Book Review – Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education

Asking "why higher education?" through funky thought experiments

I’m always kind of…bored by the education section in bookstores. It’s mainly classroom management manuals and complaints about higher education. Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education* broke that pattern: it’s a thought experiment about what higher education could be. David J. Staley, a professor in history and design, dreams out ten unique models of radically re-designed universities.

Staley starts from the premise that higher education has failed to innovate: universities are two thousand slight variations of the same thing, with each college copying a few top leaders in the Ivy League as closely as possible. Students don’t have a genuine choice, even as the product fails them. Why are learners paying thousands of dollars for degrees, only to have employers complain they sill aren’t equipped for the workforce? Why do we value this model as a society – what is it giving us? Even though he never explicitly asks the question, Staley’s models of universities – ranging from a school where the core value is beauty to one whose entire purpose is to learn how to collaborate with AI – are each a unique answer to the question, “Why do we have higher education?”

As I read, I caught myself pushing back against Staley’s models – and thus revealed my own biases and assumptions. When reading about “Platform University,” where anyone can be a professor, I caught myself thinking, “if anyone can just walk in and teach, how are we going to know this scholarship is valid?” I started with an assumption professors have to be people with PhDs and vetted papers. Why? In our modern world, is that really who we learn best from? Friends at business school have complained their academic-only professors know less than their teachers who have run corporations; law schools are often critiqued for churning out graduates who know lots of theory and are practically use on day 1 at their new law firm. But my own perception of what higher education “should” be stopped me from thinking outside the status quo to imagining new possibilities (exactly what attendance at Staley’s “Future University” could help me with!)

Staley isn’t saying we should throw away our existing higher education model: for lots of students, it’s still the correct fit. He simply thinks we need more choices. His models won’t work for everyone, but they do force you to question what it is we’re trying to achieve with our current status quo and if that’s really what we want. We’ll still need the four-year university, we’ll still need graduate schools – but we also need to acknowledge what we have today already doesn’t work for everyone, and that higher education in society could give us so much more than it does if we broke out of the existing mold.

I also think many of these are particularly suited for a later-in-life adult learner; I’m unsure if an eighteen-year-old fresh out of high school has the maturity and skillset to pull off the projects required by “Nomad University.” Targeting older adult learners is probably how we make these university models real. Most of Staley’s ideas wouldn’t pass a traditional college accreditation body, and the inertia of the market leads both parents and students to seek the traditional status quo. But adults who want to learn for knowledge’s sake would likely be drawn to the creative potential in Staley’s new schools and have the intrinsic motivation to push through the first years when things aren’t yet perfectly established. Over time, as these schools’ graduates saw more success, openness to new models would become more widespread, and we’d see even more unique models spring up.

I hope they do. I really, really want to go to some of these.

Staley’s Proposed Universities

I make a lot of these sound pretty boring, but they’re all fascinating. This is just a taster to get you curious enough to pick up the book and explore it for yourself.

• Think of Platform University like Meetup for higher education. Professors use the platform to offer classes and students coalesce around those they’re interested in taking. What is on offer is driven by the demand of the students and the teachers themselves; the university is simply the administrative structure and maintains required physical spaces. Platform University is self-organizing: anyone can attend; anyone can leave whenever they feel ready.

• A Microcollege consists of one professor and twenty students, organized around a core topic and located in a relevant geographic context. An agricultural microcollege, for example, might be hosted on an organic farm in Washington state. The students and teacher study and work together, with the core curriculum being set by the professor and all residents contributing to the college’s ongoing research. Students take other relevant general education courses online, advancing at their own pace.

• Fellows at The Humanities Think Tank use their training in ethics, history, philosophy, and other humanities to “provoke changes in the real world.” They use frameworks of humanities to make recommendations and predictions for governments, corporations, non-profits, and even the military, bringing a new lens to current issues and global challenges.

• At Nomad University, professors lead projects around the globe: designing a new municipal water and sewage system for a small city in Thailand; re-examining Hemmingway’s life in the context of the environmental surroundings of his home in Cuba; re-designing the business processes for a startup in Silicon Valley. Students travel to projects most relevant to their majors or interests, spending several months living on site helping complete the work.

• The Liberal Arts College tries trying to better train students to match the needs of the modern workforce.  It teaches seven core intellectual skills: “(1) complex problem solving, (2) sense-making, (3) making, (4) imagination, (5) multimodal communication, (6) cross-cultural competency, and (7) leadership.” Students take a four-week classroom intensive on each topic, then intern with a local company to apply their learnings. For example, after completing the Complex Problem Solving seminar, they might intern with a local non-profit struggling with a challenging business scenario. Students meet monthly with their cohort and professors to reflect on their learnings.

• Interface University argues that we get the most benefit out of tools like AI when we combine human and computer cognition. From day 1 at Interface University, students are learning with AI and robots: continually talking with and training their own AI algorithm, integrating their ideas with robotics sensors, and creating a world where their learning is enhanced as they both teach and harness the power of artificial intelligence. Students learn how to use their creativity and human cognition to ask the questions that matter, then leverage computers to find the answer.

• The University of the Body teaches for a world where knowledge is embedded in and communicated through all senses – where, for example, knowledge can be communicated through smells. (Going to be honest, I don’t really get this one. Of all the models, for me it was the only swing and a miss.)

• The Institute for Advanced Play prioritizes learning through play. Fellows tinker, play games, and imagine together, with no set outcome or goal but rather to build curiosity and imagination. Their most important question is “what if?” – which is then explored by playing.

• At Polymath University, every student has three majors: a professional major, a science and social sciences major, and an arts and humanities major. For example, I might choose accounting (professional), chemistry (science), and painting (arts). They’re expected to master each model of examining the world and create cross-connections between these fields, ultimately culminating in a capstone senior thesis that draws from all three frameworks. Professors here are polymaths themselves, sometimes with multiple PhDs, and cross-disciplinary advisors help students reflect on and integrate varied ways of thinking.

• Future University: Learning happens through modeling the future: asking ‘what if?’ about life decades or centuries from now and designing what the future world might look like and the resulting consequences. This requires learning cross-disciplinary predictive and evaluating tools, scenario planning, history, and practicing breaking out of cognitive biases. To matriculate, students need to build an actual mini-model of their potential future and test it out. (I’d argue this book itself is an example of a project at Future University!)

Staley also offers three “interludes,” universities structures thought out in much less detail. Superager University is for adults over 60 to help keep cognition sharp, The University of Beauty has a curriculum entirely focused on studying what is beautiful across academic disciplines, and Technology University both incubates new technologies and examines how and why they’re used in the world.

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Works Referenced

• Staley, David J. Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

• My comments about business school come from my personal conversations with attendees at Harvard Business School in 2023, including one full-length interview with a second-year student.

• My comments about law school come from (1) a full-length interview I conducted with a law student in 2023 and (2) the book Educating Lawyers, part of a series on professional education by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.