A piece in Sunday’s New York Times describing the physical environments of Facebook, Google and Twitter gave me pause as I contrasted the attributes and underlying assumptions with college and universities. Quentin Hardy finds these new tech monuments sharing a similar assumption: “Here, as at many other tech companies, is a sense that nothing is permanent, that any product can be dislodged from greatness by something newer. It’s the aesthetic of disruption: We must all change, all the time. And yet architecture demands that we must also represent something lasting.”

The contrast comes when this thought is juxtaposed with the words of Clark Kerr, who wrote in The Uses of the University: “About eighty-five institutions in the Western world established by 1520 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and with unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and seventy universities. … These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same way.”

High tech firms and higher education are both involved in knowledge work – engaged in continual activities focused on discovery, analysis, creation and dissemination using convergent, divergent and creative thinking. But increasingly, the ways in which that work takes place represent the far extremes of a continuum characterized on one end as formal, linear and conservative, and the the other by informal, nonlinear, progressive. Clearly each set of proponents points to evidence of success in the chosen approach – an ongoing parade of graduates and an ongoing introduction of products and services. But is there something to be learned from the other for the benefit of both?

Is there a reason to consider the impact of relatively permanent offices for faculty and staff on the exchange of ideas what is intended to be a transformational experience for students? Some faculty begin and end their 40+ year careers in the same office, or at least in the same building. Students change housing each year and classes each term, but with the exception of size and perhaps a few amenities, residence hall to apartment, classroom with or without moveable furniture, there is a constancy to the environment that suggest a predetermined structure to the act of knowing. Does this higher ed world of knowledge work need a bit more disorder in this century?

Perhaps the chaotic swirl of open and unassigned working spaces coupled with calculated encounters with the outside environment might relegate opportunities for long, slow thinking to sabbaticals intended to reduce burnout. In a world of permanent beta, the highest value is often attributed to whatever is next, which may create a constant competitive striving to make things better, but may also abandon those ideas, products and services that satisfice in search of higher perfection. Thus the act of knowing is simply never enough, not even for a moment. Does this high tech world of knowledge work need a bit more conservatism?