First published: September 29, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

I am thinking about institutions and change. Evolutionary change, revolutionary change. System change and systems change, to borrow a phrase that has acquired some contemporary currency.

Colleges and universities continue to be the case study. Change is in the air, on campus and near campus, change motivated by educational and research interests in part, by social and cultural need in part (read: labor markets for university graduates), by technologies and “technosocial” design in part (read: Generative AI), by finance and economics in part (read: demographics), and by politics and political actors in part.

For the moment I am not particularly interested in taking apart and analyzing the motivations. I am interested in what colleges and universities might do and, more importantly, the “how” and the “when” and the “who” behind the possible “what.” The demand for change is real and sincere, mostly. At different scales and in different contexts, surely, change means different things. But stay with me.

A framing anecdote is drawn from fiction, an exchange from a popular film. The remade “Ocean’s Eleven” from 2001:

Rusty (Brad Pitt): (as the two friends leave an architect’s office having stolen the blueprints to the Las Vegas vault that they plan to rob): “I need the reason. Don’t say money. Why do this?”

Danny (George Clooney): “Why not do it?”

“Because yesterday I walked out of the joint after losing four years of my life and you’re cold-decking ‘Teen Beat’ cover boys.” [pause] “Because the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the house.”

Rusty: “Been practicing that speech, haven’t you?”

Danny: “Little bit. Did I rush it? Felt like I rushed it.”

Rusty: “No, it was good, I liked it. ‘Teen Beat’ thing was harsh.”

Danny Ocean gives me the punch line. One college or one university might change or might not, but one institution’s changing usually does not move the system; one has to understand not only incentives and inspiration at the local level but also system-wide feedback loops, accountability mechanisms (and the lack thereof), and the roles of standards, standardization, and gatekeeping mechanisms of multiple sorts.

One needs resources (first), actors (both individual and institutional) second, and some cultural syntax (third): between “here” and “there” (wherever “there” might be), which both helps the actors maneuver relative to the resources and also helps observers, critics, and advocates understand whether the institutional maneuvering is going well or poorly relative to the system as a whole. Is the needle moving? Which needles? Whose needles? When? In what directions? The system is where the action is and where the need seems to be clear. So how does one change the stakes, to beat the house?

(Here, I gave a first answer to “how and why that might be happening already.”)

Ideas, game plans of a sort, and prompts of multiple sorts have been hitting the recent headlines. In this and some future posts, I’ll catalog the ones I’ve noticed, with some commentary by me.

To start with: official university reports.

The most recent of these is from Cornell University: the “Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University,” September 22, 2026. The accompanying announcement from Provost Kavita Bala makes it clear that Cornell aims to go back to the future.

MIT came out in August with the “Report of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training.” This one is less grand; “carefully but steadily MIT should proceed with AI ” is sort of the theme.

Last Spring, Yale University took its swing, with the “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.” This one came from a commission by the university’s president, who issued this statement in support of the report.

No one will confuse any of these with their most influential historical antecedents, such as Newman’s “Idea of a University,” or the Yale Report of 1928, or Clark Kerr’s “The Uses of the University.” But it’s nice that the incumbent elites are trying their best to stay afloat and right their ships, conceptually speaking.

Meanwhile, American universities are far from alone in trying to lay the foundations for their futures.

Just in, from RMIT in Australia, is this report: “Creative Work and the AI Frontier: Implications for Higher Education,” drafted by Professor Ellie Rennie. The abstract is worth quoting in full:

This report examines how AI is reorganising creative work and what this means for higher education. Prepared for RMIT University’s College of Design and Social Context, it draws primarily on economics and computer science, with examples from media, design, architecture, advertising and art, across six areas: work, platforms, value creation, organisations, robotics and governance.

It argues that task-based accounts of AI’s workforce effects are incomplete and instead treats practice–arrangement bundles, rather than discrete tasks, as the unit through which to understand change. It also builds on the author’s research on contribution systems, which record how creative work is received and built upon without turning every influence into a proprietary claim, and on Artificial Organisational Intelligence, the capacity to make organisational knowledge legible and governable.

The report identifies two key challenges. First, automating entry-level work erodes the pathways through which novices become experts, and recursive training on generated output risks model collapse. The second is legibility: making practices machine-readable enables credit, interoperability and accountability, but also extraction, so who governs that infrastructure becomes a central distributional question. The report concludes that universities should reconstruct apprenticeship, including through material and situated practice, and develop graduates’ capacity for judgement, organisational literacy, machine-readable governance and institutional agency.

That’s some heavy lifting, jargon-wise, but the Report does some useful things that are too often missing in US-centric accounts from Ivy-plus institutions. One is that it lays out at least the skeletal version of an action plan for the future of the institution and its programs. Two is that it acknowledges the complexity of contemporary university life. Three is that it speaks in the language of systems.

A great deal of what attracts academics to critiques such as Chad Wellmon’s recent book, “After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work,” is that we are, as a class, attracted to a romantic ideal: the university is where “the life of the mind” can be practiced, conserved, and shared with colleagues and students. (To be clear, it’s a terrific book, if more elegiac than prescriptive.) The mind is a singular thing, both the internal and external representation of a unique human. The university is a place, and a space, and a time, that is “other” so that the unique human can mature and become whatever version of a “critical thinker” and fully differentiated person that a field or discipline shapes them into. The place, space, and time are distinctively slower. Reflective. Trans-generational. They are not “of the market”; they are not “of the state.” Or should not be.

Generative AI intrudes on that imaginary university in uncomfortable ways. (New technologies often have.) Intrusions are far from new. “Workforce development” and career-ism by and for students intrudes. Budget pressures intrude. Scale intrudes. Administration intrudes. Standardization intrudes. Naive boards intrude. Politics intrude. Athletics intrude. Alumni intrude. Clinical health care operations intrude.

Not everyone agrees that these things are “intrusions” as much as “the ordinary institutional complexity of the modern university.” Perhaps the fairest thing one might say about the thousand-year history of universities is that they have never always been about one thing, “life of the mind” or “the pursuit of knowledge” or whatever phrase one might attach to the romanticized university. Instead, universities have last as long as they have by being vessels that are endlessly adapted to the variable purposes that societies have deemed appropriate to put into these “other” spaces.

Not surprisingly, that view does not show up in the reports by Cornell, MIT, and Yale. Universities rarely prosper by declaring that they are in the business of system-level change; Clark Kerr’s “multiversity” vision died not long after he shared it. (In California, the battles of the 1960s have become the battles of the 2020s; California community colleges have won the right to offer bachelor’s degrees.) The reports they have issued don’t have much to say about the crockpot of histories and demands through which that the “intrusions” listed above have manifested in practice.

But … while I don’t have much to add as a critique of what Cornell, MIT, and Yale have “said,” Professor Rennie’s work suggests to me that contemporary colleges and universities across the board might consider less conventional approaches to institutional change and the future than the usual “central leadership appoints a committee, and the committee reports” strategy that is mostly on offer so far.

When the president or provost commissions a report, it may take years for some echoes of that report to make their ways down to unit-level and faculty-level operations. (In a later post, I may explain how I know, via an anecdote or two.) But most faculty citizens of most colleges and universities have observed that college and university presidents, chancellors, and vice-chancellors often have much less “executive” authority than their private sector CEO counterparts do. And when they do wield their “executive” authority, administrative inertia and the faculty’s often natural tendency to resist anything that strikes them as interfering with faculty autonomy mean, combined, that not much happens very fast, at least in the domains of teaching and research.

This, it seems to me, leaves proverbial money on the table when it comes to institutional change – assuming, as I do, that system-level institutional change addressed to teaching and research is timely and appropriate.

The university – any university – is a magnificently decentralized, polycentric institution. Why speak from the top down? Why not borrow from that decentralized character?

Set aside the obvious riposte that at most universities, the usual formal mechanisms of decentralized university decision-making – “shared governance” and “faculty governance” – have been diluted almost to nothing. I have no interest in steering large scale, system-level institutional change through those doors. Not now and not yet, in any case.

Instead, at whatever organizational level one imagines – the president talking to the provost and various SVPs and directors; the provost talking to deans and directors; deans talking to department chairs – imagine the convening of a voluntary cohort of volunteer change agents and tall poppies (“positive deviants” exercising “positive deviance,” in management-speak) to build a blueprint for institutional reinvention at the “local” level. Central administrators and senior faculty organized centrally – convening positive deviance in their own right – might start by building and circulating a lightweight “template” for that local units would build on, as they wish; the template would – in the best of worlds – offer a mechanism for alignment institution-wide. Instead of a single university report purporting to speak for the entire organization – a soloist singing an aria, in front of a chorus – the result would be polyphonic but harmonic: multiple voices singing different lines, from the same score.

Don’t ask each Dean and department Chair simply to appoint a faculty committee on the unit’s future; that is likely to lead to a lot of box-checking compliance by people who may be only marginally interested in the real work of institutional design. Instead, find the people who are already pushing past the borders and boundaries of “proper” academic life and give them an institutional environment that endorses and supports their work and encourages them to scales it to a system-level and system-wide degree. In a way, let the proverbial inmates define the asylum.

This is a radically incomplete and radically optimistic view of institutional design, re-design, and governance, fraught with risk: opportunism, rent-seeking, turf-protecting and other usual sorts of academic mis-behavior.

It is, however, a way for those of us who look downstream and see only rapids getting larger to exercise some modicum of agency in our current institutional environments. Hollis Robbins wrote six months ago about something at the University of Pittsburgh that I have been helping to build locally that might – perhaps – turn into the sort of larger scale governance intervention that I have sketched above. The enterprise is called the “Ethics and Economics of Expertise” project, or “E3,” and we are just now getting started with year two. I cannot promise that anything concrete will come from E3 even in my own backyard. E3 is entirely informal, voluntary, and dis-connected from formal governance processes. But grass-roots academic organizing FTW?

Here’s the thing:

If colleges and universities don’t figure out better ways of making decisions about their own futures, and the futures of knowledge and expertise (plural on both accounts), then other folks will come along and make decisions on their behalf.

Speaking of which, did everyone see this announcement of the “Horowitz Andreessen Academy”, “a private, full-time, in-person school in San Francisco for young people coming out of high school”?

From the announcement:

Our mission is to nurture the best young people in the world, and equip them with the tools to shape it.

The campus will be humming. Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Travis Kalanick, Mira Murati, Ali Ghodsi, Patrick Collison and countless other luminaries in tech will visit and give lectures. Students will be excitedly sharing their projects, workshopping ideas with their mentors, and constantly pushing their peers.

Never mind that there are not one but two world-class universities within 25 miles of San Francisco where “the best young people in the world” are given essentially any world-shaping tool that they wish and put in close proximity to global money and power.

Take away the systems and practices that have for centuries tried to assure a modicum of independence of college and university teaching, learning, and research from market-related and government-related pressure.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ll have more on this theme, in the future.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: Teen Beat appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: September 14, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

While The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (or H2G2 to fans) has acquired something of a sour taste lately owing to its mis-appropriation by certain Silicon Valley mega-moguls, in fact the series remains a highly useful guide to thinking through complex social problems. The key, as H2G2 itself indicates right on the cover (the guide, not the series), is recognizing that these look “insanely complicated” and (therefore) following its instruction: DON’T PANIC.

In that spirit I have begun collecting references to elements of a possibly massive mega-idea of institutional design, function, and change, something that I have been noodling on for more or less 20 years but without ever fully wrapping my head around all of its dimensions. To be honest, it is still a bit blurry, although my time with the knowledge commons world has helped me sharpen a lot of its edges. And the rise and pace of developments in Generative AI have made it urgent.

I will get to the recent references shortly, and then – in this essay and essays to come – to some preliminary implications and possibly even some next steps, but first: the mega-idea. Or perhaps meta-idea.

It is this:

“Knowledge,” in all of its origins, manifestations, purposes, and uses, is simply too much. It always has been. Ask Adam and Eve.

Even the word “abundance” and the cluster of concepts that it refers to is inadequate, really, to describe the sense that “everything that we know, as humans, and that we might know, and even if we limit those conditions to ‘true things,’ is simply too much.” Readers of this Substack will recognize that I am fond of movie analogies; at this point, I would insert two famous memes. From “The Princess Bride” (1987): “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” And from “Bull Durham” (1988): “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.” Inigo Montoya and Crash Davis. Who knew?

Too much for what? Too much for anything useful. Too much for living. Another meme by analogy, this one from the title of literature-turned-into-a-film: “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (also 1988!). The existentialists knew.

Still, I am less interested in abstraction and more in pragmatism. How have we – humans – adapted? Does my starting point lead anywhere useful?

Over the millennia, “we” have collectively built a series of systems and processes for organizing and making sense of (waves hands at) everything.

Writing.

Libraries and archives.

Sacred texts.

Monasteries.

Universities.

Cities.

Classification systems and taxonomies.

The encyclopedia.

The universal museum.

Copyright law and the capitalist market (an aside: copyright exclusivity was developed to constrain the production of books; copyright openness (“ideas,” “fair use”) was developed to motivate or enable the production of books.)

Corporations (“the firm,” to economists).

The rule of law.

Disciplines of expertise.

Bureaucracies.

The Internet.

This is not an exhaustive list; other things belong here, too.

