 I have the top of the hour. So let's begin our session. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you here today. We have a couple of fantastic guests who have written a really, really important book and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Now I want to introduce this week's guests and I want to do it on a personal note. Not only do I consider the awesome Noah Pickas to be a friend, not only does the other guest have a perfectly spelled first name, but also their topic is something that I just experienced last week. Some of you might recall if you were here that I was leading the program from Qatar in the city of Doha, working in one of these global universities. The topic here is starting up new institutions around the world that have global engagement, global footprint and participate in the whole world of higher education. They have a new book, which I can't recommend enough. The New Global Universities. Out from Princeton University Press and the goal is to take you through eight examples, eight different universities that are startups that and they each have a different plan. They each have a different footprint, a different relationship with other organizations and governments and our goal here is to learn about their research and their own work, what they've discovered through all this. So let me begin by bringing up the great Noah Pickas because Noah has been a guest in the program before and I'm really grateful that he has joined us again. Welcome Noah. Thanks Brian. It's great to be back here to see all of you and of course to be interviewed by Brian and with Brian, spelled the same. It's gonna get pretty uncanny pretty soon. Noah, where are you today? Where have we found you? I am in Durham, North Carolina. Excellent, excellent. Where the weather is no doubt fairly comfortable outside. Fairly comfortable. Yes. Noah, every time we talk to you, you have so many insights and you seem to do as much work as any 10 brilliant academics. I hesitate to ask this question. What are you working on for the next year? What's ahead for you? You're way too kind, but you can share that with my boss anytime. I will. I have probably three different components other than this work Brian and I are doing on this book. One is I'm a Dean at Duke Kunchun University in China for Academic Strategy and we're at the sort of five year mark where it's time to have that transition to the 2.0 version of a new university. So we're crossing that bridge. Brian and I are working together on gathering 40 new universities from around the world beyond the eight that we did to come together in a summit this summer to talk about what they've learned. So those are lessons learned for others who wanna found new universities and also whether there might be lessons for established universities. And then I have my other job at Duke which is focused on issues that we're all dealing with right now, the conflict in the Middle East, free expression and pluralism, teaching excellence. So those are the sort of baskets that I'm working in. Wow, that's still awes me with the sheer amount of work you're doing especially building on the new global universities by expanding the number to 40 and that's terrific. I can't wait to see more of this. Hang on one second though. Let me bring your colleague up on stage while we've got the two of you. So welcome to Vice President Penpris, hello. Hello Brian, how are you? It's nice to be here and it's nice to also see Noah again and actually our book kind of started in a series of these kind of zoom conversations almost like a seminar where Noah and I were kind of teaching each other about all the things that we were learning from our different corners of the earth. Excellent, excellent. Well, I'm glad to bring you back to your roots that way. What, and this is something of the future that we can have video conferencing being in the past. What are you gonna be working on for the next year? What lies ahead for you for the rest of 2024? Yeah, well currently I'm on sabbatical so I'm at a very global but not particularly new university in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the year and I'm studying a future of higher education here with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and in particularly the AI revolution that everyone's looking at and how AI is going to make its way into every part of higher education and how we can kind of get in front of it and manage it in ways that will enhance the human experience of higher education and not put us into some kind of robot-filled dystopia. So I'm very interested in kind of the humanistic aspects of blending high technology and liberal arts and how you can get that fusion so that both complement each other. I'm also doing some traveling. I visited new universities in Malaysia, Hong Kong and I'm going on another trip to India and Bangladesh in late March. Wow, that sounds like a fantastic sabbatical. The combination of being able to take the time to deeply dive into a complex topic like AI and then to also travel at an epic scale. Fantastic. Yeah, it's been really fun and this is a good place to be because there's a lot happening here at Harvard and MIT and everyone's grappling with the AI revolution right now. Yes, yes indeed, yes indeed. Well, welcome to both of you. In fact, let me just make things a little bit a little bit more balanced and let me kick things off. Friends, if you're new to the program, I'm going to ask our guests, our authors a couple of questions about their work. And as we talk, please think about what you'd like to ask them, especially both your curiosity based on what they say but also how their work, how