Ch.25 What do we assume New Colleges will be?
Serializing Insight Experiential Colleges, how Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts college curriculum and teaching methods to produce graduates capable of redeeming-restoring SpaceShip Earth
In Chapter 25, a group of 20 Writers “put their cards on the table” about what a healthier college experience could and should be (healthy cat-herding).
Day Two of Orientation began with reviewing the War Room Mandate to the Writers Room, answering questions, collecting feedback. Then AOC spoke this way, “The war Room knows it’s impossible to control altogether how the Writers Room will shape New Colleges. The Mandate suggests major influences, we feel are worth your time and effort to incorporate. We know you will come up with many more resources unknown to us. This is good.
“It’s not just influences which will shape the outcome; it’s also assumptions. In this next triad exercise, you’ll be voicing your assumptions about the process and the outcome of your work on your core subject. Like it or not, your influences and assumptions will be Major influences on New Colleges. A good metaphor for laying out our assumptions is, ‘laying your cards on the table.’ “
Checking assumptions as “Put your cards on the table”
Much destruction came out of the Iraq War. One of few positives women held onto, was an approach to strategy meetings used by Donald Rumsfeld. His habit when meeting face to face, with a new group of decision makers, such as military men, was to ask each person to share, “What are your assumptions?” Presumably he also shared his own assumptions. The natural metaphor for this is, “laying our cards on the table” for all to see.
Readers will notice similarity between this approach and Blueprint of WE. Both encourage exposing subconscious agendas by giving social permission. This removes — hopefully — the shame attached to old assumptions, so more honest, more humble group discussion and decisions can be made.
A facilitator and a volunteer from the War Room demonstrated, sharing their assumptions. The debrief on assumptions was more lively than expected and took more time.
Early major points of consensus were in this vein:
- “College is a time for looking both more deeply within for what you hold most deeply and innermost. At the same time, college is a time to look more deeply into the outer world, for where each person can serve and contribute according to their talents and interests.”
- “College is for learners to be exposed to existing, known, Best Practices on many levels, for a lifetime of wellness and service.”
- “The political work of re-orienting economic policy and funding towards stewardship for SpaceShip Earth is largely in process (Green New Deals 1, 2, 3, 4).
“Colleges need re-orienting towards conveying an upgraded value system which goes with the practical improvements. Much of the new value system is embodied in Best Practices in Interpersonal Competency. As colleges convey these to learners, graduates can get along with each other in on-the-job teams; and, with the people they live with.”
- “Our greatest natural resource is our people. Building on social skills learned in elementary thru high school, college must convey the capstone skill: Best Practices in diplomacy and managing interpersonal conflict.”
- “Colleges must be re-made to turn away from worshipping the past. Students must look to past Best Practices; and then, discuss and write about how to apply them to our present moment. This is how to create more positive futures for the 99%.”
- “To do this will require prototyping multiple re-made core curriculum courses. Once these are stabilized; then, comes a four-year-long pilot program on a few selected campuses.”
Re-shaping colleges to re-shape culture
When mass media got wind of the news Women In Congress were considering a “Marshall Plan for Colleges;” and, “possibly taking on the task of remaking colleges thru a pilot program,” the world of talking heads on TV and internet was immediately full of every question and every abstract notion of culture one could imagine.
In the later biographies of the founders of New Colleges, what they said in 2032 was proven true. Women did not care much about changing culture in any way men and males and male academics had thought about this previously.
Instead, they asked these questions. “How can re-making colleges create a more balanced, workable-sustainable SpaceShip Earth, for the next seven generations?” When asked about this, they replied, “If re-making colleges does not improve balance and quality of life for humans, animals and plants on SpaceShip Earth, we are wasting our time.”
So it was from this angle of fixing the future for the next seven generations or more, which drove women. No one was angling to have a college campus auditorium building named after them.
In this way
Women In Congress became deeply involved
in re-shaping old, mainstream, male-focussed academic culture,
away from macho-male and male-dominators norms and tropes;
and, towards a Team Human world culture
workable, sustainable for the next seven generations and beyond.