My point is simply that are all responses to problems of “too much information,” or “too much knowledge.” Knowledge is tractable to humans when it is organized. Domesticated. The phrases “information overload” and “cognitive (over)load” and their cousins populate one version of the related literature, a body of work that largely focuses on problems faced by individual human beings. How do I cope with the modern firehose? Ann Blair (Harvard), Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (Yale, 2010), rightly and convincingly points out that these are not recent or even modern concerns.

My reframing focuses on collective practices rather than on individual decisions. The sociotechnical phenomena that I list above – and that’s what they are – are different ways in which decisionmaking practices of multiple sorts have been institutionalized.

Institutionalized. In slightly more formal language, these are all institutions. I use that word as I have implicitly throughout my writing here, simply to refer to sustained patterns of formal and informal social activity by which human beings coordinate their affairs, plan and build, and resolve conflicts. Institutions matter always; they matter especially in contexts where human histories, talents, capabilities, interests, and values are plural. All pie may be good pie, to borrow a silly line from a silly movie, but not all people like the same types of pie (and shockingly to me, not all people like pie). People find ways to get along. Often. Not always. And sometimes they get along … poorly.

Knowledge and information institutions are and always have been essential to institutional life, but in ways that often have not been recognized systematically. They may be are (also) institutions within institutions. And institutions about institutions. Institutions generating and supporting institutions. The diversity of knowledge institutions gives them power; makes them incredible research opportunities; and makes them insanely complicated.

My list of knowledge institutions above is ordered semi-sequentially not to suggest that they have been periodic, one institution taking the place of another, but instead as a reminder of how we have accumulated them over the centuries.

None of them is precisely alike. Their powers and limits, and biases and blinders, are both distinctive and almost entirely comparative. This institution works well in the following respects and poorly in others, but always by comparison to some other functioning alternatives (contemporary and/or historical) or some imagined version(s).

With my knowledge commons goggles on, I look at these institutions and observe this: each of them was (significantly, if not entirely) a “governance” response to social problems (dilemmas) associated with information and knowledge sharing at small and large scales, sometimes both at once. “Governance” in that usage simply means a collection of material and immaterial rules, norms, and systems for good, bad, and appropriate behaviors developed and administered in some collective context. My colleagues and I once labeled the collection of those dilemmas problems of “abundance,” which is not wrong but which is not entirely complete unless “abundance” is defined loosely, more or less as I have done above: there is too much.

Institutions have origins. Institutions experience change (which is not to say always that institutions can be changed, although sometimes they can be). Institutions exert influence. Institutions are often the ways in which individuals have agency in the world. Or do not.

Sometimes, institutions go away, or institutional change is so fundamental and deep that one institution appears to give way to another.

And cometh now Generative AI. How does it help to investigate and describe the many things that Generative AI “is” and that Generative AI “does” in these institutional terms. I wrote about an adjacent framing of this question earlier this year. If we put governance of Generative AI and governance by Generative AI into “conversation” with institutional analysis of related but different versions of the “too much knowledge” dilemma from other, earlier contexts, what might we learn? What might we take away?

We might add in “all of artificial intelligence” for good historical and sociotechnical measure. We might add in “Agentic AI” in order to give the question some buzzy immediacy.

When I wrote that essay six months ago, I had not yet come across other work bearing similar or related instincts. But now I have. If an important sociocultural project is “finding one’s people,” I am finding another group of mine.

So, and to highlight only the pieces of the argument that have migrated relatively recently across my virtual desk rather than those that might surface through a comprehensive search:

Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica M. Silbey, “How AI Destroys Institutions” (UC Law Journal, 2026)

From the abstract:

The affordances of AI systems erode expertise, short-circuit decision-making, and isolate people from each other. They are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.

Woody Hartzog and Jessica Silbey are law professors at Boston University, and this thoughtful article intrigued me when they circulated it in draft form. (In law professor-y ways, they are already my people. Or I am one of theirs.) Alas, despite their passionate defense of the civic sphere, there is no explicit mention of knowledge commons concerns, either by name or by suggestion. (Disciplinary connections between knowledge commons perspectives and legal scholarship are not consistently strong.) And their argument is more declarative than empirical. But the abstract makes the connection clear nevertheless: expertise and decision-making at scale are entirely in the center of knowledge commons investigations.

At the same time, their work misses a key comparative dimension: compared to what? Andrew Perlman, Dean of the law school at Suffolk University, pointed out that omission in this short response.

Next:

Dan Williams (University of Sussex) at Conspicuous Cognition, “Most Questions About AI Aren’t About AI”:

For these and countless other questions, many of which we haven’t yet even anticipated, bodies of knowledge, concepts, and methods across existing fields of research will obviously be important. But it should be equally obvious that these questions throw up fundamentally novel kinds of puzzles and challenges that existing disciplines aren’t well-equipped to handle. The knowledge we have accumulated about individual and collective behaviour has targeted human agents (or, at most, organisms). Even when we have constructed more idealised models of rational agency, coordination, competition, conflict, and institutions, they have been rooted in our experiences of human agents.

Advanced AIs won’t just have a wide range of unprecedented capabilities in things like copying, parallelism, processing speed, high-bandwidth communication, and self-modification. They will also have new kinds of goals and motivations (if those terms are even applicable) shaped not by ruthless Darwinian evolution but by complex mixtures of intentional design, curated training data, human feedback, and economic and geopolitical pressures.

At present, we simply lack mature sciences of what might happen when millions or more artificial intelligences with superhuman capabilities and deeply inhuman goals enter our societies, cultures, economies, and institutions. To make progress on the many explanatory and normative questions this will raise, we will need new concepts, models, theories, and fields.

Playing in the same orchestra but not entirely from the same score:

Henry Farrell (Johns Hopkins) (“Programmable Mutter”), Alison Gopnik (UC Berkeley), and James Evans (University of Chicago), “The Research We Need to Understand A.I. Is Falling Apart”:

Nineteenth-century industrialization led to a series of huge social upheavals in which people left agrarian lives in the countryside for jobs in cities. Subjects were increasingly becoming citizens who could vote and influence policy to some degree and were educated in government-funded schools.

Not all of this was pretty. Workers endured terrible living conditions, while rapidly growing cities became cesspits of crime and disease. Politics was ravaged by conflict between those who wanted political and economic revolution and those who called for violent repression of these movements. Liberals, socialists and conservatives worried that these tensions would tear society apart.

The fear that machines were wrecking society created political demand for reliable information on what was happening on the ground and how people were living. In Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began, the journalist Henry Mayhew calculated that hundreds of Londoners made their living gathering bones, rags and cigar ends from the street, as well as dog excrement for tanneries. Commissions of inquiry and censuses followed and gathered information on working conditions and education. Politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats debated whether allowing poor people to vote would lead to disaster.

Social science research arose to study these issues in a more rigorous fashion. Economists studied markets, political scientists studied politics and the state, sociologists studied changing society, and psychologists studied minds. Though these investigations had flaws and were sometimes biased, together they rebuilt our public understanding of what was necessary and possible.

(Henry Farrell supplements that piece with this essay – “How should social science think about AI?” – making explicit how the argument relates to Charles Tilly’s Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (Russell Sage, 1984).)

Periodizing in a helpful if classic way, and focusing on the implications of “knowledge abundance” for teaching rather than for expertise-building or research:

David Deming (Harvard) at Forked Lightning, “The Three Eras of Undergraduate Education”:

When Charles William Eliot became president in 1869, the Harvard College curriculum was a narrow body of classical knowledge. Eliot would go on to create the modern elective system. President Lowell created concentrations and said in his inaugural address that “The best type of liberal education in our complex modern world aims at producing men who know a little of everything and something well.”

This second era called on Harvard to curate and develop expertise. A book contains knowledge. An expert organizes knowledge toward a purpose and helps students sift through what Lowell called the “unending stream” of information flowing past us.

Over the 20^th century, the university became much more specialized, which greatly expanded intellectual life at Harvard. But it also fragmented us. Expertise makes you deep, but narrow. We see this outside the academy, where society requires ever-greater reliance on the expertise of others. Do you know how to fix your own car? How to repair your smartphone? How to give yourself a colonoscopy? Don’t try that one at home.

Here at Harvard, we’ve built a great university around the accumulation of specialized expertise. Most of us professors have spent our lives studying narrow subjects. That makes us experts, but it pulls us away from each other. Again, this isn’t unique to the academy, we see it everywhere in life. Specialization has great benefits, but also great costs, because it divides us into separate realities and inhibits the formation of common purpose.

I believe this second era is coming to a close. The internet has made expert content available to anyone around the world. You’ve grown up in an era where you have access to free expertise through YouTube. I’m sure many of you have used it to educate yourself, as you should. That content doesn’t replace your education here, because it isn’t personalized. Masterful lectures are part of a great education, but not the only part. They don’t answer your questions or meet your individualized learning needs.

My original go-to for this line of thinking was and remains Chad Wellmon (University of Virginia) and his 2016 book (Johns Hopkins), Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. I read that book not long after I first encountered Joel Mokyr’s work on Enlightenment knowledge production and economic growth (culminating in A Culture of Growth (Princeton, 2016)), and in my head those two poles helped me align my original knowledge commons contribution to the field of higher education history and my more recent knowledge commons view of the Republic of Letters.

That brings me, finally, to Chad Wellmon’s recent book, After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work (Johns Hopkins, 2026).

The abstract:

When the pursuit of knowledge is eclipsed by money and power, what remains of higher learning?

What is a university for? Is it a sanctuary for disciplined study, or has it become something else entirely? In After the University, Chad Wellmon traces the long and often uneasy relationship between higher learning and the institutions that claim to protect it. Moving from the guilds of medieval Paris and the knowledge factories of Enlightenment-era Göttingen to the research empires of Berlin and Berkeley, Wellmon shows how the modern university has repeatedly reshaped itself to serve shifting social and political demands.

Across centuries, the goods of disciplined study—the joy of reading, the virtues of intellectual rigor, and the possibility of self-formation—have been overshadowed by the pursuit of external rewards such as money, prestige, and power. Part institutional history and part philosophical reflection, After the University examines how today’s institutions defend themselves not in the name of learning but in the language of productivity, innovation, and economic utility. Drawing on his experiences as a scholar, teacher, administrator, and witness to crises such as white supremacist marches and the COVID-19 pandemic, Wellmon illustrates how universities justify themselves through the outputs of graduates, research discoveries, and workforce training while leaving unmentioned the very practices that once defined them.

Despite this transformation, Wellmon argues that the university’s current state of turmoil exposes a new, enticing possibility: recognizing the practices of disciplined study as goods worth valuing in and of themselves rather than simply as means to other ends. With insight and urgency, After the University asks whether our institutions can still nurture intellectual desire—or whether we must find new homes for the life of the mind.

For fascinating reviews and comments on the book, read:

Nils Gilman at Small Precautions, “The Value of ‘Disciplined Study”:

Readers of this newsletter know I have argued that Kerr’s multiversity is finished — with the arrival of AI about to serve as the coup de grâce. Reading Wellmon has changed how I think about that argument. I had treated the contradictions as structural: too many missions bolted onto one balance sheet. He shows they are also conceptual. The multiversity could hold research, training, credentialing, and coming-of-age together only so long as human capital theory supplied a single currency in which all four could be denominated. Remove the currency — as an AI-flooded labor market is now doing to the credential’s signaling value — and nothing holds the conglomerate together.

Wellmon therefore earns his elegiac register. He notes that, despite everything that’s gone wrong with the university as a system, having or not having a BA still divides those doing well from those doing badly, even as “the estrangement of disciplined study and the university is crystallized in this social fact. People are driven toward the university not because they want to learn, but rather because they know that the road to a good life runs through the university. The university absorbs intellectual desire but redirects it into pursuits of status, credentials, and output.” But an exclusively output-oriented conception of higher learning, as he puts it, is “both diminished and pernicious.”

In my Persuasion piece, I argue that the pedagogy of higher ed must be remade around what humans uniquely provide — judgment, trust, taste, the constitution of goals, and so on — because AI is commodifying everything else. Wellmon’s book adds a crucial point: those capacities aren’t (or shouldn’t be) primarily valued for instrumental reasons. For in fact they are precisely what emerges from a commitment to disciplined study.

And if you have read this far, and know my prior arguments, you will be unsurprised by this closing reference to:

Hollis Robbins (Utah) at Anecdotal Value, “‘After the University’ (Review)”:

It took me nearly seven years as a dean at two universities to see the whole of what is causing the current crisis in higher education, which I most recently wrote about here. Wellmon’s After the University offers a lament for a lost fantasy (a term he returns to again and again): “a desire for intellectual community, excellence in thinking, and the intrinsic goods of learning, knowing, and thinking” (351). I am by this time too jaded by what I’ve seen to even think about using that word myself, but I am glad that Wellmon has it and that people still see the university as someday returning to something better than the wreck it is now.

She is a little blunter than I usually am.

But she is not wrong.

University professors across schools, colleges, departments, centers, and registers of seniority are, collectively, heavily invested in their tendency to construct a fantastic world – a “community of scholars” pursuing the “life of the mind” – and then to both imagine and to practice the principle that their highest calling is to steward the transmission of “critical thinking skills” in disciplinary registers (derived from the late 19th century problem solvers responding to the Industrial Revolution) via their teaching and via their scholarship.