what they describe connects with your own work and your own thinking about higher education's future. The first question I wanted to ask and Brian, I gave you a hint of this earlier is your book looks at eight different universities and they're each different in crucial ways. They're all startups, they're all new. Everything from Olin College of Engineering to Minerva to Ashoka University. And at the end of your book, you have this great, great chapter. For me, it was actually two chapters on lessons learned. And one of the things you point out is that of these eight institutions, seven survived and not gonna survive but have succeeded really well and established themselves with global reputation. And you point out that that's an extraordinary success rate. If you look at business startups, the success rate is the survival rate is usually closer to 40% if not lower. And here you have some triumphs. I'm wondering if you could just quickly tell us what enabled these institutions to do so well and either of you can start. I'll say a word and then turn it over to you, Brian. I would say that this wasn't a careful study where we had 400 schools and we selected them and we basically identified ones that seemed compelling to us. We were not running a study. To me, there were two key features that are a little bit opposite of each other but were incredibly important. On the one hand, none of these institutions would have survived if they were not completely audacious. If they did not have a vision that was compelling that drew faculty and students and donors and governments and others to them and that really promised something that people wanted to commit to and sacrifice for. And at the same time, they exhibited flexibility. They were able to navigate moments when if the founding vision stayed exactly like it was, it would be too brittle. And that combination of sort of gas and brakes, audacity and flexibility really has been the crucial element and it's also an ongoing one they live every day. If I might also jump in, Brian, I really liked your analogy with business and that was a constant thread in our thinking and both the similarities, but I may be more importantly the differences between a new business and a new university. Both are entrepreneurial ventures. Both are working to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. And yet the kinds of strategy that you have in a new university are very, very different to the complexity and the very different numbers and very competing interests amongst stakeholders in your enterprise. And so we saw that the leaders navigate through this incredible complexity with amazing skill. It was quite inspiring and very dramatic too as well. And because they were able to start from scratch, they were really able to differentiate themselves nicely from other offerings either in the world entirely or within their region or their country. So they offered something really unique that no one else was able to provide. Excellent, excellent. Well, that sense of uniqueness, distinctiveness, which we often think about as higher education strategy, what does my college or university do that nobody else does or not in this way or as well? And in that combination, I love that gas or brakes, being able to be audacious and also to be able to pivot and change. We have a really good question in the chat. They just came in from Joyce Ogburn, our good librarian friend. And she asks, is there a point where institutions tend to ossify? No one just raised his hand and put up the front. Five years. Five years. Yeah, I mean you can measure in student life times or, you know, sort of like dog years in a way like new universities have a different time scale. So the first year of the university seems like a decade to those involved in it. And Noah and I were both involved in starting new universities. And then by about year five, as Noah's saying, when you have your first graduates out, it starts to then settle into more or less a desire to achieve steady state, partly due to the exhaustion that everyone has had from this incredibly demanding start-up phase and partly due also to just the need for signaling that stability that both faculty, students, and parents and employers want to see. So there's always tensions in a new university. That's the gas and brakes that Noah's talking about. And the tensions are pushing them two ways simultaneously. They usually try to point somewhere in the middle that allows them to remain innovative but also to achieve stability at about year five. And I would say the really interesting point too is when a university becomes older than the students. Because we find that in our sample and another university looked at around 18 or so years when they're older than their students, you go through a full life cycle of many of the professors and they're starting to get close to retirement age. And there's another point of reckoning where the university really has to figure out whether they're still a new university or not. It might be worth adding here that, so one of our schools for instance that many of you may know, the Olan College of Engineering which is the oldest of the ones we studied started just about 25 years ago. And they've had one president for Rick Miller for a long time and then in recent years or second Gilda Barbino. And we were in a conversation with her just the other day, Brian and I. And on the one hand, Olan has been brilliant in that they have created a culture of continuous improvement. It's not every 15 years we will do a strategic plan or a curriculum review. There was a way in which things they really did like engineers prototype and iterate and