The titles of the books and his position at the School of Business rather than the School of Education tell you something about Christensen’s focus, which is on disruption as an across the board phenomenon to be reckoned with rather than on higher education. It is only in his most recent book, The Innovative University, that he sets his sights on higher education, and what the future may hold in store for it.

In his view, the future won’t be a bloody train wreck. But that does not mean he is any less troubled by the challenges posed by disruption than are the many pessimists out there writing about bubbles popping. Rather, if he does not dwell morbidly, Cassandra-like, on the train wreck to come, it may be that he is mostly a hopeful optimist as regards people of good will to engage in meaningful change. Or perhaps he has just opted for this persona,thinking that you can catch more flies in the world of higher education with Socratic dialogue rather than hectoring.

One way of another, his open letter is a wonderful example of an attempt at Socratic dialogue with the putative leaders of the higher education sector. His open letter covers “eight thoughts”, four of which are problems and four of which are possible solutions. Speaking directly to them, he starts by making four points about problems that, as he puts it, “in our heart of hearts, we really know”:

1) that the current challenges are real, serious and not likely to go away,

2) that sideshows like the attack on for-profits are a diversion from the core internal problem of costs in the not-for-profit sector,

3) that student needs are being systematically shortchanged in favor of “scholarship and scholars” (i.e., research and faculty interests) and

4) it just won’t do to elevate the defense of the status quo to the center of one’s strategy.

[Let me bracket a caveat here about whether it is even fair to stipulate the above relative to the letter’s recipients. I am not sure all presidents would agree that, say, the needs of students need to be prioritized and that research has gotten too much attention. Lots of folks in higher education argue that what is good for scholars and scholarship is good for students, and I suspect that belief goes beyond a matter of political convenience for many presidents and approaches a hardened, encrusted ideology. And it is also not clear whether the audience he is addressing actually exists in a form that can respond and give voice to the Socratic olive branch Christensen is proferring . . . universities tend not to be “managed” by their presidents in any kind of conventional way, and the idea that the sector as a whole has a bunch of graybearded eminences that are capable of chewing on a tough argument probably doesn’t hold up. So there is a bit of a flaw in Christensen’s reasoning and in the design of his open letter. That said, it remains a very nicely done letter and let’s return to Christensen’s next four points.]

As to possible solutions:

1. The faculty itself, being no more selfish than most and probably a lot smarter, ought to be able to be tapped to help find a way out.

2. Residential campuses will always have great appeal. “(T)here will always be young people” who will be attracted to traditional colleges as “unique academic and social gathering places”.

3. While traditional colleges systematically generate deficits, on-line alternatives are capable of producing surpluses, thereby making the way for “profitable growth”.

4. Disruption is always threatening, but the smart faculty will embrace innovation so as to “hasten a new era of higher education productivity.”

OK, what to make of these arguments?

First of all, bravo. Despite the caveats mentioned above, the idea of an open letter stipulating inarguables and looking for engagement cannot be a bad thing, and it is a nice piece of rhetoric to be out in the public square even if there’s no real response from university presidents.

Second, I for one agree with Christensen’s stipulations and there is nothing in his open letter that would send the sector in a wrong direction.

But once again we come to the Sherlock Holmesian question about the dog that did not bark. What, if anything, might be missing from Christensen’s analysis? Are there any missing barks, or bites?

Yes, I think so.

For one, Christensen seems to be banking an awful lot on the goodwill of faculty (and, by implication, others with interests in the status quo, like the research infrastructure, athletics constituencies and others). Saying they should play nice is not likely to make it so.

Moreover, arguing that they ought to get on the technology train also has a Pollyanna quality to it. Why would a middle aged faculty member with a near-lifetime of encrusted habits all of a sudden decide to offer a course online or flip the classroom? Maybe, but it will take more than an open letter to a president make it so.