If only they – collectively – knew fully the extent to which modern universities and colleges are deeply and irrevocably committed in other directions. The university as the institutional centerpiece of the “life of the mind” is Brigadoon, an imagined and largely imaginary idea even in one of its original U.S. constructions, the famous (and backward-looking) Yale Report of 1828 and its central attention to the university as training for “the discipline and the furniture of the mind.”

Chad Wellmon mourns. Hollis Robbins, and others, may believe that the proverbial reformist game is worth the candle.

I’m not so sure. I’m a fantasist at times as much as the next academic, and most of the time I would like nothing more than to steer “the university” and my own university back in the direction that Chad Wellmon describes.

My institutional angle suggests that my energy and attention should take different forms. I don’t have a shot to take at making universities better. (But never say never, a la Sean Connery!) The angle does not give me answers, or strategies. It does give me and others a lifetime’s worth of research topics. I do have questions, which have both a practical, reformist, or even entrepreneurial character as well as a descriptive, observational character:

What comes next, amid Generative AI and (everything else)? Amid yet another twist in the “there is too much” history of knowledge and information, what do our institutions look like and how do they operate? What will they look like and how will they operate? I don’t mean only “what do universities look like?,” or “what will they look like?” let alone “what should universities look like?” Maybe “the university” as an institutional form is so tethered to expectations originating in during the Enlightenment and continuing through the Industrial Revolution and the 20th (modern) century that “the university” as an institutional form is … over. Cooked. Done. Maybe we should be writing Shelley-esque valedictories to “the Ozymandian university”: “look on my Collegiate Gothic and Brutalist works, ye Professors, and despair!”

Too soon? I mean, seriously, “what do knowledge governance systems look like?” What will they look like? What should they look like? How do we break big questions like those into “nearly decomposable” and useful elements?

And how are “we,” collectively, getting from here to there, and when, and why? Processes – plural – matter as much as end-states.

DON’T PANIC.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: Don’t Panic appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: September 8, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

The proprietor of the “AI for Legal Education” newsletter, Professor Seth Chandler of the University of Houston Law Center, has been writing about Generative AI and its uses in legal education with both enthusiasm and a critical eye. He invited “fellow travelers” of a sort to volunteer to produce guest contributions at that site, based in part on his sense that “there is too much,” as the always-useful “Princess Bride” would have it.

I raised my hand.

I wrote the following guest essay, which Seth was generous enough to post last Tuesday, September 1. I am reproducing it here in full, together (below) with a copy of the “hero image” that Seth generated using ChatGPT.

The headline – his – was and is “What is a “Generative AI policy” supposed to do?” I’ve added my own color commentary in the headline above, based on the mid-1980s pop single and album by the legendary Aretha Franklin: Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

Read on. I’ve bracketed my original essay with icon versions of the “AI for Legal Education” banner.

I want to focus attention on an under-appreciated dimension of the conversations and debates happening in and across both legal education and higher education when it comes to “what should we do about Generative AI?” That is: who is making these decisions, and on whose behalf, and how?

As the Fall 2026 semester gets underway, the waters of US and Canadian legal education are rife with institutional policies and guidance of related sorts directed partly to Generative AI use by students and partly to adjacent questions of student use of technology generally. Some of those, such as UC Berkeley’s mostly anti-AI policy and the University of Chciago’s laptop ban, have come in for a kicking here on AI for Legal Education. If you are keeping track of these things, the University of Toronto’s law program is also trying to limit student use of classroom technology; Columbia Law School came out with what it characterizes as a “balanced” approach to student experience with Generative AI. Among the most recent notable interventions in this flow of news is one from the University of Georgia’s School of Law, which sets a table of opportunity from which students should design their own paths.

Meanwhile, the broader university would like a say. The social sciences faculty at the University of Chicago, for example. And MIT has come out with a university-scale report.

Others can and have and will pick apart what they like and don’t like in each approach. There is (as well) a cottage industry of individual faculty members laying out their own approaches, which range from outright hostility (Brad Wendel (Cornell)) to grudging, skeptical acknowledgment (Michael Plaxton (Saskatchewan)) to acceptance coupled with pushing students to be purposeful and reflective about what they are doing (me) to “dogfoodism” (practice what you preach in AI enthusiasm) (Seth Chandler).

Here is what interests me, and my response to my introductory question. In what respects are schools making decisions about AI exposure, awareness, and training on behalf of their students? In what respects are individual faculty members making those decisions? In what respects are students being left to – for career development purposes – fend for themselves in figuring out what to learn about AI, and from whom, and how?

The institutional policies are, themselves, almost entirely matters of signaling rather than actual practice, and to the extent that the policies go beyond signaling, they represent public resource commitments by the schools and, in some cases, by their parent universities. Berkeley clearly and purposely wants to come across to various audiences, including to members of the Berkeley Law community, as “tech pragmatists,” if not “tech skeptics”; Berkeley’s law school has long been celebrated in other respects for its early and deep commitment to law-meets-tech research and teaching. Berkeley is not going to go out of its way to invest extra resources in AI-themed training. Across the San Francisco Bay, UC Law San Francisco has staked out the opposite pole, celebrating its commitment to having each and every student complete a capstone “AI enabled” lab. The University of Chicago Law School already employs a cadre of experienced and sophisticated legaltech practitioners in its ranks of Lecturers; I read the school’s AI policy as doubling down on commitments to have those faculty members steer the school’s AI future. The University of Georgia School of Law is levelling up, in a way; the school as such is currently not putting its shoulder into the AI space but is more than willing to support faculty colleagues who are actively synching up their efforts with AI-related resources at the University of Georgia, full stop.

At the margin, institutional policies may influence decision-making by students who opt to attend one law school rather than another based on their respective AI policies (I would be surprised if this happens much, if it happens at all); at the margin, the policies may affect legal employers’ choices to recruit at one law school rather than another, or to prefer candidates from one school over another, if there are choices to be made (again, I would be surprised if this happens much, if it happens at all).

In an important way, individual policies matter more than institutional policies. Individual teachers are almost always given the power (or retain the power) to design their own policies – based on principles of academic freedom as those meet the pragmatics of policy enforcement – even in environments otherwise described as “no AI for students,” institutionally. For obvious reasons, beginning with the fact that many if not most law professors, like many if not most university faculty generally, do not publicize the details of their syllabi or their course policies, it is difficult to get a sense of the scale of the variation that describes individual policies. I suspect that my micro-survey above of individual professors’ self-description offers only the tip of a large iceberg when it comes to what students will hear (or at times, not hear) from their teachers about when and how AI use is (acceptable) (not acceptable) (a great idea) (and so on).

All of which leads students to sort out an enormous amount of the “what to do about Generative AI?” question on their own. And without any particularly great or even good guidance either focused on Generative AI specifically or on broader questions of the roles and purposes of technology in professional practice generally, and how those might bear on decisions about investing in curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular programs.

Looking at the issue from one perspective – that of the “classic” law school curriculum – it might be difficult to see a problem. Law students have long been tasked with sorting out curricular choices and part-time and summer employment largely on their own, taking cues from upper-level students, the occasionally helpful faculty mentor, a little nudging from a career services office staff, and general knowledge about what it means to (to learn to) be a lawyer. What’s one more complex body of information and prospective practice that our students should have to know something about?

Computerized legal research was a skill to be encountered and perhaps mastered, but no one ever had to be guided in selecting among normative frames for appreciating the place of computerized legal research in lawyer formation or legal practice. No one ever said – meaningfully – that Westlaw would corrupt a law student’s capacity for critical thought or expression.

(Or if they said that, or something analogous to it, those ideas came and went and are now properly viewed as anachronistic, if not uninformed, ignorant, and technophobic in the first place.)

[Looking at the same issue from the perspective of “this is not ‘just like’ other technologies intervening in legal training and practice] My point, then, is that in coming up with policies – whether as institutions or as individuals – we are individually and collectively failing to appreciate the fact that we are imposing a significant decision-making burden on our students.

As a sector, legal educators spend essentially zero time as it is instructing our students in decision-making.

The school says “X” about Generative AI; Professor A says, “I have good reasons to promote and teach “Not X”; Professor B says, “I promote and teach Y about Generative AI.” Beyond the walls of the law school, loud voices decry the concentration of power in a handful of frontier AI firms in Silicon Valley, the labor market and environmental harms that many say accompany or will accompany the widespread deployment of AI hardware and systems, and the many ways in which data centers are corrupting both rural and suburban landscapes much as ChatGPT is corrupting the interpretive skills of students and the literary skills of higher education administrators.

“What it means to be a lawyer” used to be a somewhat helpful practical principle in selecting among and prioritizing how to spend one’s time in law school. But (in a post for the future) the implicit “models of law practice” that have long shaped the design of the law school curriculum are losing much of their integrative force. “What it means to be a lawyer” today is now many different things – related, but no longer as clearly integrated as they were as recently as 25 or 30 years ago.

Even if one disagrees with that intuition, today’s practicing bar is little help. I was on a Zoom call earlier this week with several Chief Innovation Officers of large law firms, and the dominant theme in their descriptions of new hires, straight out of law school, was a complaint that new lawyers don’t know how much tokens cost. As usual, many if not most law firms expect a grounding in the details of legaltech use that is literally beyond the capacity of most law schools to deliver. (Again, how law schools are trying to manage that capacity issue is a post for a different day.)

Given the massive heterogeneity of law school and law professor policy and practice as to Generative AI, even within a given school, what should a student do? What should a cohort of students do? My question is not about the ultimate outcome. My question goes to how the decision should be made.

AI is not failing our students.

We are.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: Where the AI Burden Lies appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: September 2, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

When I write about legal education, I am writing about legal education, but I am also writing about higher education. The law school stands in for the university, in an incomplete and imperfect way; the dysfunctions and inadequacies of contemporary lawyer training and legal scholarship anticipate and mirror many of the dysfunctions and inadequacies of contemporary college teaching and (waves hands at all of) research.

But not even gets or sees the equation, which is one reason why I (sometimes) write about legal education over at TaxProf Blog (and now, elsewhere, and stand by there – and here – for more), and why I (usually) write about higher education here.

But I need to cross the streams, Ghostbusters-style. It’s time for some total protonic reversal. I am ignoring what Peter Venkman called an “important safety tip.”

Boomer humor aside:

At TaxProf Blog the other day, I posted a bit about “innovation” in legal education. I’m re-posting it here, in its entirety, because what I have to say about a certain bit of news in legal education circles applies, conceptually at least, to equivalent bits of news in higher education circles.

How do I know? Because entirely independently of me, Hollis Robbins made this comment in a Substack note:

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed list of 16 “people to watch” (you don’t need to read it) includes the usual list of people who got the sector into this mess. It’s all politics and business as usual. Not a single person is challenging the underlying structures causing a decline in quality around the county ….

Aha.

Here we go. The following is copied from the TaxProf Blog.

The “National Law Review” has published a list of “The 2026 Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia,” here.

Who is a “legal innovator”? The NLR – and its sponsor, Wickard (“a specialized education and advisory firm operating at the intersection of law, artificial intelligence, ethics, and public policy”) writes: they are “educators, administrators, researchers, and academic leaders who are shaping the future of legal education. The recognition highlights individuals who are developing innovative programs, conducting impactful research, modernizing curricula, launching new centers and initiatives, and preparing students to meet the evolving demands of the legal profession.”

There was a nomination process, and a selection committee, whose members are listed in the story. Essentially everyone on the list is doing something with Generative AI or about Generative AI. That is not surprising, though it is disappointing. It is to be expected that a competition sponsored by an AI consultancy would equate “innovation” in law and legal education with “AI.”

As I usually do, I have a comment, after the jump. What is worth noticing here, and what is not?

What’s worth noticing:

I know a lot of these people personally. They are smart, hard-working, committed and often passionate researchers and teachers, and they’ve earned every bit of light that Wickard and others might shine on them. The range of seniority, experience, expertise, and “school status” represented on the list is impressive. Some of these people are long-time researchers and teachers in intellectual property law and law and technology, fields that I have been working in in different respects for 40 years. Some are deans. Some are energizer bunnies in different ways, as professors of practice, directors of centers and labs, as teachers of legal writing or lawyering skills. Some are legal education veterans; some have not even started their first full-time academic appointments.

What’s not worth noticing:

The word “innovator” and the aligned word “innovation” are doing much more work in this list than they should, or are trying to.

In Thomas Kuhn’s terms, building an AI-themed law lab or clinic, or research center or research program, or incorporating AI-relevant “skills” into a legal writing or even full first-year curriculum is “normal science.” It is what U.S. (and Canadian, and Israeli) law schools ordinarily do: they – really, individual teachers rather than schools as institutions or systems – identify “new shiny things” that are intellectually interesting and/or relevant to the evolving character of professional practice – and figure out how to attach them to their default teaching models and research expectations. None of these “top 50 innovators,” let alone any of their law schools, has identified or is advancing a Kuhn-style “paradigm shift.” They are – as individuals – “puzzle-solvers,” building incrementally on the past. Perhaps they are sophisticated, challenging, imaginative puzzle-solvers, but they are puzzle-solvers nevertheless. That characterization is hardly damning; it is the characterization that applies to almost all of the most sophisticated, challenging, and imaginative deans, faculty, and professional staff that I know across all of legal academia worldwide, whether or not they have been labeled “innovators” or “innovative.” I am, in my most optimistic and charitable moments, a puzzle-solver myself.