change. And it was clear that that was built into the culture of the place. At the same time, as Brian indicated once you become 18, 20, 25 and you have to figure out what are the things that need to stay put and because you need some things to stay put but also how do you renew that kind of innovative spirit? It is very impressive to us the power of the regression to the mean to begin to look like everybody else even when your intention was precisely the opposite. It's a powerful force. Oh. Yeah. We found a fancy word for it in some of the literature, memetic isomorphism but the idea that basically universities copied each other and they do it partly to speak about prestige and actually that everyone wants to look like the fanciest and most prestigious university and partially because at least in an existing university all the pressures are for conforming in terms of being something recognizable to employers and so being different is a real challenge because you have to then demonstrate that your quality makes it worth being different. You have to have that real value that justifies being a little bit at odds with the other types of universities and Poland College definitely made that case as have many of our other students because they are distinctive and for example, the Poland College ranked right alongside MIT as tops in undergraduate and innovative engineering education around the world just recently all within about 20 years from its being formed. Wow. And the other schools too have been graduating Rhodes Scholars, sending people to the top PhD programs. Even the one school that didn't survive in its present form, that's Yale and US College in Singapore, you could submit it if it were a company as being taken over by a larger one. So maybe you could give it as a merger because naturally the numbers of Singapore is taking it over and it's now operating in its endless college. Yeah, yeah. Which is quite a story and you tell this well. Friends, by the way, I'm sorry I didn't mention this. Chris Jensen asked us in the chat, if you haven't had a chance to read the book on the bottom left of the screen, you should see a kind of tan colored box that says the new global universities. If you click that, that should take you to the university press website so you can grab a copy. So the new global universities, Chris, is the title. We have some questions bubbling up there in the chat and please feel free to transfer those over to the Q&A boxes, friends, so I can share them. Or if you wanna ask them out loud, let me know. Put a click the raise hand button so I can bring it up on stage. Again, another question I wanted to ask you to, if I could step back a little bit, is why and how make these global universities I'm asking because we have, in the United States, we have a very different higher education environment than most of the world. We have our private, always financialized, high student debt system of tuition payment. We also have the demographic problem that other countries are struggling with as well. But also, so many nations right now are turning away from globalization. Either sometimes it's explicitly political, sometimes it's an attempt to preserve local traditions, folk ways, ways of knowing. Sometimes it's pure right-wing politics or left-wing politics. And of course, we have geopolitical problems, economic problems that are causing difficulties with globalization as a whole. So I guess why and how do these campuses throw themselves into the global ecosystem? No, you wanna start about that? Sure, I'll start and hand over. I think, when Brian and I began this book, we'd actually, our focus, the original title for the book was Start Up You. And the focus was just on new universities. Like a lot of you, we've worked in existing universities and we have that love-hate relationship. There are all these great things about them and then there are all the things that frustrate the hell out of us. And in particular, the difficulty of bringing about change. And so we were looking at new universities and of course, there was, as there is now, a lot of gloom in, particularly in the US context about all the problems with universities, many of which are true. There are real problems and there are external critics of them and interns. And our focus was increasingly drawn to the fact that so many of the new startup universities were happening all over the world. The sun was shining, particularly universities that were focused on a liberal arts and science education broadly understood. So we weren't looking at somebody who was trying to do, badges and certificates and online degrees. That's a whole nother world, of course. So what we found was that these new universities were all over the world. And in one sense, they weren't global at all. They were often oriented toward driving the regional economy, whether it's Singapore or Vietnam, or it was actually to bring a more innovative education to those regions. And in other times, they were deeply global in the sense that they had students from all over the world, they had faculty from all over the world and they were consciously trying to create a curriculum and a pedagogy that drew on many traditions. So it's a bit of a journey you have to go on to get to the global features. Yeah, if I could jump in. I mean, any university that you start is automatically gonna be global, just like virtue of the fact that it's inheriting faculty and curriculum and ways of academic cultural assumptions that have driven, largely from Europe, American universities have that sort of European kind of orientation. And in this case, adapting it to other countries is a liberal arts, it gives you