They knew from Monday Lunch with Experts speakers if they successfully re-made liberal arts college education, changes would trickle down first to college teacher training departments. After new teachers were trained, change would trickle down to K-12 schools. As more states and regions imitated New Colleges — in part or in whole — more and more people would benefit from the natural generalizing of healthier culture thru Best Practices.
Culture was too meaningful to preserve-accommodate old, one-sided, male norms, ideas and rhetoric. One-sided males proved themselves competent at perpetuating nothing more elevated than Regressive, selfish norms, rules and laws.
Did one-sided males, working primarily only from the lesser left brain intelligence of analysis, have any positive legacy? Oh yeah, indoor plumbing. We are all thankful for this. Left brain has its place AND it should NOT be running mainstream culture by and large.
“What kind of graduate?” small group “jigsaw” exercise
One of the early things the Writers Room did on its own was to repeat the “What kind of graduate are we creating?” with the 20 writers across four subjects. In one day, the four groups of five writers each discussed and clarified a consensus on “Our Graduate.” this would be useful within the Room, to sell to the general public; and, to high school students considering New Colleges.
No restrictions were made in advance on how “Our Graduate” was defined. Attendees split up into small groups of five. Their tasks was to come up with a workable definitions for “Our Graduate.” In the larger group, the Clerk from each circle of five reported to the two facilitators on-stage. A Scribe wrote down the new ideas and helped pass on the duplications. Similarities and differences were gathered. This guided the facilitators so they could voice where consensus seem to lay.
In this “jigsaw process,” the biggest consensus emerged around these DRAFT definitions:
- Our Ideal Graduate is emotionally intelligent, interpersonally competent, able to collaborate with a team; or, lead a team, a self-propelled problem solver.”
Clearly this was not the end of this discussion. Those interested in refining a coherent vision of Our Graduate were invited to read:
- Millennial Child, Transforming Education in the Twenty-First Century (1999) by Eugene Schwartz,
- Growing Sustainable Children and Schools Worthy of Our Affection (2018),
- Teaching as a Lively Art, (1985) by Marjorie Spock (wife of Baby and Child Care Spock),
- This research page, “Successes of Waldorf education and Waldorf alums” — https://www.waldorfeducation.org/waldorf-education/our-waldorf-alums and
- The Internal Family Systems idea of “healthy Self-leadership” podcast and transcript — https://www.goalspan.com/humancapital/episode/21/20-founder-the-unburdened-leader
Coming to consensus on a psychology of the healthy Self became one of the Big Rocks which needed to be wrangled first in rectifying Psychology into a core course on the broader topics of Communication. Once a workable consensus on this was resolved, other pieces were more like pebbles.
Influences on New Colleges
These memes were considered central and resonant:
- Doug Rushkoff’s Team Human (2016-ongoing), and
- Buckminster Fuller’s SpaceShip Earth (1968) just the title, not the book itself.
- Wise traditions and indigenous perspectives — For example, the Native American phrase, “…for the next seven generations.”
What was, and was not, needful, workable, do-able and sustainable, for the next seven generations of voyagers on SpaceShip Earth, became the philosophy of Women In Congress; as well, how they evaluated voting on proposals in the US House and Senate.
Benefits of New College education
The afternoon of Day Two was a groups-of-five process on what the benefits of a New Cs education were for students. The Leading Thoughts giant Post-Its were taken down because the debrief resulted in another large set of ideas worth posting.
These writers were able to take the idea of “benefits” and expand it far beyond what the War Room had:
- a place for women students — and male students wiling to cooperate and collaborate with females in classrooms — opportunity to meet each other, find whom they were like-minded with and so on.
The first frame the War Room put on New Colleges was simply, make colleges workable as places to learn Team Human, SpaceShip Earth values for a lifetime of service to self; and, service to others
If this proved not possible, start closing them, replace them with, manual arts apprenticeships paid for largely by corporations.