Perhaps Kuhn isn’t the right basis for my comment.

Turn instead, then, away from philosophy of science and toward management theory. “Innovation,” as Clayton Christensen got famous for arguing, comes in two flavors: “sustaining” innovation, and “disruptive” innovation.

From where I sit, the Wickard list is an excellent account of “sustaining” innovation. I see essentially no “disruptive” innovation. I see no systems of innovation, no fundamentally new ways of doing things or materially less expensive ways of doing the same things. I see no institutions creating environments where novelty can be explored and sorted. (The imprecise Kuhnian parallel is this: I see no people or schools wrestling with structural disconnects between prediction and observation.)

“Sustaining” innovation means “innovation intended to refine existing products for an industry’s or company’s most valuable customers,” typically aimed at preserving, protecting, and enhancing the industry’s or company’s status, standing, and market position. “Better products mean more profits,” especially in the short run. “Sustaining” keeps markets and companies essentially intact.

“Disruptive” innovation means “product and price competition by rivals that undercuts incumbents, typically by claiming a spot at the bottom of a market, either by selling lower cost products or by serving underserved customers or both.” “Disruption” changes society, markets, and companies.

Christensen’s original fame lay in his claim that if the “disruptor” gains a foothold at the “low” end, the incumbent’s rational strategy is to protect profit margins by moving up-market. The more the incumbent moves up-market, the greater the space left available for the disruptor to claim below it. A “low-end” disruptor becomes a “mid-market” rival, eventually – perhaps – squeezing the incumbent out of business entirely. (Because Christensen was a Harvard Business School professor and his theory isn’t really a theory; it is essentially a diagnosis for managers, this simple HBS summary offers a decent introduction to his parsing of the “innovation” concept.)

(An aside: I am aware, of course, that Christensen was parroting Schumpeter in many respects, that his diagnoses work far better as a set of just-so stories and cautionary tales than a prescription, and that Christensen had his critics – notably his across-the-Charles Harvard colleague, the historian Jill Lepore, in a 2014 New Yorker essay. Lepore was right to challenge Christensen’s sense that “disruption” had a general and almost inevitable logic to it, but she got a bunch of things wrong, too. She dismissed Christensen’s use of the 20th century U.S. steel industry as an example of a sector that got “disrupted” essentially out of existence by its failure to respond effectively to a novel production model. Lepore writes that Steel’s “failure is by no means a matter of historical record.” If she has ever visited Pittsburgh, she obviously got the wrong memo.)

Buy my Kuhn view or my Christensen view, or don’t. I don’t assume that I am persuasive.

But the questions prompted by those framings nag at me. Are “we” (in this case, Wickard) celebrating the wrong sorts of “innovation”? Or failing to celebrate additional right sorts of “innovation”?

In a conversation with a veteran US law dean just a week ago, I was asked: where does this all end, this AI business? The questioner continued: is there a cliff coming, a point at which the financial and training model of US law schools – still, at its core, the 1870 Harvard Law model – so fails to keep up with rapid and diverse changes to legal institutions and law practice around the world that employers simply stop hiring our students in large numbers, debt loads become unsustainable, and law schools’ parent universities stop subsidizing the schools anywhere near to the extent that subsidies are extended today?

I don’t know. But I have wondered the same thing, for a long time.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: What Innovation Means appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: August 25, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

A colleague dug through old material from college and shared with me a couple of pages of a text distributed to Yale students in the mid-1990s. The full text is titled “Writing Prose,” and in evolving forms it was produced by the “Committee on Expository Writing” at Yale beginning in the mid-1970s. One of its original 1970s authors was one of my freshman English professors, Jefferson (Jeff) Hunter, who later left Yale and taught at Smith College.

The material that I’ve quoted below appears at the very end of a 60-page booklet, likely added either as part of a mid-1990s revision or a late-1980s revision. The distinction doesn’t matter. What strikes me, and what motivates me to share the quotations, are parallels between the faculty’s characterization of “writing with a word processor” then and teachers’ anxieties today about students producing written work via Generative AI.

More and more Yale students, like writers everywhere, are turning to the computer and its word processing software for all stages of the writing process. There are many excellent reasons to this. Word processing eliminates or streamlines many of the routine tasks involved in writing, allowing you to work faster. With a word processor, you no longer need to retype your entire draft in order to change it, so that you are much less likely to feel daunted by the task of revising. The computer gives you many sophisticated tools for manipulating your prose, such as block moves, text searches, global replacements, and automatic footnotes. Word processing replaces the old notion of discrete drats with a continuous cycle of reconsideration and refinement, making it easier to work toward more and more polished prose. In the end, your finished copy will often look neater than a text written or typed by hand, especially if you use a spelling checker to catch errors. All of these capabilities make the word processor an immensely powerful and attractive tool, so much so that many writers would not dream or working without one. If you think of the word processor merely as a computerized typewriter, you are selling the technology short.

Many teachers nonetheless complain that there is no sharp difference in quality between papers written on word processors and those done by hand or on a typewriter. Indeed, some claim that there has been a significant deterioration [italics in original] in the quality of manuscripts because students write so quickly on the computer that they become careless about the elementary tasks of rereading and proofreading prose. Word processing may help you organize and refine your ideas, but the invention, analysis, and persuasion on which all good writing depends must still come from you. The word processor may not be simply a high-tech typewriter, but neither is it an artificial intelligence. The quality of your prose – whether measured in terms of the insight of your ideas or the accuracy of your spelling and punctuation – is your responsibility.

Taking control of the word processor so that you can use it as effectively as possible requires that you recognize the new problems it can introduce into your prose. The greater sped of computer composition, for instance, can lead to sloppiness or wordiness: as essays become longer, they often lose their organizational clarity or focus. Relocating passages in block moves (“cutting and pasting”) often introduces errors of parallelism or logical sequence. Computer revision all too frequently produces noun-verb or other word combinations that no longer agree with one another. Because you do not retype an entire sentence when you change it on the computer, a sentence such as “The typical student does not proofread carefully enough” can easily become “Too many Yale students does not proofread carefully enough.” [Bold in original.] No spelling checker can identify such errors, so the only way to guard against them is to slow down and reread everything you revise, preferably out loud. Your ear will hear errors that your eye has great trouble seeing on the computer screen.

Perhaps the most serious pitfall of word processing lies in the fact that only a small part of one’s text – far less than a conventional page – is visible at any given time. The computer screen gives writers the compositional equivalent of tunnel vision, causing them to forget statements they may already have made and making it difficult for them to keep track of the larger framework in which individual paragraphs are embedded. Although word processing is in many ways preferable to older forms of writing, the constraints of the display screen are a substantial drawback. For this reason, you should print out your word processor file at regular intervals [italics in original] in order to see it whole. At the very least, produce one complete printed draft for revision and correction before you turn in any essay.

…

In sum, writing on a word processor means writing in a powerful new way, but the goal for your final product remains the same: clear, readable prose that will convey your ideas to your reader in an engaging and understandable way. Keep that goal foremost in your mind at all times, and you will find that your prose — whether written with a computer or a quill pen — will gain a grace and clarity that will do honor to yourself and your audience alike.

The 1980s and 1990s limits of the vision animating that text are pretty obvious, although in a lot of respects the substantive guidance does not merely reflect a well-intentioned New Yorker-ish 20th century ideology (I like to imagine that the authors of the text were influenced by the campus presence of William Zinsser, of “On Writing Well”). A lot of the substance here is still quite useful, and not only to student writers.

Here is why. It’s where I enter the story, and how:

I grew up in a family of writers. Journalists, newshounds of the mid-century old school, rather than novels or poets or playwrights. Between the training I received at home and guidance from middle school English teachers, by the time I entered high school my prose had advanced well beyond an introductory level, even if I had a long way to go. (For more autobiographical context, read the first few pages of this law journal article.)

In the ninth grade, I learned to type. I was told to take my school’s typing class, which I did, and for a Christmas present (or perhaps a birthday present), I was given a manual typewriter. It’s the machine pictured above, which I still own. An Olympia SM9, which at least one typewriter maven on social media has called “possibly the best-engineered typewriter ever made,” though until I read that sentence it had never occurred to me to wonder about the relative merits of my machine. (The serial number of my machine marks it as a contemporary of this one.) Back in the mid-1970s, on that machine and the manuals at school I learned to bang out text at something close to 50 words per minute, which was a pretty respectable clip.

Every report, essay, and research paper that I produced in high school was typed up on that machine. Every paper and project that I produced in college was typed up on that machine. Every exam I took in law school was written on that machine. Back in the day – the 1980s and long before – it was common for law schools to give students the option of taking exams in separate “typing rooms,” usually occupied by a tiny handful of students rather than hand-writing exams in blue books, surrounded by a large cohort of test-takers.

I lugged all 20 pounds of my Olympia SM9 to the San Jose Convention Center during the late Summer of 1987 in order to write the bar exam over those three long days. The “typing room” for the bar exam featured more than a tiny handful of students, but by then I was accustomed to thinking and writing amid the din of typewriter keys hitting platens. Some test-takers brought electric typewriters, but they tended to be even heavier than my Olympia. The bar examiners prohibited using any machine that contained even the slightest hint of “computer memory.” Mine passed pre-test inspection with flying colors.

Along the way, the volume of material that I produced, together with my family’s nudging me toward journalism and some internship time spent in newsrooms, meant that I got to be reasonably proficient at composing at a keyboard. In the Spring of 1979, the annual “Journalism Education Association” (JEA, now JEA/NSPA) convention was held at a hotel in San Jose, and among the “student journalist” competitions was a contest to write a news story immediately following a pretend news conference. The Olympia and I listened to the speaker and to the questions and answers that followed, and immediately afterward I wrote up a story. I won a trophy.

All of which is to say that when I encountered “word processing software” for the first time, at law school during the mid-1980s, I was reasonably self-aware as to what STS scholars (but, understandably, not the Yale Committee on Expository Writing) would call its “affordances,” relative to the “affordances” of a typewriter or a quill pen.

I was not and am not as self-aware or as enthusiastic about comparative writing/thinking/technology intersections as, say, fountain-pen-using Neal Stephenson, but even forty years ago I recognized that there is no such thing as a “pure” baseline when it comes to thinking and writing without bias or contamination or influence of the “tools” that we use to compose. The McLuhan-esque adage has always been true in my case: we make our tools, and they make us.

The physical effort involved in using a manual typewriter, and the loud clacking of the typewriter keys, enforced a patience and a discipline that I have always found useful when writing and thinking, even if I boxed up my typewriter long ago in favor of computer keyboards and mice. (I am reminded of film, as I often am. In the movie “Finding Forrester” (2000), Sean Connery’s character William Forrester, a reclusive Salinger-esque writer, yells at his student protege: ““Punch the keys, for God’s sake!”) The Yale Committee clearly got and gets that part right: writing assistants, whether they are “word processors,” or “Clippy” from Microsoft,” or a Generative AI model, are – by design – intended to eliminate much of the “friction,” intellectual, emotional, and mechanical, that many have found, for generations, to be an essential ingredient in great writing. Even good writing.

Which is, in a way, also the thing that the Yale passage above gets wrong, if understandably so. The machine is, in itself, neither the problem nor the solution.

It’s the friction. If I call “teaching writing” a problem of “sociotechnical” design – blending ease and struggle, mechanical as well as cognitive and metaphorical – rather than a question of “when word processors are good” and “when word processors are bad,” then I stay on the right (write?) track with my own students. It is too easy, I think, to dismiss the Yale Committee’s guidance under the guise of treating anxiety over word processors as silly. Word processors, we believe, didn’t make the world worse.

Did they?

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: Same Old, Same Old appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: August 13, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

Columbia University’s law school recently published the latest in a string of non-blockbuster “AI use” policies for its law students. The Columbia policy is here. It comes on the heels of similar announcements from law schools at the University of Chicago (which offered a grand “AI Strategy Statement” titled “Rethinking Legal Education in the AI Era”), the University of Texas (in a “Dear colleagues” letter from the dean), and the University of California, Berkeley (simply a policy). The dean of the law school at Suffolk University, Andrew Perlman, has collected and archived AI policies and practices across many but not all US law schools. 163 schools, to be specific as I write this, based on public sources (the archive was built largely with AI, of course), out of the 200 or so ABA-accredited US law schools.

I focus on the policies, because almost all of the academic and legal profession reaction to what law schools are and are not doing relative to AI focuses, likewise, on the policies. I’ve called out the four above because they’ve been the most salient in provoking reactions, judging anecdotally from comments on LinkedIn and Substack and even coverage in the New York Times.

As I wade back into writing here about systems and institutions other than soccer/football (FIFA’s post-World Cup shenanigans tempt me, strongly, to stay with that theme, so don’t go anywhere, sports fans!), I have a few comments about what’s happening with AI policies and law schools.