There’s also the question of whether Christensen’s reforms would actually, objectively, gore some oxen. It is all well and good to speak of win-wins, as Christensen seems to do in points 1 and 4 of his four solutions. But most management is about the management of win-loses. In the real world, win-wins can play an important role as icing on the cake but are seldom the central point of leverage and action. Christensen himself speaks of the traditional summer break, something that creates large facility and program inefficiencies, as being bound up with faculty preferences. But how would one fill the buildings in the summer without a bit of–ahem–strong-arming?

Christensen describes at length in The Innovative University how Brigham Young University-Idaho was able to make that change as it morphed from a stand-alone Mormon college to a part of a large Mormon university . . . but the folks involved with this important change were, after all, Mormons. At universities with less of an identity trump card than BYU–which is to say almost all universities–asking faculty to actually give up perogatives is never easy, and Christensen does not really provide any real suggestions as to how to deal with the problem.

And it is not just a problem with faculty oxen being gored by necessity: to undertake other reforms of the type that Christensen writes about in his book (dropping athletics programs, say, as BYU-Idaho also did) calls for another set of powerful oxen to be led to slaughter, or put on diets. Not that this is a bad idea: Fenster favors (here and here). But Christensen doesn’t really grapple adequately with the problem.

I also worry that there is a more fundamental problem with Christensen’s analysis, one dealing with subsidies. Let’s stipulate that he is correct that traditional universities can’t cover their costs but that on-line approaches can. He takes that insight to a possible conclusion: universities could be comprised of a combination of both approaches, with on-line subsidizing traditional. But is that in itself a sustainable model?

Students currently put up with their tuition dollars subsidizing other things for a bunch of reasons. There is often no transparency in cost allocations and subsidies so they don’t know. They don’t have the luxury of unbundling their tuition if they figure it out. They can’t help but be attracted by the reputational buzz of college X and figure they have to put up with it. And the activities they subsidize are local and visible and they may (say, if they go to football games) recognize some sort of value for payments made.

But those conditions are less likely to apply in the case of a student who is predominantly, or exclusively, engaged in an online capacity. Why should that student want to pay a tuition charge that is higher than needed so that a traditional student can enjoy the whole panoply of services and amenities that characterize the “college experience”? That’s not only unfair but likely to be regressive as well, since the more privileged are likely to continue with a traditional education under this view, with the less privileged consigned to a lower cost model.

Granted if a college with a mixed approach could show that its mixed nature contributed to a better online experience that would be one thing. But how likely is that to happen? Given the institutional constraints discussed above, doesn’t it seem more likely that a new entity devoted to the best that on-line could offer would be able to mount a worthwhile program more effectively and expeditiously than a traditional university struggling in the face of inevitable faculty hostility and resistance to reinvent itself?

Christensen has been criticized by some of the more pessimistic commentators for being too much the reformer, reluctant to see the bubble about to burst, and too willing to conclude that the big institutions can survive if only they would tweak here and there. I myself am more of a pessimist than Christensen seems to be, per the above.

Still and all, Christensen’s letter lays out a very strong reform argument. And make no mistake about it: reform (not revolution) is in the final analysis going to be a central part of whatever change takes place. What the bubble enthusiasts miss is that the higher education sector is not the same thing, structurally, as a housing market. The latter is simply supply and demand. Yes, there are a host of institutional actors, but the real action takes place between buyer and seller. And when things drop, they drop in that sphere. By contrast, higher education is institutional from the get go, through and through.

So while I am as dour as the pessimists about the large challenge, I don’t really expect the higher education bubble to burst in as decided a fashion as the collapse of the housing market. In other words, in the end the higher education problem, though more daunting than Christensen makes it out to be, is likely to unfold in a stepwise fashion in which reformist ideas will have great traction. We will probably see some of what he suggests, too: some new leadership by to date hapless leaders, some acquiescence on the part of faculty hearing footsteps, some willingness to let the reprobate on-line world into the game. That won’t fix the problem and, per the above, it may simply set up new quicksilver tensions. But it might, just might, be enough to get by. Sometimes you just get what you need.