I worry that structural factors such as peer review, getting grants funded, and making it through tenure tend to encourage timidity in university faculty. Here are some thoughts I have on how the University of Chicago administration, or the administration at other universities, could try to encourage more bold and original thinking. I welcome any feedback.
Put out more messaging similar to Dean Ellison’s famous 2016 letter emphasizing that we challenge ideas vigorously here and people are supposed to argue with each other. Disagreement is normal and sometimes feelings get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Create an annual “Disrupter of the Year” award for faculty who publicly challenged ideas and narratives popular among their colleagues. Critically, this has to be for challenging the faculty, not for disagreeing with the public. The ceremony will be hosted by the President and the prize will be $100K in unrestricted funds. The winner will give a ten-minute talk to incoming faculty.
Initiate “The Iconoclast Incubator,” an internal call for proposals for controversial, high-risk ideas. Provide seed funding of $100k for successful proposals. The application will be a one-page proposal and a colleague willing to bet the provost $1k that the project will not lead to a paper within two years (to ensure that the idea actually is high-risk). The money will be held in an escrow account and either kept by the Provost’s office or returned with an equal odds pay out depending on the outcome. Award funds randomly among proposals that fulfill requirements to avoid conformity bias of peer-review.
Start a “Risk Sabbatical” program. 10 faculty per year will be awarded a six-month paid sabbatical by lottery. The proposal is a 150 word description of a high-risk idea. Turn off the winners’ uchicago email and disable their keycard access to ensure that they are off campus doing something new and different (but allow online access to journals). The sabbatical is immediately ended if a winner is caught on campus. Require a one-page write up of what they did and what they expect it to lead to at the end of the sabbatical, which will be made public.
OK, you wanted comments. #1--Great idea. #2-4--not such great ideas. Why? Human nature. I don't believe these would work for more than a year or two because if academics are good at one thing, it's twisting any kind of program to suit their own selfish aims. A characteristic of faculty that I find both charming (as one is charmed by an innocent child) and frustrating is their blindness to the downsides of human nature. It's what gets progressives into trouble all the time--they imagine that human nature is perfectible and become upset--over and over and over again--when human nature raises its ugly head. Here's why human nature will tank ideas 2-4.
#2--Every faculty member thinks he/she is a disrupter and every faculty member feels their flavor of disruption is useful and forward-looking and everyone else's is destructive (especially across fields; within a field, some--some--might like a disruptive idea, but convincing others can be impossible). No one would view challenges to their own biases as usefully disruptive, so the award will either never be given or given only to those who are charmingly disruptive, whether their ideas are useful or not. (Even though it's not academia, Zohran Mamdani's election is a great example of this, TDS a symptom of the opposite reaction.)
#3--Bet against writing a paper? Easy; just don't write one.
#4--A six-month, email-free vacation when no one can tell what you're doing? Even better! You come back after 6 months and just say the idea didn't pan out.
Cynical? No. Realistic? Yeah.
Great ideas! I would love to hear how to prevent the “usual suspects” from being the reviewers …. who then award the money to the “usual suspects” of recipients. (This is the “Yale Model”.) The best I can offer is to name the awards something that would be thoroughly offensive to the ‘in crowd’ that they would not apply (be sure to use the terms “Merit”, “Right”, “He”, “Genes” and a if necessary…. “Colonial”.) In the 1980s, MIT students paid to vote for the “Insitute Screw” award each year… complete with giant screw (it is an engineering school, of course.) The then very unpopular Gov Ed King actually refused the award… despite its underlying goal of raising money for charity.