The values of a Humanities education had recently been clarified and reiterated by Douglas Rushkoff in his Team Human material. The short version? A workable and useful Humanities education conveys to future generations:
- The healthy values of local culture,
- Practice in thinking for yourself, not like Sheeple,
- Further training and practice with Best Practices in interpersonal competency and healthy Group Process,
- Personal connections and a social network which may endure for a lifetime.
Writers learn Sociocracy for collaborating
The four teams of writers needed a method for keeping each team informed of progress and stuck places. Likewise, to keep the War Room informed.
Fortunately a method for large groups working on large projects together emerged in the Netherlands when corporations like Nokia won the biggest share of the cell phone market by generating more innovations faster than anyone else. How? They used Sociocracy.
Sociocracy was one of the solutions to the failure of “group consensus” attempts in the 1980s-1990s.
At Monday Lunch with Experts, women had heard how various methods of group consensus foundered and fell apart after gallant efforts by by Quakers (Society of Friends) and Starhawk a female group facilitator.
Consensus — 100% agreement of all present in a room — proved too rigid for the realities of “cat-herding.” Even when 100% consensus could be achieved, it proved too fragile and not robust enuf for real-life organizations. Something was amiss with theories of large group consensus; no one was sure what was missing.
Sociocracy to coordinate across courses
An early Scandinavian cell phone maker, a group of 100 or more engineers, innovated a solution. They called it Sociocracy. This was a way for multiple workgroups to communicate and coordinate within a large project.
Sociocracy operates on “Circles,” each circle is a workgroup with a specific focus. Each circle has a designated member who attends meetings in other circles to both share information and receive input. This way, all circles stay updated about progress in all other circles.
Circles (Sociocracy) was used to facilitate each group of writers working on different curricula.
To Learn More
https://www.sociocracy.info/what-is-sociocracy
https://www.sociocracyforall.org/
https://www.sociocracy.info/diana-leafe-christian-united-states/
More on how Writers wrote
The re-writing of core courses was too controversial to be done publicly. This was a job for writers with well-developed introvert abilities.
Based on other writers rooms, writers seemed most productive in small groups. The role of head writer was handled uniquely within each team.
For each core course, each group of writers, a daily main lesson format was used. In the mornings, for two or more hours, they worked on their own course, doing their best to identify the “big rocks” get them in the jar, and surround them with pebbles, sand and water as supportive to student understanding.
In the afternoon, each core topic team of writers dropped their own work. For 60–90 minutes they reviewed work done by another team of writers on another core course. After lunch, each group was able to review the work of one, two or three other core course writing teams. In this way, each team gave feedback to all other teams; and, all tams kept abreast of developments and innovations in all other teams.
How did workgroups keep abreast of development in other groups? One a week, on a Thursday, all teams met to share and celebrate their successes; and, discuss issues or current stuck places each team confessed to.
After 18 months of work, when the majority of teams had a first draft, the daily work schedule changed. Now in the mornings, all teams met together to concentrate on one core course only. One course was the focus for three to six weeks; then, the focus would shift to another core course first draft. In the afternoons, each team worked on polishing their own core course. Considerable time was needed to think up, compose, polish and test-drive interactive exercise sequences for each core course.
In this way, topics in one course with relevance to other courses, were flagged and connections noted in both for the teacher textbooks. This process facilitated synergy between core courses and enhanced the quality of each course.
In this way, the Writers Room became a laboratory for healthy group process, workable for very large projects. Even more than Women In Congress, the effort to remake colleges brought Best Practices in Group Process Facilitation and Consensus to center stage and kept it there. Old male ways of processing such a huge project, pitting ideas against each other, competing with each other, debating the merits of each side, would have been too stressful for women.
A key was to keep in mind and keep asking, who has power? How is power shared? Who needs more power? Who has too much? Being deliberate and CONSCIOUS about power and how it is growing, declining and shifting, talking about this openly.
