Noah Pickus is head of global strategy and partnerships and senior adviser to the provost at Duke University and the co-author of The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2023). Recently, Noah shared with me information about a new project he is leading called the Future Universities Alliance. I asked if Noah would answer my questions about this new network, and he graciously agreed.
Q: Give us the elevator pitch for the Future Universities Alliance. What is the backstory, who is involved beyond Duke and what are your goals for this network?
A: What led me to the Alliance was a pattern I kept seeing from different vantage points.
There is no shortage of innovation in higher education. New institutions are trying ambitious designs, and established universities are experimenting with everything from curriculum to credentials. But those efforts tend to remain isolated, and when something doesn’t work, it is often difficult for institutions to stay with the process of iteration. I see this especially with founders of new universities. They build boldly, as they should. Some elements work, others don’t, whether that is an aspect of the curriculum, a governance model or a student experience design. The challenge comes when that uneven early experience triggers a panic that pushes innovators back toward what already existed, rather than reinforcing a culture of ongoing experimentation and renewal.
At the same time, I was hearing something else from leaders across the sector. Founders often told me how isolated they felt. They could talk to people in business about building something new and to academics about education, but there were very few places to speak with peers doing both at once. Leaders in established institutions wanted their teams to engage more directly with these newer models, not because they intended to replicate them, but because they wanted to widen their sense of what is possible.
The Alliance grew out of that combination of fragmentation and demand. The Innovation Sandbox, in particular, is designed around real work in process. It brings together leaders who are actively building or transforming institutions and gives them a structured way to compare approaches, test assumptions and adapt ideas to their own contexts. It is less about spreading models than about helping institutions adapt and build on one another’s work over time. It now includes an advisory group of global leaders and a first cohort of nearly 50 institutions across five continents. The goal is to make that kind of learning more rigorous, more transferable and more widely shared across very different institutional contexts.
We’re not trying to define the future university. We’re trying to create a way for institutions to learn, in a more structured way, how to become different kinds of universities over time.
This takes a very concrete form in our first year: Our goal is to ensure that the 49 institutions that raised their hand to join this inaugural effort are successful. We want them to feel supported and stretched as they move critical projects forward. Along the way, we will learn a great deal and that will shape how the Alliance evolves from here and what we are able to share more broadly with the field.
Q: How does the Future Universities Alliance fit in with your current role at Duke? What else do you work on?
A: Most of my work sits in places where the structure is not fully defined yet. I would not describe my job as a traditional administrative role.
At Duke, I work on academic strategy and global partnerships, but a significant part of the role involves helping new ideas take shape and then deciding what they might become. Some of those efforts remain projects. Others begin to take on a life of their own and require a platform, a network or a different kind of support to grow. This work is closely aligned with Duke’s broader global strategy, particularly its emphasis on building deeper institutional partnerships and sustained, collaborative work across institutions.
In practice, that means spending a lot of time in moments of transition. When something new is forming, the work is about clarifying what problem is actually being solved, what would need to change for it to take hold and who needs to be involved early on. When something is at risk of stalling, the work is often about identifying whether the issue is conceptual, structural or simply a matter of capacity and alignment. Those distinctions are not always obvious, but they tend to shape whether an idea fades, stabilizes or expands.
The Alliance is one example of this kind of work at a different scale. It sits at Duke, but it is designed to work across institutions and contexts. The aim is to create a space where institutions can engage one another around high-stakes work in a more sustained and structured way. That requires Duke to act as a convener and catalyst, especially in the early stages.
Q: Your professional background is interesting. You trained as a social scientist and have followed a nontraditional academic career path. What were the choices you made in shaping your career, and how does your experience shape your work with the Future University Alliance?
A: My path has not been linear, and at several points it was not clear what would come next.
One early turning point came when I had been teaching at Duke for a number of years. I realized that although I was living and working in North Carolina, I did not really understand the state in any meaningful way. That recognition led me to leave Duke to help launch the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State with Governor Jim Hunt. It was not something I had planned, but it became an early experience in building a new venture and thinking about institutions in a more practical way.
Later, at Duke Kunshan University in China, I was part of designing a university from the ground up. That experience made explicit what is often implicit in established institutions. At Minerva Project, I saw a different version of the same question: what happens when you take design seriously across an entire system and then try to extend it across multiple contexts. Leaving Duke after 25 years to join Minerva involved real uncertainty. I did not know if I would be effective in that setting, and I did not know whether the model would succeed. But I believed in what it was trying to do and that felt worth the risk at that stage.
Another uncertain moment came when I left Minerva and returned to Duke. That decision was shaped by family, but professionally, it left a period where I did not have a clear sense of trajectory. Looking back, that space clarified something that had been emerging across those earlier experiences. There was a great deal of innovation underway, but it was unfolding in parallel, without many opportunities for institutions to learn with and from one another over time.
I did not set out to build a network. The insight came before I knew what to do with it. It took shape after working on the book on new global universities, after seeing how Minerva’s work traveled across institutions and especially after bringing together founders and leaders from different parts of the sector. What became clear in that setting was that they needed one another and that they wanted a space to engage more directly.
It turned out that my role was to build that room.
