What should a new university look like and how would we build one?

General
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Lately I’ve figured out how to teach pretty “thick” (per Rauch’s definition), in a professional/technical major, in a college system otherwise mostly focused on DEI. (My students are themselves tremendously diverse). It took three years to figure out how to do that, essentially as a personal initiative. The institution did not fund me for this or require anything like it. Nor did it stand in the way (largely because I am rather skilled at win-win, non-confrontational relationship building with the powers that be). At the inception of the project, I had no idea really what I was trying to do or where it would end up, it’s just the need was palpable, as the video speakers each express from their own angles.

Here is a quote from a recent student discussion board showing how it resulted in practice: “I leave this class not just with more skills, but with more questions worth asking.” That’s because of the infusion of topics like ethics and metatheory into a CS class. So it can be done. But how?

First of, the filling in of the “hollow” university must begin with inner work by faculty, staff, and students. No doubt it all starts there. Next, it’s important to find community, even if that community is off campus. In my case, I found community first online, then in various local groups and organizations. Third, to bring new perspectives to curriculum and instruction, it takes skillful means. My practice training over the past two years with Intentional Society, a practice group affiliated with 2R, was essential to me feeling confident enough to open up highly emotional values-laden questions in a professional/technical context. Theory alone would not have worked.

So can it be done? Yes. Is it easy? No. But honestly, looking backward, it’s not really all that mysterious and I do believe the process is transmissible. Whether current universities can be transformed through this process, or whether new alternatives must form at the margins, remains to be seen. But in any case, faculty practicing in this way will at least not be hollow themselves, and will soon form relationships with others of similar substance.

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Yes - I think that each of us has that question - can the system in general or my own university be reformed? Can we, by better teaching and advocacy, reverse the apparently overwhelming trend towards selling credentials, as opposed to training students how to think about hard problems?

We had that question before AI - I think the calculation has changed radically after AI. My argument on AI was that both the students and the teachers will quickly recognize that the current system is pointless and miserable after ChatGPT. The post I linked to argues that universities sold their degrees as credentials for getting better jobs, and after ChatGPT, employers will quickly conclude that there was little point in paying attention to a degree obtained by the student using a robot to do their assignments.

Also bear in mind that we university teachers vastly overestimate our excellence as teachers. Specifically, 68% of surveyed university teachers thought they were in the top 25% in terms of the quality of their teaching. So I suspect we’ll also overestimate our ability to change the university by our own teaching, and other teachers will do that too.

We will all have to make our call - is the increasing damage from the systemic structures in play reversible by reform from within? Or do we have to leave that system in order to throw off the constraints that it applies?

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Well, it’s going to be one of those, isn’t it? Meanwhile, though, it might be a suitable action target to prepare for both alternatives. Being a hiker, I’ve learned to pack layers for all weather. As a metaphor, that seems advisable.

My situation is odd in that I’m able due to life circumstances to play on both sides of this particular street. I could retire in a minute by just sending an email, and that would be that. So the exit door is very, very available. But precisely because of that, there is absolutely nothing at risk by sticking with the institution a bit longer and gambling aggressively on change initiatives. Like the song says, “you got to know when to hold 'em, and know when to fold 'em”. For now, I’m still pushing chips at the center of the table, because win or lose, being a player to the end feels something like a calling …

First things first … my recommendation is to get the content and the practices well worked out before trying to institutionalize whatever it is. Then shop for institutional sponsors and containers. Be a garage band first and figure out your sound. The big stage will come calling soon enough, once your sound is tight. So, for example, if you can create a theory and practice model that really expresses your vision, some school somewhere is likely to want it. Or some sponsor will fund the program in a different educational format. Either way, it’s a dues-paying process to get there.

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I have done the time here. I can honestly say that I just can’t imagine how one would go about that, in the UK institutions I have worked in. I can, I have, exhausted myself to build courses that are at least closer to something I would like to attend, but the end result is little impact on the institution, and an exhausted, and finally ineffective reformer. And that was before AI, which had the effect of amplifying the work I had to do in assessment and marking and disciplinary procedures in order to make sure that most of the class had actually learned something by the end.

So - I’m having a very hard time imagining the garage band inside a larger university, with all the various pressures that the university tends to apply. I think that garage band would be practicing in the evenings and at weekends. I don’t know about you, but my attempts to improve teaching, while resisting the pressures to make education cheaper and easier and more pleasant, pushed me well outside the point where I had spare time and energy for my garage. But even so, I would still have to find others who were prepared to work that hard, with so little prospect of success.

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By the way - you may be interested in this fascinating description of the introduction of Toyota manufacturing process within General Motors.

Summary - when Toyota took over GM’s worst car plant, they transformed the work and the workers, making it one of the most efficient plants in the US. However, when a GM manager tried to introduce Toyota practices in another failing factory, this failed completely, because the institution around him resisted the changes at every turn.

