Hi, and welcome to my second contribution to the Global Futures Office of Research Development and Strategy (GFORDS) blog.
In this entry, I’m going to explain (some of) the innovative structure of GFL and how the vision behind it helps advance a similarly innovative approach to impact in the world.
The first place to start is with the idea of a laboratory – the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory (GFL). When we think of a laboratory, we normally think of a relatively small-scale entity that represents and contains the research efforts of a small group of people, e.g., Professor X’s laboratory. In that sense, a laboratory is something, organizationally speaking, that might be contained in a school, a research center or a research institute. But the Global Futures Laboratory contains all of these things – and more – instead.
GFL is rather more like a laboratory in the way that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or Sandia National Laboratories is a laboratory: a large-scale, mission-oriented enterprise that assembles a broader set of intellectual and operational capacities to approach a problem in a more complete and holistic way. President Crow – whose scholarly background includes the empirical study of the variety of research laboratories in the United States – has occasionally remarked that the United States has invested huge sums in these large-scale laboratories oriented around technologies – nuclear weapons – that can destroy the world, but it has not invested in similarly scaled laboratories that can save the world. GFL is meant to be one such laboratory.
Within this laboratory are structures that are more familiar to the academy: the College of Global Futures (CGF), which houses several transdisciplinary schools, and the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation (GIOSI), which is a collection of roughly three dozen organized centers and similar initiatives that share an orientation toward research. But there is a larger structure within GFL in which CGF and GIOSI, among other units, are embedded. This structure is the five “Spaces.”
GFL has been designed around the idea of deploying its work via five “Spaces”: Discovery, Learning, Engagement, Networks and Solutions. They represent a set of capacities across which GFL and its faculty function – broader than the traditional set of faculty responsibilities of research, teaching, and service. The Spaces often imagined as containers for other units within the Global Futures Laboratory (e.g., the College of Global Futures is in the Learning Space, the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions is in the Discovery Space). This vision, however, would simply recreate another set of silos or bins to separate what GFL wants to do in a more integrated way.
The Spaces are better thought of as (what science policy jargon calls) “assessment regimes” – the set of values and their measurements by which success is understood, encouraged, and supported. For example, success in the Learning Space is defined by student success, and it is measured through such indicators as the number of enrolled students, their persistence and graduation rates, time to degree, employment after graduation, etc., as well as by the performance of individual faculty members in instruction. In the Discovery Space, we have traditional measures in dollars of research proposals, awards, and expenditures (in aggregate and per faculty member), as well as publication measures like citations. However modest the quality of these indicators is, activities in the Engagement, Networks and Solutions Spaces are even more challenging to assess.
Some units are clearly dominant in some of the Spaces, e.g., CGF is dominant in the Learning Space, but other units that do not report up to through the college have a role in student success (and the Global Futures Scientists and Scholars who reside in units outside CGF also perform in the Learning Space in those home units). Moreover, CGF has interests that are not limited to the Learning Space. Similarly, GIOSI is dominant in the Discovery Space, but other units in GFL and not in GIOSI perform research, while many entities within GIOSI are involved in activities beyond discovery. This lack of mapping of one unit into one Space is normal for assessment regimes – think of students taking tests in different subjects, or athletes competing in multiple sporting events.
GFL is still designing the Spaces through this vision which, among other benefits, allows any unit to be affiliated with any Space, depending on how it is functioning, how it seeks success, and how it desires to be understood and evaluated. GFL is also attempting to build capacity in each Space to support success in ways that emulate how CGF supports teaching excellence and how GFORDS supports research success.
What this support looks like, e.g., infrastructure for engagement, networks, and solutions, and how robust it might be is a topic for current and ongoing considerations. If you have thoughts about building infrastructure for GFL in these areas, please let me know.