One, and hardly original to me:

The attention to policies misses a great deal of what is actually important to law students, to new law graduates, to law professors, law schools, and therefore to the legal profession as a whole, and to the communities and organizations that rely on law and lawyers. Which is: practice, meaning the many different ways in which law schools and law professors might introduce students to AI, explore AI with students, help students see the powers and limits of AI, and so forth. Policies have only so much weight relative to student and faculty behavior.

Individual behavior is one thing; collective and institutional behavior is yet another. On the school and faculty side of the proverbial ledger, and beyond or behind a give statement or policy, what are the institutional commitments to build and support teaching practices and research around AI? “How is the policy enforced” is one thing, but only a start. Institutional commitments might reach much more deeply (or not); they might amount to money and time and faculty and other effort directed to courses and experiences that embrace AI (either in a curriculum that is “about” AI or in a curriculum that weaves AI into other material, or both), or that keep AI at arm’s length or beyond, or (more likely, I suspect) that blend of those things by context.

In the abstract, policies are parsed and critiqued for being (at times) too restrictive. Berkeley’s policy seems to be the strictest version of “No AI For You,” a la Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi.” Or, at times, too generous and undisciplined. Even Berkeley’s policy, like most, allows for opt-outs by individual faculty members. What Scylla takes away, Charybdis gives.

I am as aware as any university professor that organizing and implementing resource strategies to back up institutional commitments pose different and more complex problems for academic leaders (deans, but also motivated faculty voices) than nudging faculty members into formal alignment with an institutional policy. A university is something like an aircraft carrier: a multi-purpose system of systems, technologies, purposes, and people that is enormously powerful but that changes course only slowly, never all in the same direction, and never on the proverbial dime. (Also, some argue that aircraft carriers are obsolete in an era of smart weapons. That’s a conversation for a different time.) The faculty opt-out strategy is obviously key to getting faculty to accept the conduct and outcomes of a policy-making process, for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons, but that process requires (only) a lot of talking with colleagues and (if it’s done well) with present and former students. Changes of institutional course often require partnerships with provosts, and advancement offices, and community partners.

Which is why this initiative at UC Law SF (the San Francisco law school formerly known as the Hastings College of the Law, part of the University of California) is distinctive. The law school will require that all JD students complete an “AI-enabled lawyering lab.” Observers may disagree about the wisdom of that strategy (personally, I think that it’s a good thing). What impresses me is the fact that the school is putting time and money behind its formal vision. UC Law SF is a stand-alone law school.

Given what may turn out to be (and what I think are likely to be) disconnects in practice between what the policies permit and require and what actually happens in classrooms and among students, it will be interesting to watch patterns of evolution and change at both levels.

Two, and entirely about me:

My own law school (Pittsburgh) is not represented in the archive produced by Dean Perlman at Suffolk Law, largely because our law school has no institutional policy on AI use by students (or others, including administrative staff). To the best of my knowledge, there is no movement among my colleagues to produce one. That’s not a considered forward-looking strategy; it’s inertia. The University of Pittsburgh culture often takes after City of Pittsburgh culture, which I once characterized as “don’t just do something. Stand there.” Both Pitt and Pittsburgh are no longer as stuck in the cultural mud as they once were. The AI economy is as difficult to overlook locally as it is nationally and internationally. But neither Pitt nor Pittsburgh has the institutional dynamism or flair of Silicon Valley or New York or even many cities of Pittsburgh’s own size.

Yet as every teacher at almost every level and in almost every institution knows by know, student access to and use of AI systems is nearly universal.

So I wrote my own policy. “Opt-out” permissions even at schools that have adopted institutional rules mean that I could do this, I think, if I were teaching at Berkeley, Texas, Chicago, or Columbia. I will be curious to learn, if I learn, about the range of opt-out settings adopted there. There is an archive to be built of individual faculty practices, at law schools and elsewhere.

Here is mine.

I teach upper-level elective courses only. They are relatively small scale. I don’t give exams of any sort. I have long permitted my students to consult any material and any person of their choosing. I am not trying to assess what my students know; I am trying to assess their progress in becoming legal professionals. So I treat them that way: as junior legal professionals. AI will be a part of their professional experience (and if they are employed in part-time legal work during law school, in all probability AI is part of that experience); therefore it should be a part of their apprenticeship, meaning law school. So the TL;DR version of my policy is this: students may use the AI systems that they wish to but are expected to disclose the character of their use in some meaningful detail. The policy is new for 2026-2027, so I do not yet have answers to some obvious questions: how much detail? What happens if I deem the detail to be inadequate? What happens if they use AI but don’t disclose?

It’s an experiment.

(I wrote everything above before reading Clay Shirky’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, which I echo, in a way. Or he echoes me. Or both.)

Three, looking ahead, and again, not inventing a theme but bringing it into relief in my field:

One obvious explanation for all of the attention to policy rather than practice, both among law professors and their critics, is that addressing AI via policy insulates the faculty and the practitioners from the sense that we (the collective “we,” meaning the multiple wings of the profession) don’t in fact know what we’re doing. We did, but now we don’t.

I mean that – “we don’t know what we’re doing” – in a nearly literal sense, and I also mean it mostly in a positive, optimistic sense.

One key thread linking statements by Berkeley, Texas, Chicago, and now Columbia is a strong and unbreakable commitment to protecting and privileging the critical cognitive skills of lawyers-to-be. The commitment is not limited to law and lawyers and law schools, but it is especially sharp in a field that has signed on – for decades – to the principle that the purpose of law school is to teach its graduates to “think like a lawyer.” Folks as old as I am will remember this legendary line from the fictional Professor Kingsfield: “You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”

Shaping mush into discipline is what law professors do, even if we don’t do it with the ruthlessness of Harvard Law School in the 1970s and before. (Kingsfield was a piece of work, but by all accounts his questioning style was not unrepresentative of the real Harvard Law School.) It’s what law professors know how to do. For the most part, it is both what law professors take pride in doing and pretty much all that law professors know how to do. “We have to keep AI from corrupting that discipline-forming process” is also “we have to protect our field, and our jobs, careers, and identities,” even if that latter statement is a difficult truth.

AI policies are the tips of institutional icebergs. Below the waterline are big questions: what should law schools and law professors do, looking forward, given AI? Stay the cognitive course? Steer in additional directions? Who does the steering, keeping the course or changing it, and when and where, and at what pace? If any specific school is a proverbial aircraft carrier, what are its resources, purposes, and missions, and personnel? To whom is it accountable, and how? I have a recent post up on the TaxProf Blog that elaborates somewhat on what I called existential themes.

Those are not rhetorical questions, at least not entirely. Whether they are rhetorical or real, they are difficult questions, with no simple or obvious answers. I hear them asked rarely, among my colleagues. (And I have not even waved at the finances of law schools. Over here, I did.) And to be clear, I am using law here only as a case study. The entirety of the higher education edifice is facing one version of these questions or another, or perhaps all of them. And the only way forward is, as Anne Lamott famously wrote, bird by bird. One step at a time, in purposeful action in multiple directions, even purposeful re-commitment to classic values and practices. Policy isn’t enough.

Commentators of a certain age might get to this point and yield the floor to Pogo: I have met the enemy and he is us.

But I am more optimistic than that. The university’s decentralized character, its multi-purpose-aircraft-carrier-character, is its superpower. If it has a superpower. Where do we go? What do we do? Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we – the collective we, the citizens of the department, the center, the school, the college, and the university – have the power to decide, if only we seize it and exercise it.

Years ago, talking with a senior, experienced, and widely-respected law professor friend, I explained that I had given up the traditional law school practice of assessing my students via single comprehensive end-of-semester “issue spotting” exams. Instead, during the semester I gave them (and give them) a series of written assignments that are meant to test my students’ abilities to form themselves into junior lawyers, dealing with incompleteness and ambiguity. (Anyone can read my assignments for themselves at my course pages, and anyone can read my explanation and justification here.) I judge their work accordingly. I was a practicing lawyer for a long time myself, and I’ve been a client. I think that I have a sound basis for evaluating the early career “lawyering” capabilities of my students.

My law professor friend replied, in all sincerity and in good faith, mustering a career’s worth of dignity, pride, and expertise: I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that.

It’s an imaginative leap from that anecdote to this one, but stay with me, please:

Way back in the late 1980s, Nike launched an ad campaign built around Michael Jordan and directed by (and co-starring) Spike Lee. The gag was a blend of Spike Lee’s performing in his Mars Blackmon character from “Do the Right Thing” and Mars’ relentless insistence that Michael Jordan’s scoring prowess was based on the Nike “Air Jordan” shoes that he wore.

Rather than on, say, MJ’s relentless drive not only to perfect his talent but also to change the way that the game was played. Basketball before MJ was one thing; basketball after MJ has been another thing entirely. Michael Jordan is not the only player to have changed the sport, but he did change the sport.

AI.

Changing what teachers and schools do? Or do we change ourselves?

It’s gotta be the shoes.

The original commercial is too good to omit.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: Doing the Right Thing appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: July 27, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

Not only did I spend weeks of the Summer of 2026 glued to my TV screen, watching World Cup soccer, but I also wrote near-daily essays on Facebook about my reactions. My audience? My dozens of what Facebook calls “friends.”

Many of those people are my friends beyond Facebook. Their responses to my essays being pretty positive on the whole, via Facebook comments and private messages, I’ve combined the essays in a single document.

The exercise was revealing: I wrote nearly 23,000 words in total! For a lot of college and university professors, that’s a Summer’s worth of effort.

Call it, then, “how I spent the better part of my Summer,” or one fan’s journey through soccer’s looking glass. Add my narration to your own, or enjoy my version of the tournament vicariously, as a partial substitute for your own experience.

Here it is, with the title, “A Summer of Soccer: The World Cup 2026.”

My Dean will never care about my effort or yours, and none of what I wrote is publishable as an scholarly journal article or book chapter. But I had a lot of fun along the way, and I got to put my 1970s “old school” journalistic training to use. I once learned to compose at a typewriter keyboard, in a newsroom. That explains the header image! Maybe someone will find it interesting, amusing, or even useful.

Next time, I’ll find a way back to topics other than soccer. The Fall semester looms; my courses begin in only three weeks. And I have a lot of additional writing to do!

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: A World Cup Story appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: July 21, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

Like tens of millions of people around the world, I spent much of the last five weeks glued to my screens, watching and following the World Cup.

(Sorry. That’s the “FIFA World Cup,” at least since 1970, when modern branding first kicked in to the tournament, figuratively. 1970 also was the first year that the World Cup featured the now-iconic black-and-white hexagons-and-pentagons soccer ball. The black-and-white contrast, a departure from the white balls and orange or brown balls that had been common to that point, was a tip-of-the-hat to television broadcasters that need the ball to show up on screen clearly. The ball itself, branded the “Telstar” as a link to the space age, was produced by adidas, which ever since has had the exclusive right to produce the official World Cup ball. The current FIFA/adidas ball contract runs through 2030. I once wrote about the history of the soccer ball.)

I’m “back” from soccer, or football, or “the football,” or fútbol, but the tournament and the sport are not far from my thoughts. To step in again to this space, I thought that I’d begin with some reflections. Institutional lessons from the World Cup!

There are five. Maybe I’ll have more later. Five, to start with, for now.

One: Systems matter.

Colloquially we refer to each team not as “the team” but by the name of the country the team represents. Twenty-six roster players stand in for and re-enact national identities, cultures, histories, ambitions, resentments, conflicts, and more. Which means that it is both inevitable and right to see what happens on the field (as well as in the stands and in the streets) as concrete instances of institutional concepts. When the jerseys go on and the ball starts to move, large-scale systems are paying off – or not.

It’s easy to start with the winners: Spain. Their performance against England was a master class of touch, style, strategy, and execution. The players seemed to glide around the field; their English opponents never seemed to catch their breath, despite moments of rhythm. What was set up in advance as a clash of titans turned out to be far more one-sided, beginning to end, than the 1-0 scoreline suggested.

England?

I am referring, of course, to Spain’s victory in the final of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, a performance that was every bit as dominating, disciplined, and impressive as the win by Spain’s men’s team in last Sunday’s match against Argentina. I do not doubt for a moment that the men observed the play and the successes of their compatriots in Sydney and said to themselves, “hold my Tinto de Verano.” Rodri (more about him in a moment) et al. played a game that was in many respects a mirror image of the game that we saw from Bonmatí et al. Crisp first touches, quick one-touch and two-touch passing, rhythm, great use of space, patience, discipline in the face of physical defending, and when the opportunity arose, a lethal finish.

None of that happens, men or women, without institutional design and support and without players and managers fully participating. We say “buying in,” a phrase whose transactional implications I dislike. I’ll borrow from the 1973 Mets: “Ya Gotta Believe!”

I don’t just mean that the fans need to be all-in; I mean that the vision and values – as well as the strategies and tactics – need to be organic to just about everyone in the institution. What we see in Spain today are obvious manifestations of a commitment to a style of player development and performance, from the youth level onward through clubs and national teams, that owes its origins to a Dutchman: Johan Cruyff, who brough “Total Football” from the Netherlands to Barcelona in 1973. We saw Cruyff’s influence in the “tiki taka” style that defined Barcelona’s glory years earlier in the 21st century and that Spain rode to the 2010 World Cup title. We see it not only in Spain; we see it in Guardiola’s Manchester City career.

