A university provides amazing resources and assets. I would even defend its overall structure to a degree. For one thing, it is robust against faddish ideas. If a university could change more easily, then a discipline like classics would have been shut down long ago. But classics is an exciting and generative field today (see this and this). It has survived the tough times because universities have institutionalized tenure, credentials, and departments to resist change.

Still, these structures frustrate many valuable innovations, especially when academia might interact better with the outside world. Courses must last for about 13 weeks even though real-life projects continue far longer than that. Professors must demonstrate regular results, but some especially worthy projects cannot yield publications quickly enough. Faculty must teach students who happen to be enrolled at their own institutions, even if more appropriate groups could be assembled by drawing on many colleges and including non-students.

These are just examples of the ways in which academia is “kludgy.” When you face a jury-rigged mechanism that still works for many purposes, you can just go with it, you can reject it and try to build something new, or you can add hacks: “inelegant but effective solutions.” Many of my favorite academics make hacks because they love the university but don’t think it quite works for their purposes. For instance, they teach their classes in state prisons. Or they assemble a set of “semi-formal learning groups” within a large state university and actually name it “hackademia.” Or they start meeting weekly for discussions of political economy and 30 years later have a virtual international network. Or they build tools with and for lay partners and reflect critically on the results. Or they create a Summer Institute without tuition, grades, credits, or official enrollment, and teach it off season at (for example) Tufts.