What if higher education focused on restoration rather than transformation?

There is no mystery about why "transformation" is a regular part of higher education-speak right now. Everyone recognizes that we are in a period of substantial, accelerated change. Transformation is a way of describing that change.

Our embrace of transformation masks uncertainty about what it means, what its purpose is, and what it stands-in for.  Take, for instance, the definition of transformation.  Its usage includes two potentially divergent meanings: change in scale; and change in state. So, a transformed campus could be much larger, or richer, than it was before, but be essentially the same.  Or, a student who has a transformative experience could be fundamentally different from who she was before.

The purposes of transformation are similarly contradictory. Transformation can be purpose-neutral, as many of the large-scale changes influencing an institution are beyond its control.  Or, its purpose can be functional, in that transformation pursues more or better things--students, buildings, funding, etc. Or, it can be  liberationist, in that transformation frees an institution or person from the limits of previous budgets, curricula, or points-of-view.

While questions of definition and purpose are important, they are less important than the question of what transformation stands-in for.  Here, let me propose that attention to transformation stands-in for paying attention to restoration.

Let me argue further that many institutions, especially those that are small, have a faith commitment, reside in struggling communities, or serve the “new demographic” of college-goers, would be better off focusing on restoration than transformation. I say this because these sorts of institutions reside in worlds where limits, not limitlessness, are the norm.  And they work in communities and with lives that are broken, and hence in need of restoration prior to, or instead of, transformation.

How would a college centered on restoration be different from one attentive to transformation? A couple of ideas:

1. The college would have to assert up front a particular view of human nature, since restoration requires work towards a particular end.
2. It would assume that students bring with them skills/talents/interests and of weaknesses, absences, and challenges.  Its struggle would be to respect both parts of their natures, and help them assemble those things into something that has integrity.  It would design systems, curricula, and activities that acknowledge the dual nature of students. It wouldn’t be sanguine, though, about the prospects for these efforts, because it would realize that restoration is more difficult than transformation.
3. The organizational structure of the institution would model the whole to which it is working--unity among the disciplines, or in the experience of students, or healthy ecosystems of learning, or relationships between campus and community, or between students and their peers and families.
4. Learning would be explicitly about deepening context--providing greater historical, local, disciplinary, and human connections--so that people could understand what was being restored, rather than about escaping context in order to transform.
5. It would make decisions about the allocation of resources based on their impact on wholeness, integrity, and relationships (and the challenges of each of those things)  rather than questions predominantly  about the scale or pace of change.
6. It would measure the impact of its work largely by whether its efforts helped create the conditions (the ecosystem) in which people and relationships can be restored, and whether it found greater integrity in its own actions, in the use of its resources, in the lives of its students, and in the communities in which its people  live and work.

In calling for attention to restoration over transformation, I am not necessarily calling for the restoration of any particular approach to higher education.  (After all, there are secular institutions and huge ones whose work is restorative, and small, faith-based institutions whose assumptions are transformative.).  Instead, I am calling for focus over sprawl, limits over limitlessness, consistency between vision and action, and some humility about our ability to fundamentally change things.

It may be, though, that many of the issues afflicting us--racism, economic inequality, climate change, and the fracturing of communities--are better worked on through a prism of restoration than transformation.