Which is not to say that Cruyff-derived soccer is the only way to inspire a team to great heights; we’ll see if Klopp and his “Gegenpress” can do as much for Germany as they did for Dortmund and Liverpool.

A lot of people in administration, management, and coaching had a lot to do with Spanish success along the way. But Spanish soccer had the wisdom to take inspiration from a transformative leader and to build (really, re-build what had been a notoriously underperforming system) around it. Spain has experienced some horrific soccer-related behavior in recent years, particularly surrounding the women’s national team, but on the whole the Spanish soccer federation has done a lot of things right.

Don’t get me started about Norway. Talk about national commitment, inside and outside a team, a supporters base, a state-sponsored sports system, and the country as a whole. Ro!

Two: Institutional size matters.

After the United States crashed out of the tournament in the round of 16, soccer pundits in this country returned to their favorite quadrennial hobby: speculating about what the US needs to do to compete consistently and successfully at the highest levels of international soccer.

I don’t have an answer. I’ve been following national team soccer in the US only since the mid-1970s.

I do know, however, that the country’s size – its diversity of interest and practice, its decentralized governance systems, its history of localism and narrow tribalism, its occasional commitments to inclusion, its treatment of sport as entertainment and recreation rather than as collective culture – works against it. This year’s World Cup demonstrated yet again that smaller countries can, in the right circumstances, marshal history and practice (and more than a little rule arbitrage, sometimes) to “outperform.” Norway and Switzerland (with national youth development systems)! But also Uruguay (where soccer is a national obsession), Croatia (where it is fundamental to national identity), Morocco (which took full advantage of liberal player eligibility rules), and of course the Blue Sharks of Cabo Verde (finally, an obviously positive use case for LinkedIn!).

Yes, youth soccer in the US operates on a pay-to-play model, once you get past recreational soccer. But that’s the least of it, in a way. Professional soccer clubs in other countries may “sign” kids to contracts even before they reach middle school. My hunch is that the US simply has too many things going on – in education, entertainment, community – for the country to develop the sort of single-mindedness about soccer that international success demands. The US can be more consistently competitive than it has been, and it has demonstrated that competitiveness over the last 25 years. Why? Because the most talented American youth have figured out how to steer around the entertainment model that dominates US pro sports and have shipped off to other countries, where soccer is taken more seriously.

My takeaway is that large systems and institutions need to be “decomposable,” or “nearly decomposable” to borrow a concept from Herb Simon. Meaning: large scale complex systems function best if they can be broken into hierarchies of small systems that operate largely independently of one another in the short term and that are coordinated thoughtfully over the longer term. “Youth soccer in the US shouldn’t be pay-to-play” is too crude a descriptor. Recreational soccer doesn’t interoperate productively with competitive youth soccer. Competitive youth soccer that feeds into high school soccer doesn’t interoperate productively with independent youth soccer clubs. NCAA and other college soccer doesn’t interoperate productively with professional leagues in the US. Not all of the professional leagues in the US get along well with one another. And USSoccer, the national federation that is nominally “in charge” of (almost) all of the game in this country, has no clear or consistent vision for the future of the game. Look no farther than its track record in hiring and firing national team coaches.

Three: The first touch matters.

I mean that both literally and figuratively.

Literally in the sense that players and teams that performed consistently well used their first touch of the ball to incredibly positive effect. Sometimes I will watch a soccer game simply to focus on that first touch. A good first touch sets up a player for a pass or a shot or a dribble past or through another player; a poor first touch sets up a player for giving the ball away, or a poor shot. Spain: amazing first touch. The US: inconsistent first touch.

Figuratively in the sense that soccer, like any team sport, is in the end an institutional formation. It’s about the people. Watching this World Cup, you could sense – even through the screen – that some teams cohered, inter-personally, and some did not, or at least less so.

To the extent that the US team succeeded during group play – a run of performance that in my view vastly exceeded the team’s actual technical talent – Mauricio Pocchetino nurtured that success by persuading his players to buy his “why not us?” schtick. Didier Dechamps and France had a great bond. Ståle Solbakken had it with Norway. Luis de la Fuente and Spain, to be sure. Carlo Ancelotti was brought in to lead Brazil for precisely this reason: his leadership and success records are unimpeachable. But he could not get Brazil’s players on the same page.

Neither could England’s Thomas Tuchel, which tells me that “first touch” influence doesn’t always come from the coach or the manager. England’s on-field leadership was stellar even if Tuchel’s hand on the tiller was unreliable. That includes Kane, Rice, and Anderson; Pickford had a great run in goal. That’s a backbone to envy.

For my money, though, Jude Bellingham was without question the breakout performer at this World Cup. He doesn’t have Erling Haaland’s charisma; he doesn’t have Kylian Mbappé’s flair, and he doesn’t have Yamine Lamal’s “next big thing” celebrity. What Bellingham has is the power to simply take over the game. Rewind the last 60 seconds of the third-place “bronze” match between England and France, which was as entertaining and mesmerizing a soccer game as most people ever have seen or will see. By the end of the match, France could sense that a tying goal was in their grasp. And then Bellingham, a late substitute for England, seized a loose ball in midfield, drove the remaining length of the pitch, and slotted the ball home. Whistle. England win.

If England had made the final, Bellingham may have ended up with the Golden Ball, as player of the tournament.

Instead, that honor went to Rodri, who did two remarkable things in my “first touch” characterization.

One: as a central midfielder – and mostly as a defensive central midfielder – he conducted Spain on the field. And I’m using “conducted” in a figuratively musical sense. Individual players had their roles and their moments; like all soccer players, they were improvising around a set of themes. But at his best, Rodri made sure that everyone was playing from the same score. He is the sort of player that I want to focus on for 90 minutes, and that I often did. His first touch was consistently sound.

And two: he did all of this after coming back from an ACL. Modern surgery and rehab being what they are, everyone knows that an ACL reconstruction is not the end of a career as it once was. Everyone knows that the goal of coming back from an ACL is to come back to the game at the same level that the player had pre-injury. And everyone knows that reaching that goal is nearly impossible. Time, age, and scar tissue inevitably take their tolls, even in the near term. Ask Virgil van Dijk, who came back from an ACL but who has never been the dominant force that he was before. But Rodri has done it. To me, with two ACL reconstructions behind me, that’s incredible.

Four: Institutional performance starts and ends with discipline and resilience.

Heading into Sunday’s final, every experienced soccer watcher on the planet hoped for a reprise of the style of match that characterized the last hour of the 2022 final between Argentina and France: thrilling end to end attacking soccer.

What we got was, instead, a reprise of a long-standing Argentine tactic: bullying, physical soccer designed not to inspire but instead to deflate. As they often are, Argentina were comfortable without the ball. Let Spain push the ball around; even let Spain take some shots. That’s what Martinez is for, in goal. (And as everyone saw, Martinez played an amazing game.) Little of what we saw from Argentina on Sunday came as a surprise (or should have come as a surprise) to observers whose knowledge of soccer extends beyond the Summer of 2026.

Argentina have the passion that defines the tango and the blue-and-white jersey – a passion for success that may not be equaled in all of soccer – plus a ton of technical talent, and the most gifted left foot in the history of soccer. But Argentina brought more than all of that to this tournament, as it almost always does. Argentina pushed and bullied its way to the conclusion of several matches, holding out for a moment of opportunity that Messi or Fernandez might seize. And seize they did.

Spain, for its part, knew that this was coming. And they knew that even more of it was coming in the second half of Sunday’s match. (Still more came even after the final whistle, and Spain were celebrating as the winners.)

And Spain said, to themselves: we know who we are, and we will play our game, and we will not be knocked off our rhythm by bullying and physicality. That’s discipline, and it goes back to vision and values as well as strategies, tactics, and first-touch skills. Knock Spain down, and Spain will get up. That’s resilience.

UCLA basketball coaching legend John Wooden is associated with a saying that applies here: “How you practice is how you play.” Spain didn’t have to invent what they demonstrated in this World Cup, in the final or earlier. They did that work before the tournament started. So did all of the teams that thrived into the late rounds.

Five: Institutions play by the rules, until the rules run out.

Croatia would like a word. Egypt would like a word. Maybe the United States would like a word. Maybe Germany would like a word.

It’s difficult to imagine any of those teams advancing more deeply into the tournament and then beating Spain. In my view, Spain were simply that good.

But … Croatia were denied a crucial goal because a technology of adjudication suggested that a ball touched a player’s hair but not his scalp. Egypt were denied one of the great goals of the tournament because the referee figuratively “re-wound the tape” of play to a point far earlier than many observers thought fair. The US “benefited” from a FIFA-derived ruling that restored a star striker to the field and that simultaneously motivated their opponents (Belgium) to greater heights. Germany, like Croatia and Egypt, were denied a goal based on a questionable VAR (Video Assistant Referee) judgment.

Contrary to a lot of popular understanding, VAR (or “the VAR”) is not a computer. Computers and computer algorithms are not deciding whether a player is offside, or whether a player handled the ball or committed an offense worthy of a caution or ejection, or whether a goal should or should not stand.

Humans are making those decisions. Which is to say that humans have incorporated computers and computer algorithms into their decision-making processes inartfully, to say the least, and in ways that lead many people, including many thoughtful, experienced people, to anguish over hyper-technical interpretations of the Laws of the Game, corruption of the game by unseen and unaccountable influences, and radical inconsistencies in officiating practice that are, in some tellings, far worse than the “ordinary” inconsistencies in refereeing that soccer has lived with for more than a century.

But remember that the great Uruguayan writer Galeano, in “Soccer in Sun and Shadow,” called the referee a “dictator.” One man. His law. No appeal.

The problem, dear Brutus, lies not with VAR, but with us. Broadcasting plus social media plus Big Data analytics plus various levels of anxiety about “fairness” and “justice” – not to mention national and community identities – have combined in our collective imaginations to expect levels of consistency, transparency, and accountability in referee decision-making that simply cannot be achieved. To demand them, really.

There is a long-standing line of commentary in response that argues, in effect, that the expecting and the demanding are part of the theater of the game. If we all had nothing to argue about, then why would we watch, or play, or care? Refereeing decisions become fuel for identity formation.

There is more to it than that, I think. Wanting referees and refereeing to be “better” is natural and understandable, even if we will disagree about what we mean by “better.” There is a hint of Kurt Gödel here: the more perfect and complete our technical systems become, the more obviously their limitations will stand out. A fully-formed, complete system of adjudication that answers all questions fully, accurately, and consistently is an impossibility.

We are arguing, instead, over second best. What do we want, knowing that we’ll never get everything that we want? We might imagine a world in which human referees disappear entirely, and all questions of offside, handball, violent conduct, and goal-or-no-goal are decided by machine, instantly and automatically and – in principle – consistently with and across games. How about a network of surveillance drones, flying about the field (sorry about that, Norway), “adjudicating” conflicts on (and off!) the field more or less instantaneously and transmitting signals wirelessly to the (sensor-enabled) soccer ball. Sounds and colors in and on the ball would indicate possession, free kicks, cautions and ejections, and so on.

Is that a world we would want? That we would enjoy?

Soccer might become more like tennis, where line judges have disappeared from major tournaments and the chair umpire’s job is mostly to announce the scoring.

Or, we might return to some earlier “golden age” of gentlemen-adjudication. Trust the elite experts who invented the sport, or so say they. Soccer might revert to something like golf, where the judgments of unaided human officiating are still front-and-center. Better?

I wrote about the VAR at length, here. (There, but not here, I wrote a bit about where the rules come from.) Again: I have no solutions. I’m just there, and here, to suggest that we work together to figure out the world in all of its complexity.

Thanks for sticking with me. And for welcoming me back!

The post Substack: World Cup Lessons appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: June 30, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

The 2026 World Cup finals may have seized the romantic imaginations of billions of people around the world right now (including mine), but the serious work continues, too.

Not that the World Cup isn’t serious work.

Nevertheless:

I am reproducing here three posts that I published the other day at one of my other social media venues, a blog (yes, an actual blog, still) that serves US legal education. “TaxProf Blog” is more and less than the title suggests. It was founded and for many years edited by a tax law professor and dean of the law school at Pepperdine University, Paul Caron, and it focused mostly on tax law (no surprise) and occasionally on larger topics connected to US legal education. Late last Fall, Paul stepped back from his primary leadership role on the blog. The AALS – Association of American Law Schools – took over hosting and publishing; I was invited to join a small roster of new contributors, to focus on legal education.

My posts there largely dig at the complacency of US law schools, for reasons that I explored at length in earlier public (but mostly unpublished) essays. [One] [Two] My view is largely that the strategic, economic, programmatic, and day-to-day challenges facing US law schools (including deans and faculties within the schools, and the provosts and parent universities of which most law schools are parts) are micro versions of the strategic, economic, programmatic, and day-to-day challenges facing US universities. Talking about legal education relates directly to my day job, but it is also my gateway into the larger “what’s the future of higher education?” and “what’s the future of the university?” questions that circulate on Substack, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, the pages of what’s left of elite media, the occasional monograph, and some other places.

