After doubling down, Clay Christensen has tripled down. This is a familiar ploy: if you say something doubtful, then repetition will make it come true. In the words of one critic, Christensen is to business what Malcolm Gladwell is to sociology.
Christensen and Michael B. Horn, the former the apostle of disruptive innovation and the latter his St. Timothy, recently repeated their claim that 50% of colleges would fail in the next decade, or 10-15 years. Their goal line has been reasonably consistent: in 2011 it was "as many as half," (we're 8 years in) and 2013 it was 25 percent in the next 10 to 15 years (6 years in); in 2017 "as many as half" within a decade (2 years in); in 2019. Christensen and Horn write that "some college and university presidents . . . tell us in public and private settings that they think the 50 percent failure prediction is conservative -- that is, the number of failures will be far higher." Names? Places? and does executives saying that make it so (is this presumption of their predictive competence warranted)?
But the reasons for this prediction keep changing, and there's the ploy: save the effect but change the cause. One is reminded of the late Sydney Brenner's Occam's Broom: "sweep under the carpet what you must to leave your hypotheses consistent." The reason for such precipitous closures, foreseen (in 2011) in the period 2021-2026 were disruption due to innovative technologies: the subtitle of The Innovative University is Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. The main idea is that "in the DNA" of American colleges and universities is a desire to be like Harvard: wealthy and comprehensive. By contrast Brigham Young University/Idaho exhibits a completely different, innovative strand of DNA: "in how it serves students by a combination of distance learning, on-site learning, and lower-cost alternatives to residential college" (quoting my review from November 2012).
Implicit in the metaphor of DNA is a certain determinism: you cannot change your own DNA, after all (without extremely powerful, still-developing technologies that occasion many moral questions). Your DNA determines, in this view, what you will be: such "Harvard" DNA will be a fatal flaw in many colleges and universities, according to Christensen and Eyring. Can you really change your DNA from the inside out? It's a clumsy metaphor: no wonder Christensen has abandoned it.
That 2011 book also quite ignored several inconvenient facts about BYU/Idaho. Mormons get a considerable price break there that "Gentiles" do not receive --pointing obviously to a hefty subvention from LDS sources. BYU/Idaho is, after all, a satellite of a powerful, wealthy, comprehensive mother ship in Provo, Utah: the satellite campus can hardly be a synecdoche, assuming that what is true for the part is true for the whole. The economics of BYU/Idaho and the considerable technological subsidy its online instructions receives from the mother system is simply left out. Apparently Occam's Broom works well in Idaho and Utah.
Is Christensen's central claim true, that the DNA of American colleges and universities propels them to desire to become Harvard. Is that really true? What about those institutions that could have become Harvard (or Michigan), and chose a different path? Did a liberal arts college that chose to remain a liberal arts college necessarily thereby fail its DNA? Ask too many questions, and the whole edifice collapses.
Christensen's account and predictions rely on a very superficial knowledge of the history of higher education. That lack of knowledge allows him to claim that nothing has really changed in American higher education in 150 years. How about women's education? (--one of Christensen's real blind spots). How about public community colleges? A comparison: religious groups in the Abrahamic traditions often work by one person with some kind of authority meeting and talking to others who are supposed to be instructed. Isn't the real point what they say? --words with profound differences that mask a reductive similarity of communication. Closer to home, James McCosh (of Princeton) and Clayton Christensen (of Harvard Business School) both stand or stood in front of others and talked: is that really the sum of development between them? Again: Occam's Broom.
In their 2019 opinion, Christenen and Horn change the goal-posts: now the cause of instructional failure will be changing business model driven by implicitly disruptive technologies. Does anyone remember the educational TV boom in the 1960s? That also was a changing business model. Of course business models are changing, and have changed in the past: again, consult a deeper understanding of American higher education. All current debates about business models, missions, curricula, and the needs of students have a very long history, such as Crisis on the Campus by Michael Harrington (ca. 1951), or the famous General Education in a Free Society (1950). Students have never been mere passive recipients (although the contemporary view of them as "consumers" drives them to passivity). From the colonial to the denominational colleges, land-grant colleges, public universities: the business models have evolved. The business model in higher education is changing as we speak.
In other words, Christensen and Horn present the same tired and superficial nostrums of ten years ago. Even the historical examples in his ur-text, The Innovators Dilemma (1997), are questionable. Predicting the apocalypse is an old business.
I have argued elsewhere that the fearsome language occasioned by "disruptive technologies" has origins in the pre-Millennial Restorationist theologies of early 19th century frontier America, especially the Burnt-Over district of upstate New York, and showcased pre-eminently by Joseph Smith, Jr. There's a reason that his Latter-Day Saints are latter. Christensen was formed in a community that stands by Smith's proclamations. I do not pretend that he has smuggled theology into business, but rather that there is an elective affinity between such mainstream LDS thinking and business disruption: Joseph Smith Jr. was supposed to put the rest of Christianity out of business (the "great apostasy" from the 1st century to 1830). How has that worked out for for the Latter Day Saints? (--and nevermind the very current cosmetic name changes).
I continue to wonder whether discussions of disruptive innovation in higher education are in fact a cloak for expediting other changes, less technological but no less disruptive, initiated by senior academic leadership. To be a disciple of "disruptive innovation" means you're a member of that club. Is this called group think? Has it served GE well?
So will somewhere around 50% of American colleges and universities fail in the next decade? This might be the case, but not for Christensen's and Horn's (and Eyring's) reasons. In their recent post in Inside Higher Education, they cite situations in New England. I live in Connecticut: this is daily reality for me. Demographics are shifting: colleges and universities in the northeast quadrant of the continental US are going to have a hard time on that basis alone. Some have already closed, more probably will --but not because of changing business models driven by disruptive technologies. Demographic change exerts a constant pressure not unlike climate change. The real question is, who can adapt, and how well? The population probably will not achieve replacement rate, even in the southwest.
American higher education may be entering a "perfect storm" of demographic change, economic turmoil, and moral and cultural drift or outright corruption (e.g. the recent admissions scandals). All of this is cause for deep concern; none of it depends upon the snake-oil of "innovative disruption" via technologies that power changing business models. For many institutions, strategies of differentiation based upon price point, purpose, and location will matter a great deal. Strategies based on pure number crunching accompanied by credulous faith in technologies will probably not work. Online education is here to stay, but it will not disrupt on-ground education as much as non-technological demographic trends will. This is not the stuff of disruption, but of long-term anticipated and unanticipated consequences of historical change, about which Harvard Business School professors have no more particular expertise than anyone else. When disruptive innovation gets dumbed down, it isn't disruptive anymore, but just change.
Change is hard. Adaptation to changing conditions is hard enough without the burden of misplaced, scary, apocalyptic language.