Side B: The Flip Side of Higher Education

There was a time when small artists and bands had limited options, and one of the most affordable was the 7-inch single. Those little records — common through the early days of rock and roll and well into the 1990s — were often called 45s because most of them played at 45 rpm.

Before digital technology made distribution cheap and immediate, putting out a record took real money. You gigged for months to pay for studio time, production, artwork, pressing, and whatever passed for distribution. Then you put your absolute best song on the A-side. Sometimes that was because it was the obvious single. Sometimes it was because, if you were being honest, it was the only song you had that was really ready.

But the record had two sides.

Flip it over and you got the B-side.

The B-side could be the next-best track, but often it wasn’t. If the band had another strong song, they might save it for the next single. So the B-side became something else: a cover, a throwaway, an experiment, a song that didn’t quite fit anywhere else.

It was usually less polished. Sometimes it wasn’t especially good.

But for small bands, the B-side could also be more revealing. The A-side told you what the band wanted the world to hear first. It was the pitch, the introduction, the most careful version of themselves. The B-side was different. It was closer to the working version of the band: what they were trying, what they couldn’t quite place, what mattered to them when no one was paying very close attention.

The people who flipped the record over were the ones who actually wanted to know.

That’s the operating premise here.

I work in higher education. I have for a long time, across enough different functions to develop a reasonably wide-angle view of how colleges actually work — not how they present themselves, not how the press covers them, and not how students experience them from the outside, but the machinery underneath. The decisions. The constraints. The trade-offs. The bureaucratic logic that looks irrational until you understand what problem it was originally built to solve fifteen years ago.

And sometimes, yes, it was just irrational.

Higher education is usually explained from the A-side. The official statement. The crisis headline. The faculty op-ed. The student quote. The legislative hearing. The consultant language. The coach’s grievance. The donor’s frustration. The institutional press release that says everything except the thing that actually happened.

None of those are useless. Some are important. But they’re usually partial, polished, strategic, or shaped by the incentives of the person speaking.

The news covers higher education with the tools available to people covering higher education from the outside. That means quotes that fit the angle of the story, simplified narratives, and occasional conclusions that are just flat wrong. I don’t really blame the reporters. The beat is vast, the institutions are opaque, and everyone with a stake in the story has an interest in controlling how it’s told.

But the result is a public understanding of higher education that’s often pretty thin.

I can’t fix that. I’m also not going to claim expertise on all things higher ed. But I know enough to say when something sounds right, and I know enough to say when it doesn’t. I know when something sounds like an administrator who’s never managed anything, or a faculty member who’s brilliant in their discipline and largely clueless about the institution they work inside, or a student who has strong opinions about a system they’ve never had reason to understand from the inside, or a coach talking about higher education with the confidence of someone who’s never been responsible for anything except winning games.

Don’t ask an administrator how to build a bridge. Don’t ask an engineering professor how to run a college. And don’t ask someone who’s only ever read about higher education to explain it to you.

That’s what Side B is for.

Not the official version. Not always the cleanest version. Not necessarily the version built for maximum reach.

Just the other side of the record.

Less polished than the headline. Sometimes rougher. Sometimes stranger. But closer to the sound of the institution as it actually works.

For the people willing to flip it over.