Reimaging Small Colleges for Service through Conversations

A recent blog post by Mónica Guzmán caught my attention this week after another flurry of blog posts calling for small colleges to rethink their business model.  "Make the News a Conversation," was posted on the Nieman Reports site that is affiliated with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.   

Guzmán shares a story of informal meetup gatherings over coffee that she nurtured in Seattle for several years.  There were no agendas, just conversation about whatever people wanted to share.  Over time, relationships were built and strengthened. 

After she was admonished by an editor admonished for wasting her time, Guzmán studied responses to her articles and concluded that the quality of reader responses was enhanced by those who had participated in the meetups.  

Guzmán concludes by noting that the pressure on journalists to change their approach continues with "...a new set of challenges to journalism...demands that we revisit journalism’s core purpose. Can our purpose be just to inform..., when so much of what drives our society are the stories people tell each other, stories a whole army of journalists could never hope to find and report themselves?

Journalists are feeling all this pressure to go big. Go viral. Get scale. I think most of us would do better going small. Find the communities whose conversations you can do the most to strengthen and get to know them. Not so they can serve you with clicks and shares and crowd sourcing, but so you can serve them better than anyone else."

I believe that small higher education institutions can benefit from Guzmán's experience and that we are always thinking about the need for ongoing and necessary conversations with the communities we serve.  

Each new crisis in the academy strengthens the external and internal calls for change...change that always seems to involve pressures to achieve greater efficiency and spread costs over larger and larger pools of students.  The constant stress and repeated episodes of crisis management take a toll and contribute to environments where the necessary conversations with stake holders either may have lapsed altogether or are more difficult.

Sustaining conversations over time requires an investment of time and energy.  As one brief example, I've been a long term member of Rotary and marvel at the power of Rotary's international network to accomplish small and large change through a simple concept...have people gather once a week for a meal.  Build relationships over time and when a need arises, the group figures out a way to successfully move forward.  Who would have thought that polio would be nearly eradicated in our lifetime through the efforts of thousands and thousands of volunteer members of Rotary Clubs around the world?   

The meaningful changes I have experienced or observed during my career in higher education have often been built on a foundation of informal conversation.

So, how can colleges as organizations hold sustained conversations with their communities over time?  How do we remind ourselves that we need to have conversations in an environment where making and implementing decisions seems to overshadow all other considerations?

I look forward to your feedback and suggestions!