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My teaching career started as a graduate student at Stanford. But being a lateral thinking type, I could not really focus on a thesis topic and left there for more random professional wanderings over 40 years or so. Some of those wanderings took me through the University of Washington (one of leading public universities in the US) as both a student and an instructor. So I’ve had exposure to the high end. But most of my teaching career has been in down-market schools, with first generation, low income, working class students. In hindsight, glad it worked out that way! Going down-market gave me freedom to innovate, and students not very far up the rungs of social power. So student (or collegial) pretense has not been much of a battle to fight. I really don’t know what “down-market” looks like in the UK, but that’s the sort of garage where the band can form and find its rhythm.

The only thing I truly hate about my current school is it’s 50 miles from home and the freeway commute is literal murder. (Two different shootings closing all lanes just yesterday) My post-retirement plan is to bootstrap my own education program nearer to where I live. Running parallel to your situation, I don’t really have “bandmates” just yet. But I’ve figured out how to show up in other organizations and turn in the equivalent of “session gigs” in a variety of venues. My network is growing thicker through the process. At some point, there very likely will be a band, and a garage, and a sound, and a vibe, and an under the radar audience. No way I can prove any of that. But I completely feel it.

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The Toyota / GM example is a good one, because GM would never have changed if it had not been dramatically out-competed by Toyota. I’m sure the same is true in the current university system. It’s a monoculture, with no effective competition. And AI is a potent toxin in that culture.

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+1 on that! One of my current reads is Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. The mathematical guts of that is the Price equation. Cooperation will selectively triumph in evolutionary competition between human groups, when:

Between group variance/Within group variance > Selection strength on individuals/Selection strength on groups

The problem is that groups of highly motivated collaborators tend to out-compete other groups, but there are always in-group incentives to slack off and let other others carry the load (or absorb the cannon fire). AI is the ultimate slacker play. Why do actual work, when you can just click on links? (The brain requires a lot of calories, BTW).

Applying Turchin’s model to your university case allows a tentative hypothesis: schools with active human collaborators setting the tone are going to out-compete lesser motivated shops addicted to AI. History is replete with examples of tiny bands of hard-cores rolling over numerically superior empires. Worry therefor more about quality than quantity.

The challenge we all face here (by we I mean 2R in general and many similarly-minded folk around the world) is “what is the attractor?” What affords the genesis of a new asabiyya? (Ibn Khaldun’s term, used extensively by Turchin). There are a lot of good ideas floating around here. Time to capture all that lightening in a bottle.

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I just don’t see anything like that kind of competition between current universities. We’re all selling the same kind of sausage made in the same kind of way. I would argue that is a sausage without taste, made in a miserable and terribly inefficient way, but it would take a real competitor to show that.

And there is, in general, a radical lack of collaboration.

I remember overhearing a conversation in the Bytes Cafe in Stanford, where somebody was saying that, in Hewlett-Packard, you’d walk down the corridor and ask a colleague whether you could borrow a machine they were not using, and they’d say yes. But if you walked down the corridor in Stanford and asked the same thing, they’d say no.

I left Birmingham University - in part - because it was so miserable returning to the university after doing some work with my open-source colleagues. My open-source colleagues were - are - extraordinary collaborators - our joint goal was always in front of us - getting the work done - building the software. Then I would go back to the university, and everything would grind to a halt, as every actor would be working to calculate what they would win or lose from any particular change, where the benefits to the students would be of almost no consequence in comparison.

I believe that is because there is no sense of a common goal in a modern university. We all have individual goals, and dues that we need to pay to the university in order to pursue them. In general, there is no good way to measure the quality of teaching, or the quality of our graduating students, and I have seen little interest in trying to do that. It’s a machine that keeps running, whose purpose has been lost.

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That could be said about many institutions. Universities are just one example. One of my old Stanford professors expressed that universities work mostly as museums of culture, but are not the best forum for anything creative. It’s no accident that Hewlett-Packard started in a literal garage.

My creative fires get lit on mountain hikes or in a kayak or in small group conversations along the way. Research, documentation, curriculum artifacts, formal syllabi, credit-bearing courses - that’s all downstream. And never as pure as the original inspiration. It sounds to me like open-source development resonates for you with the Ikigai question “what do a I love?” If that’s correct, then further questions about your skills (ability to deliver on various metrics), social requirements, and resource opportunities may suggest a way to capitalize on that passion. My own sense of “what the world needs” is what I’m now calling the 3Cs: communication, cooperation, and collaboration. Open-source is a good fit with all that. My current production agenda includes work on an open-source textbook, with a large collaborative authoring and production team, so this perspective is informed by practice as well as theory. Is there an action you might attempt to sense into the potential for an open-source analog in the field of educational programming? Trying whatever that is might yield information about available constraints and affordances.

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As you can imagine, I do indeed write my textbooks with open-source licenses. The forum restricts me to two links, but, for example:

https://odsti.github.io/cfd-textbook/

However, you’ve probably also gathered that it now seems clear to me that small, tentative experiments are not going to be effective, because the problem has become to great, and too urgent.

