Rethinking Higher Education from the Inside Out: Art Markman On How to Make Universities Not Suck

Art Markman, guest · [03:43]Life throws curveballs at you, and about a year ago, in, in September of, of 2025, my mother passed away. after about a six month illness. And of course, losing a parent is, is just an incredibly difficult thing for anyone who's gone through it. It's, it's, it changes the way that you look at life, in, in a lot of ways. And, and so that was, that was difficult. At the same time, professionally at the university, things were changing a lot there. Anyone who's followed Texas politics knows that the legislature has been Pushing a, more influence onto the university over the last several years. The governor has, had an influence on the board of regents, and ultimately a new president and new provost were installed over the course of 2025, and they came in with a particular set of views about, about how to engage with education, and I, I wasn't a particularly good fit to that. I really believe that, we should be focusing on the core outcomes, learning outcomes that are associated with the college education, and that the, the content is a vehicle to that, and that really ensuring that students understand the Skills of value that they have obtained from their education is a critical part of what universities need to do to regain public trust. I think our administration had a different view on that and felt that, that a lot of public trust was lost primarily through the content of what was being taught rather than that structure of what's being taught. That made me a poor fit to the new approach, and that's the point at which we parted ways. And so it definitely, in the span of a couple of months, meant that two fundamental grounding points of my life had changed. And I was really in a situation where I had to decide what came next, and fortunately, options emerged for me that gave me the chance to pursue a different course.

Art Markman, guest · [09:43]I think it's fun sometimes to be a little provocative in the way you phrase things to, to, to get people to sit up and say, what? Universities are, are wonderful creations. And, and I am forever grateful that I was able to spend 35 years teaching. But, you know, we, we are not particularly good at, at educating, honestly. I, one of the things that I've talked about a lot is that, that in my journey in, in learning about what good teaching is, I discovered that I was not a particularly good teacher for most of my career, just an entertaining one. And, and that's because I, I was never really fluent with how to design a good education experience. how do you ensure that you've clearly articulated the learning outcomes that you're trying to achieve? How do you really develop experiences so that students stay focused on them, that they practice them, that they get real formative feedback where Try something and get feedback to correct how they're doing something and get the student focused on the acquisition of knowledge and skills and attitudes rather than just trying to get a grade that is going to go on a transcript that no one's ever going to read. And so when I talk about universities potentially sucking, it's largely that students are forced to do a lot of the weaving together of their education experience by themselves. And great students, really academically inclined students, manage to do that. And of course, part of the problem with universities is we tend to staff them with a bunch of people who were good at school. So as a result, we don't necessarily see the importance of stitching together that experience, providing more scaffolding so that students are aware of the skills that they're learning, that they're being given opportunities to see the same skill in many different classes and have that pointed out to them so that they're aware of that skill, and that they're, that the, that the grading that they get is, is actually directed at the skills rather than just at the overall assessment that you get on some paper or, or some test. And so I think we do a disservice to a lot of the students because, you know, any student who's ever taken a class in college and said, I don't even know why I'm in this class, has been let down by the system. There should never be a class where you wonder why you've been taking it, because it should be made obvious how it is that that fits into your progression as a student. And we should encourage students to explore topics that, that they find interesting without necessarily knowing why they're going to use that information later. But we should absolutely try to help students to understand how the education that they're getting has a, a totality to it and an arc to it. And when we don't do that, and most higher education institutions don't do that, we are, we're sucking.

