Institutions often speak in the language of planning, alignment, efficiency, and sustainability. These are necessary words. No organization can function without structures, budgets, priorities, and decisions about the future. Yet there is a risk when this language becomes too narrow: it can begin to obscure the historical, technical, and pedagogical labor through which institutions are actually built.
Programs do not appear suddenly. They are created over time through curriculum development, student advising, course revision, assessment, collaboration, experimentation, and sustained attention to changing needs. Behind every academic structure there are people who wrote proposals, built sequences, responded to students, adapted to new modalities, removed financial barriers, and maintained continuity through institutional transitions. Much of this labor is quiet. It rarely appears in summary reports. It is often invisible until a decision threatens to undo it.
This is one of the central tensions of institutional life. What takes decades to build can be reduced, in administrative language, to a category, a metric, a duplication, or a recommendation. Data can illuminate important realities, but data can also flatten them. Enrollment, completion, productivity, and efficiency all matter, but they do not always tell the full story of what a program does, whom it serves, or how it supports a larger academic ecosystem.
A soccer team offers a useful analogy. Spectators often remember the goal scorers. They see the striker who finishes the play, the player whose name appears in the headline, the moment that becomes visible on the scoreboard. But teams are rarely sustained by goal scorers alone. They are held together by the players who defend the midfield, by the defenders who close spaces before danger becomes visible, by the goalkeeper who prevents the score from collapsing. Much of the work that keeps a team alive is preventive, structural, and often unnoticed. The absence of that work is usually recognized only after the team begins to concede goals.
Institutions function in a similar way. Some structures may not produce the most visible outcomes in isolation, but they stabilize the larger system. They organize movement, preserve continuity, protect access, and make other successes possible. To evaluate only the most visible result is like judging a team only by who scored, while ignoring the midfielders and defenders who made the match playable in the first place.
A degree, a certificate, or a curricular pathway is not merely a credential. It can also function as an organizing structure. It gives coherence to course offerings, helps students understand a path forward, supports advising, sustains departmental planning, and signals institutional commitment to a field of study. When such structures are removed, the effects may extend far beyond the number of students who formally complete them. The consequences may be curricular, symbolic, practical, and structural at the same time.
Institutions sometimes distinguish between a program and the discipline that surrounds it, as if one can be altered without affecting the other. In theory, this distinction may be administratively convenient. In practice, the relationship is more complex. Academic programs shape disciplines by determining which courses are offered, how often they are offered, how students are guided, and whether a field has a stable institutional presence. To remove a pathway while claiming that the discipline remains untouched can miss the structural role that pathway has played.
There is also the question of process. Institutions often point to meetings, committees, reports, and timelines as evidence that consultation occurred. These mechanisms are important, but they are not the same as meaningful participation. A process can be formally available and still fail to reach those most directly affected. A recommendation can move through established channels and still leave open the question of whether the people closest to the work had a genuine opportunity to shape the outcome. Meaningful process is often slow, difficult, and inconvenient, but that is precisely why it matters. In a time when many institutions seem increasingly impatient with deliberation, when every decision is expected to be immediate and every outcome quickly measurable, the discipline of waiting, listening, and revising has become even more important. When institutions or governments bypass that discipline in the name of speed or efficiency, the results are often damaging: structures are weakened, trust is lost, and decisions that appear efficient in the short term create larger problems later.
Shared governance depends on more than procedure. It depends on trust, expertise, and substantive engagement. It requires not only that information be technically accessible, but that the people closest to the work have a real opportunity to contribute before conclusions become difficult to change. The issue is not simply whether a process existed, but whether the process allowed for meaningful analysis before decisions hardened into recommendations.
This becomes especially important when the people affected are not resisting change itself. Faculty and staff who build programs are often deeply aware of institutional constraints. They understand budget pressures, enrollment shifts, duplication concerns, and the need for adaptation. Many have already spent years adjusting programs, collaborating across units, and finding ways to serve students more effectively. The problem arises when collaboration is mistaken for silence, or when previous efforts to align with institutional needs are forgotten.
In such moments, institutional memory becomes crucial. Without it, decisions can appear cleaner than they really are. A structure may look redundant on paper while serving different students in different ways. A program may appear small by one metric while being central by another. A pathway may show limited completions while still sustaining access, transfer preparation, course sequencing, and student mobility. The absence of context can lead to decisions that seem efficient but may weaken the very systems they intend to strengthen.
The same pattern can be seen when people attempt to intervene in the machinery of the state without understanding how its parts hold together. From the outside, a public system may look slow, redundant, or unnecessarily complex. It can be tempting to remove offices, procedures, programs, or protections in the name of efficiency. But many of those structures exist because previous crises revealed the need for them. They are not always elegant, and they are not always easy to explain, but they often prevent collapse. When someone puts their hands into a public system without understanding its internal logic, the result is rarely renewal. More often, the intervention destroys capacities that took decades to develop.
Educational institutions are no different. Their structures may look inefficient to those reading only a chart, but many of those structures are forms of accumulated knowledge. They reflect past student needs, past failures, past adaptations, and past commitments. To dismantle them without understanding why they exist is to confuse simplification with improvement.
The goal of educational planning should not be for one part of an institution to absorb another. It should not become a competition among programs, departments, or locations. The strongest institutions are those that recognize complementary strengths and build from them. If one program has developed a successful model of access, innovation, affordability, or flexibility, the question should not be how to eliminate it, but how to learn from it and expand its benefits.
This is why institutional decisions require humility. Efficiency may be necessary, but it should not become a substitute for understanding. Alignment may be valuable, but it should not erase difference. Sustainability may be urgent, but it should not be pursued in ways that weaken access or disregard the labor that made access possible.
Educational institutions are built by people over time. Their strongest programs are often the result of patient, cumulative, and largely invisible work. To honor that work does not mean avoiding change. It means approaching change with care, context, and respect for the histories embedded in the structures being reconsidered.
When institutions remember how things were built, they make better decisions. When they forget, they may still move forward, but they risk leaving behind the very people, values, and forms of knowledge that allowed them to serve students in the first place.
Fabián Banga 