The Discipline of Subtraction
David Epstein's new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, arrived this month and almost immediately reached the New York Times bestseller list. In a recent online conversation with Jeff Selingo, Epstein extended his thesis to higher education, where headlines about budget cuts, program closures, and enrollment shortfalls now dominate trustee meetings and presidential cabinet retreats. The same conversation is happening in independent school boardrooms, where contracting demand, tuition pressure, and rising operating costs strain institutional habits formed over decades of growth.
Epstein's central thesis is that constraint is often the condition that produces creative strategy. Designers understand this intuitively. Ukrainian engineers, cut off from Chinese drone components in 2023, responded not by surrendering but by building a domestic industry now valued at tens of billions of dollars. Constraint, properly understood, serves two functions: it forces the clarification of priorities and pushes people into exploration they would not otherwise undertake.
For schools and universities, the tougher question is whether leaders can accommodate the conditions Epstein describes when constraints arrive uninvited, or react with panic and defensiveness. Most heads of school and presidents did not choose enrollment cliffs, federal research caps, or fertility-driven demographic decline. Epstein's answer is that while the constraint itself may not be chosen, the response always is. The L-Cross mission at NASA received roughly half the expected time and budget. The engineers initially complained. Then a team leader asked a different question: if we were going to finish this anyway, how would we do it? That reframe led them to borrow imaging equipment from army tanks and temperature sensors from NASCAR, and the resulting probe confirmed the presence of water on the moon.
The diagnostic framework for any institution facing financial pressure is subtraction neglect bias, the well-documented tendency of people and the organizations they build to solve problems by adding rather than removing. Leidy Klotz's work at the University of Virginia has demonstrated this pattern across multiple domains. Independent schools accumulate co-curricular programs, signature initiatives, and administrative roles in much the same way universities accumulate centers, institutes, and majors. Each addition is defensible on its own terms, but the aggregate becomes incoherent, expensive, and highly resistant to change.
The Broad Institute, when it found itself overextended in genomics, ran a forced audit. Leaders placed every active commitment on a Post-it note and asked which one would be cut in the next thirty days. They followed it with a rule they called “stop starting, start finishing.” Nothing entered the top of the funnel until something came out of the bottom. A version of this exercise belongs in every strategic planning cycle in independent and higher education. The question is not whether each program is good. Every program looks good when examined alone. The question is whether each program advances the institution's core sense of itself.
Epstein recounts the story of General Magic, the most consequential Silicon Valley failure almost no one remembers. The company defined its customer as “Joe Sixpack” and built everything for everyone. One engineer was asked to extend a calendar function from 1904 back to the Big Bang in case someone wanted to write historical applications. The Palm Pilot, built later by one of the same engineers with a fraction of the resources, did three things and decisively beat General Magic. Universities and schools that cannot finish the sentence we are for ___ tend to drift toward the General Magic problem. They keep adding because each addition seems necessary, even harmless, and they confuse program growth with progress. [See this piece by Brian Rosenberg in the Chronicle of Higher Education.]
The leadership task in scarcity is interpretive. Leaders must convert an external limit into an internal forcing function, turning a constraint into energy. They must give faculty and staff agency to decide what to subtract, even when they cannot give them control over the constraint itself. They must protect against the institutional reflex Safi Bahcall describes, in which a community under pressure shifts from working for the survival of the whole to working for the survival of individual turf. And they must build subtraction into ordinary practice rather than crisis response, so that closing a program is recognized as a strategy rather than punishment.
Five years from now, the institutions that used this period well will not be the ones that merely survive it. They will be the ones who can finish a sentence about what they are for and who develop the discipline to live within that answer.