Guided by the War Room, a small but influential cadre of women facilitators and managers gained expertise in facilitating live group process towards durable work products.
Over the several years of the Writers Room, the wisdom of how to manage big projects without a top-down, male-centric, hierarchical use of power, spread out to other government projects; and, to the wider world of non-governmental orgs (NGOs). After the Writers Room sun-setted, these facilitators and managers went on to be creative with other big projects we will hear about later.
Writers Room starts actual work
Once on their own, in their own offices, the Writers experienced a bit of a crash emotionally. The enormity of their task hit many of them. Writers were being paid to propose how to re-invent face-to-face culture. The way female writers supported each other thru this was to keep reminding each other, “Enlightened leadership always has supporting it, a narrative about personal, deepest, innermost values.” A giant Post-It of this was visible in many of offices and cubicles. This is why male heads of colleges had failed. They gave only lip-service to this goal.
What else helped was another giant Post-It, “Values clarification begins as an internal activity. If it does not progress down into an outer, FUN social-learning activity, in classrooms, then there is little hope for conveying healthy values to future generations.” Writing teams supported each other to keep making the process fun and lively. To speak up and ask for support when they felt stuck. To frequently refresh each other, in dyads and triads, with the questions, “What are my values?” “Which values do I hold deepest and innermost, close to my heart?” It took humility to accept how many times the teams needed to go back to this radical starting place. It was time well spent.
Other useful wall Post-Its:
- “We are not worried about how our four-year curriculum contrasts with the superficial values most colleges give lip service to. Let them be inspired by our example.”
- “Only a curriculum engaging a wide range of students to explore their own values and form their own character, has any chance to fill the void where a paternalistic, 1950s consumer religion once held sway.”
- “New Colleges must be places where young adults thinking about the highest good for the next seven generations can meet each other, learn together, work together, start families together, and so on.”
- “No one can build new culture alone, isolated. We have to find allies and engage others. Group process exercises sequences accelerate identifying which tribe you belong in, who is in your tribe and who is not.”
These ideas surprised no one who understood how healthy new culture grows UP from the grass roots, by congregating people who share healthy values. Food draws people together; yet, values is why they stay together.
Many writers understood — abstractly — the “biggest rocks” for each core course were all values and myths. Most of the Writers felt the topics of values and myths were their weakest areas of expertise.
Further, no one could find even one college, in one nation anywhere, which could serve as a template for New Colleges. Not even one college was found whose mission was to uncover, nurture, develop, preserve, and spread, Best Practices in all fields? It was depressing. The female Writers simply had to live with the lonely pioneering nature of their project.
They were very aware of the alternatives: There was no alternative. If young adults were not exposed to, practice in a wide array of tried and tested, Best Practices in multiple disciplines in a liberal arts college, it was very unlikely to happen outside of college in the world of work, family, children.
Even the early history of US colleges was useless. The first US colleges were narrowly focussed on:
- Upgrading church preachers and improving sermons,
- Agricultural and technological “progress” defined only as as “more productive” and “more profitable.”
Not until 2030 had anyone seriously challenged colleges to consider a wider brief, a wider purpose, to develop, test out and new cultural innovations to learn which Best Practices were valid and worth spreading widely.
A value structure in which colleges might have done this, was not even conceived until the 1960s-1970s. By the end of the 1970s, after the New Deal consensus broke down, things went back to the Gilded Age: “socialism for the wealthy, social darwinism (dog-eat-dog competition) for the masses.”
Until New Colleges, Women In Congress had little to no interest in re-making mainstream culture. It was only the threat of losing liberal arts colleges altogether 2029–2030 which brought to their attention, the practical need to remake colleges. Remaking mainstream culture was not their focus. The glamor soon fades; the task becomes simply the work to be done.
The War Room had a clear mandate to support and monitor all workgroups so they could avoid overwhelm and burn-out. Often re-directing teams to focus on their next do-able, workable baby steps was needed. Keep all workgroups abreast of how each development fits into the Big Picture.
