Throughout the late 20th century, and into the early 21st, when we spoke about “innovation” we largely meant impressive technical feats. Think Jobs and Woz creating the Mac, or Larry and Sergey creating Google, or the kinds of things Tony Hirst and Jim Groom seem to pull off regularly. We made heroes of the two geeks working in their mom’s garage… We made heroes of the lone coder, working late at night armed only with Emacs and Mountain Dew. These legends engaged in mythical man-versus-nature battles, subduing the wild frontier of source code and bending the Internet to their wills. They’re just plain cool.

However.

The kind of innovations these legends produce – technological innovations – are the easy kind of innovation. They are innovations that manipulate inanimate entities free of agency. During John Seely Brown’s visit to BYU last week, I heard him say that while the 20th century was a time of technological innovation, the 21st century must be a time of institutional innovation. This is the most insightful statement I’ve heard made in recent memory. It impacted me deeply, as it neatly summarized a frustration I’ve been feeling more and more keenly.

Anyone who has worked to reform an institution will readily admit that the more people are involved, and the more they are invested in maintaining the status quo, the harder it is to affect change. Even something as small as a stepwise incremental policy change can be a multi-year battle. I can hear you now thinking, “Just burn it down and plant a new institution in the ashes,” or “Just punch out and create a new institution to compete with the first.” Sometimes these are legitimate approaches to getting things done, but sometimes they aren’t. I seem to keep finding my interests lie in problems and institutions where these more radical methods simply don’t seem to apply. This seems to portend many difficult years ahead for me.

Imposing your will on bits and bytes is “easy.” Leading an established institution through the valley of the shadow of reform and up the opposite bank toward innovation is “hard.” But it is absolutely critical work, and precious few people are in positions that afford them opportunities to provide this kind of leadership.

Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me. I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

In today’s higher education environment, accreditation bodies are very much like the Catholic Church of old. They exercise supreme power and authority of our institutions, and should our accrediting body choose to revoke our accreditation, our universities would go straight to the institutional equivalent of Hell.

This control over our schools is both ambient and ubiquitous – everywhere and unseen – much like the Church’s domination used to be. And as long as our institutions have to conform to the wishes of the accrediting bodies, no large-scale innovation or reformation can happen. (As an exercise, try to imagine an accredited institution of higher education that looks meaningfully different from any other.) We need an institution with the courage to nail its list of issues on the door of the accrediting bodies and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me (aka revoke my accreditation). I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.”

Of course there are a number of smaller start-up colleges that have a “who cares” attitude toward accrediting bodies, but these folks were anathema to begin with – so no message is really being sent. We need a “member of the Church” – an accredited institution – to stand up and reject the demands of the accreditors that prevent us from really innovating. Perhaps then we can start to clear out the kludge that is preventing higher education from trying new things and begin keeping up with our quick-paced business, government, and personal lives.