“Generative AI,” in its many manifestations, is not itself the cause (or cure) for law schools’ complacency, but Generative AI exposes it more clearly and directly than almost any other socioeconomic or sociotechnical development that I can think of going, back to my start as a law student in 1984. That complacency spans not just legal education, of course. It cuts across vast swaths of the legal profession. Lawyers of many sorts and stripes, law professors, law deans … almost all of them are playing their parts in what they think of as a perfectly normal narrative of law and justice, “the rule of law” meets expert, exclusive, elite careers, a story that is changing and evolving through time more or less as law and justice and the institutions that embody those concepts have changed and evolved durably for the last 150 years.

My header image today goes to that persistent normalcy. It is from the great “Stranger Than Fiction,” a film with Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell as author and subject who discover and who overcome (because this is Hollywood) the existential questions lurking beneath the narrative.

And I am reproducing the posts because I continue to be reminded of just how siloed the (social) media-verse is. My TaxProf Blog posts seem to speak to a tiny slice of the legal education professoriate and to a slightly larger but still far from comprehensive slice of legal education leadership. Basically, over there I am writing for a small number of curious law school deans and former deans. Here, the audience may be little larger, but it is a different crew – people who may be less interested in legal education perhaps but who may share my interest in connecting the legal ed-meets-higher ed dots.

With that preface:

Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1

News from Austin: Dean Bobby Chesney at the University of Texas (UT) School of Law circulated a long-ish memo the other day that lays out a mostly clear-eyed, common-sense view of how artificial intelligence technologies and systems ought to be folded into the legal education program at that law school. Here at TaxProf, Kevin Johnson had the news right away, together with a link to a praiseworthy comment from Seth Chandler.

I have a couple of notes.

Note one:

The memo affirms that UT is steering in the direction of a thoughtful, full-bore critical embrace of AI for students, faculty, staff, and graduates. That’s the common sense part A. And the memo also affirms that certain features of legal education as we (the faculty in particular) have come to know it and practice it are affected by AI … in ways yet to be sussed out. That’s the common sense part B. And those may not be sussed out easily or quickly. Paraphrasing (see the memo at p. 5) and borrowing from Seth Chandler’s summary:

[Chesney] starts from the lawyer capabilities AI, he asserts, cannot supply: rigorous analysis, deep command of the conceptual structure of a body of law, discernment, persuasion in live and high-stakes settings, and judgment under genuine uncertainty. He is probably right, at least for 2026. He then asks whether ubiquitous AI threatens a school’s ability to build those, and reaches for the right history.

Chandler’s comment – “He is probably right, at least for 2026” – gets at:

Note two:

U.S. law schools, and perhaps law schools and law faculties elsewhere, are still tiptoeing around AI as if it is an uninvited guest that is threatening to spoil the party. Dean Chesney’s memo, thoughtful as it is, reads to me like a great lawyer’s effort to express his and his faculty’s navigating around a problem rather than wrestling with its deep structure. The list of “lawyer capabilities” in the memo (again, see p. 5), which are listed under the heading “educational rigor,” sound to me like the ambitions that made 20th century legal education great, and robust, and enduring, for many if not all of the people and institutions that it touched, including those it excluded.

What about the 21st century?

What if artificial intelligence is an existential challenge to current systems of training lawyers, rather than a moment in technological evolution that calls for institutional resilience and adaptation?

That is the subject of Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2, yet to come.

Legal Education Existentialism, No. 2

In Legal Education Existentialism, No. 1, … I asked out loud: “What if artificial intelligence is an existential challenge to current systems of training lawyers, rather than a moment in technological evolution that calls for institutional resilience and adaptation?”

I’ll be honest up front. I have my suspicions and my biases, but I do not and cannot know whether or not AI is an existential challenge. Instead I introduce you to Professor Michael Plaxton, at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, who is clearly thinking along the same lines and who lays out the question sharply and elaborately.

More below the jump.

In a recent Substack essay titled “To Our Next Law Dean: How will you justify our existence?,” Professor Paxton writes:

[A]ll of the things that law schools can effectively teach at scale – i.e., to a large number of fee-paying students at once, thereby making content-delivery practically achievable – are things that high-quality legal AI can already do or will be able to do better and much more efficiently than many or most of the law students we graduate. Insofar as what we are teaching is sufficiently general that it can be – and has been – delivered in a more or less standardized fashion across a range of casebooks and textbooks and across a range of law schools, it is something that AI can also assimilate and deliver with vastly greater efficiency.

That is surely right.

And

[A]ll of the things that people will want human lawyers for – human judgment, human relationships, human accountability – are things that law schools cannot effectively teach at scale. For the knowledge that AI cannot assimilate pertains to matters that are not general; that are profoundly local in some sense. The knowledge might be local to an extremely niche sub-sub-sub-field of law, involving a very small number of repeat players. Preparing students for that field of law involves familiarity with the highly bespoke practical and legal problems faced by participants in that specific context, and may also involve acquiring some familiarity with the participants so that one can understand why and how certain legal solutions are attractive to them.

Right again, in my opinion.

So: what about AI? Observe the unintended echo here of part of Dean Bobby Chesney’s recent memo about AI at the University of Texas School of Law:

What about just doing what we have always done, but doing it better, more rigorously? Continuing to focus on the teaching of general legal doctrines, concepts, methods, techniques, but insisting that students learn them at an exceedingly high level – such that every law graduate could critically assess the output of an AI-generated brief or memorandum? Perhaps that kind of high-level mastery would amount to a kind of local knowledge. Maybe. But even if it does, that kind of mastery cannot be delivered in anything like the way we deliver legal education at present. It cannot be massified.

Though it is not a popular thing to say, we know full well that most law students do not have a deep understanding of the material we teach; many lack even a superficial understanding. To provide the sort of deep understanding of the law that will be in demand would require vastly more intense, curated, one-to-one, ongoing mentoring, with iterative assessment on every topic. A single professor could not possibly do this with every student we currently enroll. It would not be scalable and we know it.

And so:

“If AI can do all the things we are capable of teaching, and law schools are not capable of teaching much (if anything) else, then what is the case for law schools? … Perhaps there is room for optimism. [Here he links to a Substack post from the former Dean of Northwestern Law and former AALS President Dan Rodriguez] I don’t want my next dean to indulge in despair. But a would-be dean who tells me I have nothing to worry about – well, I can’t take that person seriously.”

Next and last for today: where does existential thinking take the collective “us”?

Legal Education Existentialism, No. 3

Today’s “Legal Education Existentialism” series started with some reflections on Dean Bobby Chesney’s recent memo about AI at Texas Law and continued by expanding its reach to question the basic purposes and structures of contemporary legal education as a whole. Is legal education entering an existential moment?

In this last post today I pull back the lens even further by linking to a recent essay by Jordan Furlong, the Canada-based consultant and journalist and one of the most thoughtful people I know among observers of the “law industry.” The essay is titled, “The unbundling of lawyer institutions: AI will strip law firms and law schools of their commodity features. Their future depends on whether they can rebuild around their highest-value functions and their trust-bearing core.”

My notes, below the jump.

He builds in part on Professor Paxton’s critique of legal education, highlighted in my second “Existentialism” post today, and also on a recent piece by Nicola (Nikki) Shaver, a highly-regarded legal profession consultant based in the UK, titled, “Law Firms Want to Change; They Just Can’t.”

Furlong writes:

Legal intelligence — the capacity to apply legal knowledge to analyze legal issues, create legal instruments, and solve legal problems — is valuable not only because of its utility, but also because of its scarcity. Back in first-year law school, when our professors promised they’d teach us to “think like a lawyer,” they were also saying we’d become members of the exclusive class of people equipped and authorized to exercise that capacity — and therefore, one of the few reliable conduits through which legal assistance could flow. That rare ability would command a premium price.

Equally valuable, therefore, was any institution that could organize scarce legal knowledge and transmit scarce legal intelligence to novice learners at scale — which is where law schools have traditionally derived much of their economic value and their ability to charge what they do. And so was any institution that could organize the work of credentialed lawyers to solve legal problems and deliver legal outcomes to clients at scale, which is where law firms derive much of their economic value and their ability to charge eye-watering fees.

But scarcity was the key. In current parlance, the average person’s inability to organize and command legal intelligence to solve their problems enabled the “moat” that protected law schools and law firms. Accordingly, if legal intelligence were to become widely accessible — if, say, a machine could help learners acquire legal intelligence, or could mimic it to provide legal information, documentation, and direction to legal solution seekers — then both law firms and law schools would have a problem. And here we are.

From “scarce” resources – talent, expertise, intelligence – to “abundance” is a little overdetermined, as academics might say, and Furlong recognizes that. Let us say that those resources are being produced and allocated in all sorts of new ways. If “unbundling” the functions of legal services organizations (including law firms) and law schools is one institutional response to new production and allocation systems (and a response that has popped up from time to time across all professions, professional sectors, and all of higher education) then what remains for the system of existing institutions?

That is Furlong’s version of Legal Education Existentialism.

His response:

In both law firms and law schools, therefore, the scarcest and most valuable assets are great people and great reputations. In a real sense, each of these assets enables and reinforces the other. And what both these assets share in common is one thing: They engender trust. And now we come to the heart of the matter.

A functioning society needs reliable repositories of trust. We don’t all know each other and we don’t necessarily all like each other, so we need recognized institutions in which we can collectively deposit enough trust to enable our daily transactions. We need repositories whose foundations and standards and safeguards are so strong that they justify our confidence; we can count on them and on what they provide. Houses need load-bearing walls; societies need trust-bearing institutions.

Law schools and law firms have always been the legal profession’s trust-bearing institutions. AI is going to unbundle each of their individual functions and deliverables, stripping the value from any whose commodity status AI has revealed or enabled. That might sound like a pretty dire forecast.

There’s more at work here than the economics of efficiency, however. The human need for trusted legal institutions is real, and it will survive the impact of AI. But these institutions have to recognize and accept the surgery they’re about to undergo — the removal of their commodity elements — and make plans for how they will recover, adapt, and flourish afterwards.

Here is my note:

I am not sold. I buy the idea of institutional repositories of trust, which covers both functional and reputational dimensions. But as a society, over centuries and especially over the last decades we have learned to trust machines and technologies and to build regulatory systems and forms of community engagement to mitigate risks and constrain spillovers when “trust” seems to extend too far. I am not a critic of “trust,” but I do not think that legal education existentialism can be managed using a “trust” toolkit.

Where I would begin, instead, is with a suite of values and value that Michael Paxton highlighted (but briefly) as part of his letter to a dean: “There will, I suspect, always be a place for human judgment, human contact, human relationships, and human accountability.” Law schools for a century have been organized around scarcity (as Jordan Furlong writes) and around a very specific cluster of forms of expertise. To be a lawyer was to be a member of a club, certified by a diploma (usually) and credentialled by admission to (or being called to) the bar. “Oh, the humanity!” one might cry, as a kind of cruel joke; law schools are notoriously inhumane. But I am not speaking of making the experience of legal training more humane (although that would clearly be a good thing); I am speaking instead of centering human experience and human capacities in the design of systems of legal training, both in law schools and elsewhere.

I recognize that the likelihood that this will happen is remote, on my terms or on Furlong’s, for many reasons, the first of which is undoubtedly collective skepticism as to my “existentialism” premise.

But I live in Pittsburgh, where during the 1970s and during the heyday of the Steelers’ run of four Super Bowl championships, it was essentially inconceivable that the good times would end. There were abundant good jobs, lots of good money, stable union contracts, and no threats from competitors or different technologies. I was not in Pittsburgh in 1982 and 1983, but more than 40 years later, the region is still deeply scarred by the consequences of complacency.

I once met Jack Schlegel at the University at Buffalo, as part of giving a job talk at that law school. I had no idea then of who he was or what he had written. I have come to be a big admirer of a piece that he published in the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2007, titled “A Damn Hard Thing to Do.” That title, if not the specifics of his motivation and vision, has always stayed with me. Large scale institutional change of any sort is always difficult, especially if one imagines trying to direct it rather than riding waves of evolution and disruption from various sources. As Nicola Shaver reminded the practitioner side of law in her essay – it may be nearly impossible. Her payoff for law firms seems (to me) to apply equally to law schools:

Firms are, in effect, attempting to compete in a fundamentally different market while operating within structures designed for a previous one. As long as that remains the case, progress will be uneven and limited.

Change is possible, but it’s not frictionless. The next few years will require firms to make explicit choices about what they are willing to adapt, and, in some cases, what they are willing to let go. So the better question is no longer whether firms want to change. It’s which ones are prepared to.

And yet (to add a line that I did not include in the conclusion to that series: I remain (guardedly) optimistic, about seeing the scripts (plural) that we (the collective, non-specific “we) in law have been using to constrain our imaginations and about writing and building genuinely new ones. More on that optimism later on.

Now, for a little while, back to the World Cup.

Thanks for sticking with me.

The post Substack: Higher Education Existentialism appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.

First published: June 8, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.

“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.

In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.

Today I take a detour, away from writing about higher education and cities and knowledge commons and toward the institution that for the next month or so will capture a significant amount of attention and interest from essentially the entire population of Earth: the finals of the World Cup.

I start with three soccer geek footnotes:

First, I am unapologetic in using the words “soccer” and “football” interchangeably. “Soccer” is a perfectly good English word for the sport, meaning “England English” not simply “English language.” The word soccer was invented by the English and used regularly in England for decades. The word shortens the phrase “Association football,” which referred to the game organized under the auspices of the Football Association (FA) in the 1860s in England. “Association football” was distinguished from “Rugby football,” “rugby” being the name of the English public school (that is, private independent school) most associated with that different form of organized chaos.