Art Markman, guest · [21:40]Suppose you're teaching negotiation. Now, when you teach negotiation, there are particular concepts that you might want to encourage students to learn. A really important one is what goes by the acronym BATNA, which stands for the best alternative to a negotiated agreement, which is basically the concept of, I should know when I should walk away from a negotiation because actually not reaching a deal is better than the deal that we're currently reaching. Now, if I have an AI system that I can put together and give it part of a negotiation exercise, instruct it to be a firm but fair negotiator, letting them know that they're negotiating with a student who's learning the process of negotiation, and then giving it outcomes like trying to learn this notion of BAT, then The system will actually engage in a negotiation with you, and you can work through an exercise and negotiate the various points of the deal. And at the end, the system can actually then be instructed to turn around and provide the student with feedback related to their performance in that negotiation, to suggest here are things you did well, here are some things you can improve on, and can even then take that feedback and reflect it back to the faculty member to say, here's where this student was strong, and here's where this student needs additional work. Now, the beauty of that is, if you think about how this stuff gets done traditionally, you take a bunch of students and you give them these negotiation exercises and they negotiate with each other, which means the blind is leading the blind because none of the students are that good at it yet. They don't necessarily recognize what the other person could have done better. And if one of the students is substantially better than the other, it's not clear either one of them gets much out of the exercise. But by building a system that is set up to meet the student where they are and then to provide them feedback based on what they were able to accomplish at their level, now suddenly you are building out a set of experiences that can potentially reach the entire distribution of students rather than just a third of them. And, and that to me is incredibly exciting, but it requires a lot more structure in the way that you're thinking about the way a course is designed and how that course fits into an entire curriculum, because that's, that's really only going to work if you can tailor the systems you're creating to particular kinds of skills so that the student is getting much more targeted feedback, about what they're learning.

Art Markman, guest · [26:06]And I think that a lot of the process of building change and building consensus for change among faculty is to start by really highlighting the need, right? The need that students have to have a more effective curriculum, the need that universities have because of, I think, what could really be existential threats to higher education. And within that need to recognize that being asked to do something that is ultimately quite different doesn't necessarily require wholesale revamping every single thing you're doing in a single semester. You can make concrete steps towards improvement that are incremental on a, on a semester by semester basis, but still have a profound impact on the quality of the education. And so I think, I think working with faculty is going to, is, is, is an important part of this process of change on the one hand, but on the other hand, I think we have to recognize that we are no longer at a moment when we can continue to do things the way that we always have. And not every institution has been quick to recognize that. And, and, you know, but at a time when many smaller schools are having significant financial troubles, even some larger schools have had some financial difficulties, we, we have to be willing to be part of the solution right now. And, you know, it's funny, I, I have a, a cross stitch up on my wall that one of, I think I showed you this, that, that one of my, former, colleagues gave me, one of my Team members when I was at Texas. Faculty sometimes when things are imposed from the outside will say, but academic freedom. And I always like to remind them that academic freedom is not the freedom to teach badly. And that we do have to recognize that if we create a little bit more structure around the education, perhaps require that faculty use some of the same vocabulary when they're talking about certain skills, that that is not really impinging on academic freedom. It's Using the academic freedom they have to teach the concepts that they think are crucial within the disciplines that they're teaching in a way that maximizes the value of that for students across the program of study that they have.

Art Markman, guest · [31:45]I got involved in this kind of externally facing communication after, you know, another one of those news programs where the National Science Foundation was threatening to cut funding for the social behavioral and economic sciences. And I was literally screaming at the TV, somebody's got to explain to these people why this matters. And then I kind of looked, stopped for a second. I said, you know, I Maybe I should pretend that it's literally my fault that nobody understands why the work that we do matters. And from then on, I started looking for opportunities to communicate that outward. And one of the things that that did for me was to give me an appreciation of how you create the broader context, how you think about the broader system in which the work we do is embedded, which I think has affected the way that I look at everything. So a lot of us who do research of any kind recognize that we have to do something very specialized in order to succeed. We have to ask a very narrow question, you know, and the analogy I use for this is, you know, the question that we're asking is about the width of the head of a pin. And when we write up that research, we rarely describe the entire pin, let alone the pin cushion that it's on or the table that that pin cushion sits on. And I think that one of the things that trying to communicate about research to people who aren't active Involved in that field has taught me is you've actually got to take a step back and think about what is the system? What, what is the entirety, of the, of the, the body of work that this fits inside? And, and how do you situate a particular question inside of a broader framework that makes it interesting to people who don't really care about that particular head of that particular pen? And once you start thinking that way, I think it, it helps you to see a lot of what is missing in many of our conversations in academia, including our conversations about the way that we teach. So a lot of times, for example, we spend time thinking about, well, we need to improve our curriculum, and then we engage in an effort of curriculum redesign, and it ultimately fails because lots of people have different anecdotal opinions about how to make these changes. So I actually think that spending 15 years writing for popular audiences made me a more effective administrator, in part because it was never about solving a particular problem. It was trying to understand the system, and in what ways was the particular problem that arose a symptom of something that was going wrong in that system, rather than a particular problem that needed to be fixed by itself.