not saying bureacracy is good (it’s not) but there are a million and one reasons that universities have gotten to be the way that they are. You start layering up all the regulations—for a state-funded institution, on top of federal funding, regional accreditation, Title IX issues and other “not law but everybody knows” type stuff, grants administration, IPEDS reporting—layer that on top of local traditions and norms, as well as the competing interests of research and education, graduate students and undergraduates, all with a constantly-rotating senior leadership, and…well…it’s a mess.

Without a little bit of understanding of all of those areas (and I’m sure I forgot some), you’re not going to get anywhere.

This circles around a little bit more to the thesis that I may never write, if I ever decide to go for my PhD: staff in a university are just as influential as the faculty, but they are the underwater part of the iceberg that no one ever sees.

Nobody—even the people who are actively studying the university as an organizational structure—takes into account the importance of the staff role.

I’d be willing to bet that staff have cultural biases just like the faculty, and that staff culture directly impacts the ability of faculty to get things done. I’d even say that staff cultures are compatible with faculty cultures, but not in a 1:1 way.

After all, being a staff member (aka, “having a job”) isn’t the same as having one’s identity wrapped up in having a PhD.

Anyway, there is a reason that most efforts to reform higher education fail.

Honestly, it might be a better idea just to start from scratch.