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What is the problem space? Higher education? Or more?

After listening to a couple years of metacrisis doom and gloom, I resolved to create the most urgent practice possible to address the full scope of it. (Not that my unaided efforts would amount to much - but the more realistic challenge was find alignment with promising approaches widely shared). My Ikigai model came out of that sense of urgency - the time for action is right now, not after endless theorizing. (Of course, Hoovering up extant theorizing is indeed part of my action approach. No need for wheel reinvention).

So I’m always fishing for urgent action angles. If universities are just dead weight for what human futures now require, let the dead bury the dead. Where, though, shall we seek the living?

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I follow this conversation with great interest, and not a little practical experience. The start of my career was the rather opt-out choice of being a schoolteacher, where sadly I did not fit well. After a later PhD I had the chance to be an active university lecturer for 3 years (at City, London) where my teaching was actually assessed as excellent (can’t remember the name of this scheme, but it was back in the early 90s). I put this down to my school teaching training and experience. But even then I was noticing the incipient demise of the whole system, which as far as I can see has only got worse.

At Liverpool (late 90s) I was at least my teaching was not ordinary: it was giving courses in Internet skills. I enjoyed introducing business people, and the unemployed, to basic HTML, and to e-business basics (as they were then), and related topics. No assessments, grades, or certificates.

At Bolton (late 2000s and early 2010s) I wasn’t teaching at all, but part of the research and service team called CETIS, involved in many aspects of educational technology (the E and T). But the demise was continuing close by, within notice.

If we can change the “should” to a “could” (in the thread title) I’d be delighted to share ideas around, perhaps not exactly how to create a new university, but rather, how can we organise what most of us recognise as “higher education” in a way that is not flattened, eviscerated and commercialised by (many of) the current institutions. I might phrase questions something like:

“How could ‘higher’ education be provided and supported? What kinds of organisation might be involved? What tools, techniques, methods, practices would serve something like the Second Renaissance? How can we provide Deliberately Developmental Spaces at this level of learning?”

“Deliberately Developmental Spaces” is explicitly an area of interest for Life Itself.

For 2R? I don’t really see 2R as a potential deliverer of HE. It’s a useful talking shop, though, where we can meet each other, exchange and develop ideas. But I suggest that the effectiveness of this will depend on both the ideas and the experience we can bring together. Good to see that @RobertBunge has plenty … it would be good for this thread to hear who else has lived experience in this area, beyond being a student.

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2R might be part of a wider ecosystem for whatever “higher” education may become. The Deliberately Developmental Spaces ideas seems very much on target.

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Rapid (and predicted) recent rate of closure of universities : Was Christensen Right? - ListEdTech

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Also declining demographics:

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cliff-fewer-college-students-mean-fewer-graduates

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Here’s a thought experiment. I have enough historical and theoretical content lined up to teach a semester length undergraduate course on the metacrisis. Would the best way for me to effectively address the metacrisis be 1) teaching a conventional for-credit semester course in a tuition-charging institution of higher learning or 2) providing that same content for free in more flexible ways online?

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How much impact do you think such a course would have on the metacrisis, in the more effective of the two formats?

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Thinking about my own rhetorical question, the best answer seems “both”.

Here’s how the content I have in mind has evolved over the past couple years:

  • lots of online research, discussion boards, book orders, and online discussions about the books.
  • a few Medium articles published over the last year.
  • elements of this content included in Ch 20 (IT Futures) in a 20 chapter open-source textbook I am co-authoring.
  • supplements to that chapter added to a LMS for a face-to-face computer science lesson to close out the year.

I thought the face-to-face session was dynamic, but I had to “earn” the opportunity to offer that session by teaching 10 weeks on other topics, not to mention a lot of others courses only tangentially related to the core topic I am currently focused on. That’s a lot overhead for one fine classroom lesson.

My current goal is to redevelop the content so I can show up as a guest speaker and not have to teach a whole semester to get to the actual point. Of course, an entire semester specifically on the actual point would be interesting as well.

What I realized this morning is that any future semester length course on my preferred themes would benefit from having readily accessible online content ready to go. So my current focus is on developing more Medium articles. Those can speak for themselves. Or they can be used by others in their own courses. Or they can be used by me if the fates arrange for me to lecture on just what I want to lecture on. In any case, molding the content into article format seems most advisable in the near term.

As for how much impact any of this will have on the metacrisis - good question! As much impact as I am likely to ever have in any case.

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I see lots of good sense here, thanks @RobertBunge ! Giving away all the basic stuff for free establishes your reputation for all to see — maybe this can follow on to more advanced courses? Or am I just reproducing “freemium” (for which I have mixed feeelings)?

Is there any commercial demand for such knowledge and expertise? I’m not clear about that. But if there is, I’d suggest not doing it alone, but consolidating a community of practice to deliver it.