Move Slow and Fix Things

Musgrave argues that this hyper focus on growth creates instability because most of the students that leave these institutions will need to be involved in maintaining businesses rather than being the one a handful of big innovators.

Starts with explaining how in the 1980s and 1990s, in elite schools (e.g. Harvard), there was a shift in focus from producing good corporate employees to the following:

These forces, in turn, were accelerated by the increasingly winner-take-all dynamics of the economy that were unleashed by the demise of traditional industries and regulations.

To be sure, the focus on innovation and creation isn’t irrational.

As these standards became articulated and expressed more clearly, both in briefings to elite high school college admission counselors and in the results of the admissions themselves, ambitious high school students (and their families) learned how to perform them. They wouldn’t seek to be student body president or editor-in-chief of the school paper... See more

Maybe working a little harder to understand what makes work count would be a good turn.

Musgrave outlines that innovation is often easier to measure which is perhaps why it's easy for it to become the focus—rather than improvement.

Having an institution geared to producing really top-rate people who play within the system is not going to set the world on fire, but maybe we don’t  want  a world on fire.

In particular, the choice to valorize disruption and innovation sits uneasily with both the actual process of university education and the needs of careers that people will actually have. It’s also bad for society on net.

Starting  projects and embracing “theories of change” became  de rigeur .