“Rugby football” was shortened to simply “rugby” or “rugger”; “Association football” became “soccer.”

Terminological snobbery entered the sport’s lexicon in the late 1960s, when English soccer fans wanted to distinguish their authentic sport (which may well have been invented in Scotland) from the crude version of the kicking game that was getting some attention in the US, which is to say, what had once been English colonies, and the even cruder version of “football” that was on offer from the National Football League.

To this day, American soccer fans are fond of associating themselves with the English and referring to their passion as “football” or worse “real football”; it is no accident that the most popular and celebrated English-language soccer commentators on American television are English. In a weird way, we pine to be “authentically” English again. (The exception that proves the rule is the broadcaster Andres Cantor, who was born in Argentina, who is equally excellent in Spanish and in English, and who is often regarded by non-Spanish speaking soccer fans as “authentic” in a different register.)

All of the above and more (that is: the language wars) are well-documented in this wonderful little book, titled “It’s Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa): On the History, Emotion, and Ideology Behind One of the Internet’s Most Ferocious Debates.”

Second, the event is branded the “FIFA World Cup” today and has been since 1970, but no one except FIFA, its federation members, sponsors, some broadcasters, and organizations with worries about trademarks says or writes “FIFA World Cup.” The tournament was created in 1930 as the “Coupe du Monde,” “Campeonato Mundial,” or “World Cup,” and “World Cup” it remains.

Third, the event that kicks off on June 11 is the finals of the World Cup, a tournament that has been contested among 211 FIFA member nations since 2023. The terminology is a bit confusing, I agree, because in casual usage “the World Cup” starts on June 11 and culminates in “the World Cup final” on July 19, after more than 100 matches in “the finals.”

How I am such a relative insider to little details such as these? Me, a mere American?

And what does any of this have to do with my interests in institutions and governance of complex systems?

Here we go:

I am a member of that tiny community of suburban Americans who got their start in competitive soccer in the late 1960s. I was in the second grade, I think, when I first put on a soccer jersey and took up a post as what was then called “a fullback.”

I have no idea how many of that community are still alive today, but I once figured out that around that time there could not have been more than about 100,000 kids – almost all of them boys – playing organized youth soccer in the US in 1970 outside of social clubs anchored in immigrant communities (Italian, Irish, German, Greek, Mexican, Dutch, and English, at least based on people I played with or met as coaches) and the occasional group of children of non-US-born graduate students at the local university.

My family organized one of the first two AYSO (American Youth Soccer Association) teams in Menlo Park, California. (AYSO, known for the motto “Everyone plays,” was founded by German expats in Southern California in 1964.) We were the “Pythons,” and like all of the teams in our little Mid-Peninsula league, we wore uniforms that were modeled after the uniforms of English First Division teams. Our black and orange resembled Hull City. I regularly wore uniforms of various colors and designs until my late 20s; the last time I pulled on a shirt was (only) about 20 years ago. I have a winner’s medal from a statewide California U-19 competition from the late 1970s. A college coach watched me play a match during my senior year of high school and included me in the “recruited players” practice when I showed up on day 1 of my freshman Fall. (I did not stick it out. This incredibly talented player was also in that group. I had better things to do with my time in college than watch him run past me and score goals!) I played briefly with the father of Diego Luna, today one of the stars of Major League Soccer (and, puzzlingly, omitted from the US team that will compete in the World Cup finals). I have the scars that give me an insider’s knowledge into traumatic knee injuries experienced on the soccer field.

Beyond my playing (and my brother played, too), we were part of “soccer world.” Our family were original (1974) season ticket holders of the NASL San Jose Earthquakes. I participated in the “Stanford Soccer Camp” for several years, when that program was simply for kids who wanted to learn to play and play better, and I attended a sleepaway soccer camp (a novelty at the time) at UC Santa Cruz in 1975, where the guest coach was Paul Child, then the Earthquakes’ star striker and later a star for the indoor Pittsburgh Spirit. (Paul settled in Pittsburgh after he retired, and because of his contributions to Pittsburgh soccer and to the Pittsburgh Riverhounds, last year’s USL Championship winners, the supporters’ stand in the Riverhounds’ stadium is named for him.) The coaching staff at that camp were so taken by Paul that they jokingly promised to call him out from the stands when they took the campers to a Quakes match. I remember hearing them shout “give us a game, Paul!” when he took the field that night. My father immersed himself deeply in youth coaching, refereeing, freelance soccer writing, and community organizing. Through his connections, I watched the opening match of Major League Soccer in 1996 – San Jose Clash 1, DC United 0, and thank YOU Eric Wynalda, who scored that goal! – from the owners’ box at the old Spartan Stadium.

So much throat clearing.

Now, the points, more or less:

Thanks for reading Everything In Between! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Soccer is an institution of institutions, constructing and evolving through intersecting and overlapping tiers and layers of forms, practices, rules, and social norms. I explained that claim at great length once in an academic article about soccer and soccer refereeing. My point was partly about soccer itself and party about soccer as a case study of evolving institutional governance. (I wrote about it here, at this very newsletter, a while back.) For a much shorter, more fun, and less academic version of the same idea, see this little piece about the history of the soccer ball.

Soccer’s “polycentric” institutional context stretches far and wide: from the 19th century factories of Scotland and Northern England to English public schools to the English colonies that received versions of the game that were carried by English civil servants and that were rooted eventually, locally, in neighborhoods and communities from the southern-most tips of Africa and South America to the northern-most reaches of Scandinavia and essentially all points in between. Today, multiple generations onward, whether it is one person knocking a ball against a wall or multi-millionaires hashing it out in the final of the Champions League, soccer is not simply “the beautiful game” (if not always beautiful, in practice); it is something close to a universal language. Combine a human or two (or perhaps … robots?), a round object of a certain size, and a reasonably flat, stable surface. That’s all one needs to join in the play, or to have a focus for a chat (and a debate!).

Soccer is essentially universal, but it has an almost endless number of local variations, “local” meaning historical setting; neighborhood and town; age, gender, and ability; nation and region; and on the field (pitch), in the stands, in the streets and over the last 20-plus in streets and “fan zones” adjacent to major tournament matches, and in bars, restaurants, and homes. Watch for the Dutch “Orange Bus” coming to Kansas City.

Which means that to me, the fascinating and fantastic “thing” about soccer is not simply dissecting chances made and chances missed, or coaching tactics, or refereeing errors, bungled penalty kicks, chronic disappointment (the Dutch, again and again, and the English, since 1966), or the corruption and other self-dealing on abundant display at FIFA and regional and national soccer federations. The fascinating and fantastic thing is the unrelenting passion that institutional drama has not and seemingly cannot extinguish, both on and off the field. The best of soccer on the field lies in the players’ freedom to imagine collectively and individually. The best of soccer off the field lies in fans, supporters, and broader communities borrowing that freedom and blending it with their own, both in their attention to the game itself and also in their incorporating their attachment to soccer into their building and reinforcing their local, regional, national, and other identities and histories.

To illustrate:

In 1994, I had the very good fortune to go to a number of World Cup matches in the US, including the final in the Rose Bowl. (With my friend Adam, I sat more or less behind the goal where the teams faced off via penalty kicks. I won’t say that Baggio and Baresi put their shots over our heads, but I don’t say that they did not.) I sat with and walked with members of soccer cultures from all over the planet.

I was in the stands at Stanford Stadium on July 4, 1994 to watch the US play Brazil, along with more than 80,000 other people.

As much as I enjoyed the thousands of Brazilian supporters drumming and samba-ing for well over 90 minutes (because the drumming and dancing began in the streets outside the stadium before the match, and continued well afterward), the greatest display of unexpected and extraordinary soccer commitment that I have witnessed was during a different 1994 World Cup match: a group match between Cameroon and Russia.

Competitively, the match was far from compelling. Both teams were already out of the tournament. Still, Russia played aggressively and won, 6-1. Five Russia goals were scored by a single player (Salenko), a record. The legendary Roger Milla, hero of Cameroon’s 1990 team, scored his team’s only goal (also a record, as Milla extended his run as the oldest player to score in a World Cup finals).

But what caught my attention wasn’t the play on the field. I happened to be sitting in an “open” part of the press building that rose about the West side of the old Stanford Stadium. We were not in a private box; we were not in the press box itself. But we were seated adjacent to a section of Cameroon fans. Not any Cameroon fans. These were wealthy, elite Cameroons: dressed to the proverbial and oh-so-beautifully colorful nines, and who conducted themselves before the game with the grace that one stereotypically associates with any country’s elite.

And during the match, these people – to a person – went absolutely nuts. Men. Women. All ages. Standing, screaming, waving arms. I’ve been in European soccer stadiums where ultras sing and chant in coordinated rhythms for 90 minutes, and those fans had absolutely nothing on the high-end Cameroons that I witnessed in 1994.

And it was glorious.

How much of this will return to the US this year? What about the Dutch fans? The Scots? The Argentines? The Moroccans? The Haitians?

Late last year – November 2025 – at a college football tailgate I met the mother of one of the players in that day’s game, a woman who mentioned that she was raised in Haiti. “Haiti!,” I replied, “Haiti has qualified for the World Cup finals!” The woman’s smile broadened into an enormous grin, and she extended her joy immediately by wrapping me in a bear hug. Few soccer fans think “Haiti” when they think of signature national teams, but clearly, to many Haitians and people of Haitian descent, soccer is intimately connected to national identity. And that’s the point. Ted Lasso’s Dani Rojas was not wrong: football really is life.

The Norwegians? Judging from their new team photo, Norway is bringing an old-time Scandinavian swagger to North America. Real Vikings!

Will US Men’s National Team fans find their own voice, literally and metaphorically speaking?

I don’t know. The American Outlaws supporters’ group will certainly give it a go, but even a lot of American soccer fans aren’t familiar with the Outlaws.

I do know that media stories wondering whether soccer’s time has finally come in the US are missing the mark. US sports media and, by extension, casual sports fans in the US, have come to treat organized sports mostly as entertainment. It’s commerce. The game is a product, on the field and on the screen. The media want to know: when will US soccer be big business? The implication often being that US competitive success and cultural salience will follow once the right sort of industrial/commercial enterprise is built around the game.

But inside the US, that hasn’t been the story of soccer over the last 30 years, and outside of the US, that’s not the history of soccer, even if in some countries and some professional leagues, it is increasingly (and unfortunately) the practice.

Instead, the passion that has built soccer over well over a century and around the world, and the passion that fascinates me, is the passion that emanates from the intersection of organized activity (institutions) anchored in history and community – much like baseball once was, in the US, and still is in places.

That passion has long existed in the US, even for soccer. The Athletic, connected to the New York Times, had a terrific piece the other day that explored the history of American soccer’s original and longest-standing journalistic institution: Soccer America, originally known as Soccer West. That took me back. Once upon a time, as a middle schooler, somehow I got roped into an afternoon in the stands at a high school stadium in Cupertino, California, selling copies of Soccer West to the smattering of family and friends who were there to watch a youth soccer match. I think that each copy cost 35 cents; I got to keep a dime per each one I sold.

Between suburban soccer in the US and the even longer history of soccer in immigrant communities – near me, in Pittsburgh, the Beadling club has long been one of the elite youth soccer programs in the US; it began as a social club for Italian coal miners and their families – no one who cares about soccer in the US today should be wondering: how do we turn Major League Soccer into a rival of Major League Baseball or the National Basketball Association? Instead, they should be studying the history of soccer passion in the US and how that passion has been “institutionalized” per the “polycentric” framing that my academic self tried to capture in the articles I pointed to above.

In other words, where we have seen soccer grow and stabilize around the US, where we have seen Major League Soccer find its feet, and where we have seen other professional leagues grow and thrive (including the USL Championship), and with the women’s game, institutional equilibria have been established around local communities of players, families, and supporters.

NFL owners and some players have gotten rich selling soap – a product, known as “football” – to willing and persuadable consumers. In all but a handful of cases (Pittsburgh, interestingly, being one of these handful), community identity has been manufactured around the club and the sport. (I witnessed this living in the San Francisco Bay Area during the Brodie-to-Young 49er years.) Internationally, soccer has edged in that direction, especially as Premier League clubs have built fan bases in Asia and in Africa and as the Saudi government has (tried to) build a soccer identity in Saudi Arabia. But that success may prove to be unstable. Durability starts on the ground. Build locally. Bottom up, everyone.

Bonus note: my two favorite players of all time are Franz Beckenbauer (I got to see him play in person once; I was on the sideline for a Cosmos match against the Oakland Stompers, in 1978) and Michelle Akers. Der Kaiser, and Mufasa.

I’ll leave you all with this. I was in Soccer America once. In 1974. My younger brother and I were featured in a short piece on our playing for multiple teams at the same time, and scoring goals by the bucket-ful. As recently as 50 years ago, soccer in the US was simultaneously the NASL, which was a sort-of professional league, and notes in a local newsletter.

To sum up, borrowing Ian Darke’s great call from 2010:

Go, go USA!

The post Substack: Give Us a Game appeared first on Madisonian: On Governance and More.