Alena Selezneva
What happens when you invite a preselected group of representatives from 49 vastly different institutions from 23 countries to spend a few days together talking about innovation in higher education throughout the globe?
You leave fired up about the future.
Which is what I needed, because when I look at the dusty landscape of U.S. higher ed, I find it hard to get out of bed. Instead, I went over the rainbow and landed in a Technicolor dreamscape that filled my brain to bursting, refreshed my sad little soul and connected me to a fascinating and lovely group of people.
When a friend first told me about the Innovation Sandbox created by Noah Pickus at Duke, I yelped, “That sucker stole my title.” When you’re as insecure as I am, you cherish any small illusions of originality. Then I remembered that I stole the title for my leadership newsletter from friends in computer science who use the term to describe a safe place to play, to try out ideas, to experiment without harming the operating system.
The goal of the Future Universities Alliance is simple: to bring together for deep conversations those who understand the world is not the same as it was a century ago, or even two years ago, and who want to make sure that we have a global populace educated enough to face whatever the future hurls at us.
The idea was to have teams from a diverse set of institutions work together for one year, meeting online monthly and broken into three pathways: existing institutions that had already made big changes, those that were in the process of trying to innovate and brand-spanking-new places. They were put into sandbox pods of four to six institutions. They had their first Zoom meeting in August.
The Future Universities Alliance Global Summit held early this month on the Duke campus (refreshingly absent any sort of Duke branding) was the chance for them to meet in person as they carry on talking. If the summit is any indication of what that will look like, well, I got a glimpse into the future, and it is bright.
Noah Pickus’s career has zigged and zagged from Duke, Franklin and Marshall, the founding of Duke’s Kunshan University in China, the Minerva Project, and ASU, to work with founders from around the world. He coauthored a book with Bryan Penprase called The New Global Universities.
I think gatherings and institutions often take on the personality of the host or leader. Noah has had many titles, but the most fitting may be mensch. He is a righteous man who greets the world with humility, curiosity and kindness. Did I want to pick out a polished stone from a box at the beginning (as we were all directed to do)? I did not. I am not a joiner; I’m a scoffer. But at the end of two days, I knew I would treasure that stone and keep it on my desk as a tangible reminder of what I took away.
The first question I asked Noah in our fireside chat that kicked things off was “How did you come up with this wackadoodle idea?” This led me right into what I called the Seder question: How is this different from all the other networks, associations, consortia and conferences in higher education?
He promised it would be. I was skeptical. Like many, I am conferenced out. Plus, it’s hard enough to get people from different institutions in the same city or state to work together or even, if we’re being honest, to share ideas honestly and challenges vulnerably instead of wanting to best the competition by bragging about how great you’re doing. (We know you’re lying.)
How, I wondered, could participants from one specific place with particular challenges and structures distinguish an idea that is genuinely transferable from a bright, shiny thing developed elsewhere? This is especially true when we know that higher ed, at least in the U.S., exists in a hierarchical world. You might even say a caste system, thanks to annual rankings. How can you level the field so that those who think they’re higher in the pecking order aren’t just doling out their wisdom to us poor little chicks?
As a faculty member who has seen a zillion administrators with big ideas come and go, I know everyone is suffering from innovation fatigue. What makes a change effort durable enough to survive its champion? What must be in place for real innovation to happen instead of just being talked to death?
All to say, I had some questions, Noah answered, and holy growth mindset, bat people! The challenges we face in the U.S. are not ours alone. Vermont and Pakistan each deal with a situation where there is no real industry for students to get jobs. Trust in higher education is in the pooper all over the world. Even at universities just over a decade old, faculty resist change. What is AI doing to and for us? Who knows! Plus, leaders everywhere are really freaking lonely. One president of a university in a European city people want to visit said he hoped to be invited to spend a week at other institutions and would be happy to host in return (including cooking dinner at his home).
The diversity of institutions and their projects looks one way on the page, but that cannot capture the human spirit that buzzed through the rooms. I didn’t spend much time with those from the U.S.-established institutions because I already knew about most of them. They are all doing great work and facing the impossible heavy lift of getting people to change. Innovation is happening all over our country, though in many cases it is tweaking a structure built for a different century.
Each time I sat at a table with six to 10 other people, I couldn’t imagine what I was going to hear. I would love to tell you about the cool stuff happening in postsecondary education in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Asia (buying family-run schools and offering well-crafted, affordable online curricula in places where demand outpaces supply; putting applicants in Kazakhstan in a Survivor-like situation to see who is resourceful and adaptable and then providing free education for leaders) but you might skip that part thinking, in error, it isn’t relevant to you.
In the U.S., the simple truth is we have too many institutions for a dwindling demand. We know the numbers of colleges that are going belly up and recite eulogies for the dearly departed. At the same time, many new universities are popping up, some entirely online and others buying the brick-and-mortar campuses of defunct colleges, and on those ruins they’re planting different kinds of flowers. They are working to provide affordable and meaningful education in today’s world. The founders I met in Durham are no less true believers in the power of education than John Dewey was.
Audacity is my jam; I am interested in distinctive institutions that have a clear mission and know who they want to serve and how to do it, which, let’s face it, is not true of many of our current colleges and universities. They are adding beautiful tiles to the mosaic that makes up our sector. Some are for the public good; some are for profit, though I’m not so sure those two things are always mutually exclusive, but all are paying attention to the fact that the world is not what it was before.
At the end of two days, I had experienced an answer to the “how is this different” question, but I’m not sure how the experiment could be replicated. Higher education conferences do not have to replicate all the problems of traditional higher ed, but so often they do. When I sit in an audience and have panels of people talking at me, my cuticles fear for their lives. Even though we know the lecture format is not a good means of delivering information, we all keep using it.
Really, the secret sauce is getting the right people in the room: Those who lean into humility, curiosity and a sense of mission. A friend told me he hires by the no-assholes rule, and that’s kind of what it boils down to. I hesitate here to refer this gathering by its given name, a “summit.” That seems too fancy and pretentious for something that felt like a family reunion with people you’d never met in person.
The last thing I asked Noah at our opening session—one of only two 30-minute sessions during the day where participants had to listen to people talk at them—is what success for this wackadoodle thing looks like. At the meeting he said, “It’s an experiment. We know we will learn and adapt along the way.” Afterward, when I followed up, he said, “Success isn’t simply that a remarkable group of people found one another. It’s whether those relationships, and the work they’re doing together through the project-based pods, actually help institutions make better decisions, navigate difficult choices and learn faster than they otherwise would have.”
Noah and his team gave institutions a framework and a curated circle of connections, and Duke provided the substrate for things to grow without expecting anything in return. You know, the old “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Who knows what the world of higher education and beyond will look like in a year, or even next month, but I know that these folks are helping to shape it.
