Can a liberal arts college lead innovation?

Thoughts from a film producer, migrant rights advocate and liberal arts grad turned champion for innovation and entrepreneurship in the academy.

Actors and observers inside and outside of the college and university worlds are in agreement: higher education is in a state of unparalleled disruption. Rising tuition, new technologies, and emergent modes of learning and knowledge production are shifting the roles and methods of our institutions faster than most can keep up.

Educators and students alike are rethinking “traditional” modes of teaching and learning. Liberal arts colleges, in particular, are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate their value. What is it about a four-year residential experience that creates a transformational foundation for life and career?

Professionally, I take up this complicated landscape through the lens of my role as Director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Davidson College — a nearly 200-year-old institution oft thought of as being and working, by and large, as traditionally as its conservative southern environs (about twenty miles north of Charlotte, NC).

At Davidson, however, we’re in the midst of a holistic cultural shift. Students, faculty, staff and alumni alike are embracing the challenge of re-articulating, redefining and re-imagining the liberal arts for the 21st century. In doing so, they’ve at once 1) acknowledged the value of entrepreneurial problem-solving in an increasingly globalized and rapidly changing world, and 2) taken up the huge charge of meeting society’s need for graduates who can lead as innovators in a complex knowledge economy.

As some might expect, I am asked — on practically a daily basis, both on campus and off— some form of the following question: how does a liberal arts education, with a curriculum focused more on Sartre and Schumpeter than startups, facilitate innovation? At root, I am really being asked to respond to an unstated, and perhaps even more difficult interrogation: can innovation be taught?

To many of my colleagues in higher education — particularly in the liberal arts — this question sounds simple, even redundant. Why do or would we need to “foster innovation” beyond our core curricular offerings? In other words — do we really need to do anything more or different than what we’re already doing (and doing WELL)?

My working hypothesis: now, more than ever, institutions of higher education need to offer resources that build in-demand skills and experiences for students — as well as faculty, staff and alumni. We’re charged to create foundations for lifelong learning, and to create new knowledge in an environment that sets our community members up to succeed at making disproportionate impact for good. At Davidson, my collaborators and I engage with this vision by working to create offerings built upon thinking critically; engaging creatively with technology; working iteratively; taking smart risks; and prototyping tangible solutions to real-world issues.

How do I personally take up these responsibilities? Davidson’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative (the team I lead), alongside a cross-institutional cohort of interlocutors, designs programs and projects that, ultimately, examine whether formalizing conceptual, “organic” notions like innovation and entrepreneurship is worth aligning college resources, interests, institutional strategies and recruitment efforts behind. Now halfway through my second year at Davidson, the work we take up together centers around widening the scope of possibilities for students who want to delve into what it means to meaningfully apply their liberal arts education — both before and after they graduate.

As of today, the opportunities my collaborators and I build take many forms:

• Weekend-long intensives (“startup weekends”) where students pitch and learn how to validate new venture ideas, all while receiving actionable feedback from academic and industry professionals.
• Design challenges where faculty, students and staff together work to create user-centered, validated solutions to community problems.
• Spaces that allow all campus community members to experiment with maker and tinkerer tools, digital technologies, and as-yet-untested pedagogical practices.
• Industry partnerships that build bridges between core liberal arts competencies and complementary experiential learning programs.
• Compensated opportunities to work at alumni-led companies and organizations that apply the Davidson education to post-graduate life in a vast variety of entrepreneurial and innovative ways.
• Seed funding to test and launch ideas coupled with access to accelerators, international teams and training, and mentorship.
• Simple but substantive conversations that encourage reflection on the innumerable options the liberal arts create for young, thoughtful 21st-century college students and graduates.

Though our initiatives and work are still young, these examples, among others, have proven not only effective but of interest to students and professionals on and off campus. Our peer institutions are taking note — some even reaching out in order to benchmark their innovation efforts to Davidson’s leadership, nimble approach and willingness to conduct curricular R&D.

Innovative work, same core values

In an ideal world, college and university students and faculty alike think of their education and workplace as a living laboratory. At Davidson, I work with a tremendous team to create conditions that foster this mindset. We are building, breaking and making infrastructure that supports a culture of curiosity and openness — all rooted in the fundaments, pedagogy and philosophy of the liberal arts.

While coworking spaces and incubators pop up across the country, our community at Davidson is anchored by something different: faculty and students who devote their time and energy to not just solving pressing problems, but creating and exploring paradigm-shifting innovations through a deeply ethical set of lenses that reflect humanism, leadership and service.

As academia seeks to build meaningful and stronger bridges beyond the bounds of campus, it’s become evident that liberal arts schools are uniquely positioned to be leaders of both thought and action for entrepreneurship and innovation. Their naturally cross-disciplinary environments set the stage for the kind of creative, global and nuanced knowledge production and problem-solving that our world requires.

So at Davidson, and for me, we are fortunate to begin every day with these bright, burning questions: not just what’s next? but How can I build it?