This is the cultural moment for the small, the local, and the specialized. Craft beer has more cultural resonance than Budweiser, artisan bread is more attractive than Wonder Bread, more people would rather shop at a farmer's market than at a Food Lion. Local bookstores are resurgent; Barnes and Noble is fading. In politics, people distrust the national government but trust their local governments; they perceive the quality of "public schools" and "teachers" to be in decline, but still like the neighborhood school and their kids' teachers.
It is easy to see why this is the case. Local things carry both a perception of value and of quality. They are more personal and more connected to their audiences. They are more authentic than big, distant, hard-to-understand organizations. They have values rather than brands.
But the change that makes this the age of the local has less to do with perceptions and more to do with process. Today, for the first time, small organizations have access to excellent systems. A jewelry-maker can sell his wares on Etsy or Amazon, take payments through a plug-in Square device, and print new models on a 3-D printer. Local growers have greater access to heirloom varieties, specific information about their land's microclimates, and simple ways to get their products to market. And all of them have inexpensive ways to draw attention to their products. Each of these systems allows small producers and organizations to be excellent at what they do.
It is ironic, then, that in the age of the small, small schools struggle so much. There are many explanations for the attractiveness of big colleges and universities--Division I sports, a huge variety of majors, the prestige of their faculty, the dollars generated by tens of thousands of students and alumni. And there are plenty of reasons why small schools struggle--low visibility, small-town locations, and a perception that the value isn't worth the cost.
All of these are true, to be sure. But an equally important reason that small schools haven't flourished in this local moment is that they tend to have weak systems, or in some instances, are hostile to good ones. We pride ourselves on personal interactions with students, but too often those one-on-one meetings happen because the student has a problem caused by a broken system--they got a bill they shouldn't have, or were advised into the wrong class, or can't graduate on time, or are in a conflict because they can't get away from the antagonist that is in every class in their small major. We save money by not spending on infrastructure, even though spending on infrastructure protects against catastrophic failure and massive bills. And we don't build good policies and practices for problem-solving or innovation because we have long made decisions in idiosyncratic, one-off ways. In short, we believe that good systems are too expensive, or too impersonal, to be worth the time.
For students, faculty, and staff, though, these small school system problems mean that the experience of being at a small school is too often about working around failed transactions rather than building deep, authentic relationships.
The challenge for small schools, then, is to think more like the craft brewers, local growers, and artisans enjoying the prominence of this moment. Obviously we need to focus our efforts on those few things we can do really well, and take pride in our specialized nature. We need to contrast ourselves with our larger, more generalized peers. But even more, we need to build strong systems, both within and outside of our institutions--systems that provide ongoing cultural support for small schools, and that free the faculty, staff, and students of small schools to attend to learning rather than patching broken systems.
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