a chance to import, but also modify and reinvent. And so that was the other part of our title. This is not, in most cases, just an American university plot on a foreign shore, but they are genuinely expressing and reinterpreting the cultures of their region, genuinely having dialogues and thinking for the first time about this moment in their countries as they reach above colonialism and as they really strive toward greater levels of leadership and more advanced fields. And especially in Africa, even though many of those schools, like HSC and National Leadership University, which we write about, they were not particularly global in that they weren't like NYU bringing together 110 countries, but they were pan-African. They had aspirations to really bring together the whole continent and to inspire a new generation of ethical and entrepreneurial leaders, as Patrick Aloua, the founder of this recipe, talks about. So in all cases, I think they were looking to sort of take the local culture and sensibilities and enable the people from the area to reach the greatest heights possible in their lives, leadership, knowledge, work, if you will, but also a deeper sense of what it means to be human and what it means to be Vietnamese, is what it means to be Denean, what it means to be from the Mina region, and not as a Western interpreter would say, but as they themselves would say. And so all these schools have amazing programs that really reflect the cultures that they're rooted in. And this gives rise to actually Noah's invented term, rooted globalism, which I think now you can talk a little bit about if you like, but it's a beautiful way to express a type of globalization that is rooted in a particular context and culture. Please do, please do. Well, I'll just try to, I'll make it brief here. I think that, rooted globalism is, simply if you think of most education being fundamentally national because there are national systems of education. And on the other hand, particularly in the West and then exported elsewhere, the term of art we've all been used to hearing is it's about global citizenship. And both of them seem problematic from an educational perspective in that the connection between your ethnic, your racial, your religious, your whatever national identity is important. Those identities are important. So is an increasingly global dimension and their tensions between the two. And too often we define, we're gonna train you to be citizens of this country or you're gonna be a global citizen floating up there above everybody else. And so we have talked a lot about rooted globalism particularly at Dukunchan University where the tensions are built in. The assumption is as an individual you're gonna be navigating your life at all these different scales and that our governance systems are navigating that. And rather than have an aspiration of here is what the answer looks like it's to understand what those levels and the identities are, where the tensions are and how best you can navigate them. And that seemed to us at least like a more compelling vision than the other ones on offer. Yeah, if I could just jump in one more time. There's a lot to, you asked why Brian. And indeed now there's a lot of centrifugal courses that are flying, making the world kind of fly apart. People retreating into nationalistic little enclaves and rejecting the thought of globalism. And I think because of that these universities I think become all the more important because they are a force for drawing us together and finding ways of crossing culture, understanding and deeply learning from each other. And I think this is an important and even more important notion today as a way of really deeply understanding each other and really working to get a sense of a global community that can work together on some of the really intractable problems that we all face. So I think these schools create leaders that are not just from country acts but do have that more global vision about their mission in life and their purpose. And I think that's another exciting thing about these institutions. Sounds, this is me vigorously agreeing and saying this is fantastic and we need that especially if we're trying to tackle the climate crisis. But let me step out of the way. Let me thank you both for those great answers but then let me also see what the rest of the community would like to inquire about. And again friends, if you're new to the forum or if you're out of practice just click on the very bottom of the screen and either click the raise hand button if you wanna join us on stage. And unfortunately it looks now like you either have to have a beard or be named Brian to be on stage but it's okay. Other, the rest of you are welcome but or click the question mark if you'd like to ask a Q and A question. In fact, we have one of those right now. This is a quick one for you and maybe pointing towards your new project. This is from Hal Hepner in Southwestern University. Any experience of the Universidad de Libertad in Mexico, this school uses many of her project tools. I believe they're in year one or two. Yeah. So yes, I was at Minerva project for just over a year and that's also one of the books though the university not the project is the consulting parent organization. And Brian and I featured the university in the book and the Universidad de Libertad wanted to create something, they wanted an alternative to the traditional institutions in Mexico. I think they had something of an ideological they wanted very much Libertad to emphasize freedom and not government control but they wanted to create a more flexible way for students to get degrees and not just simply bachelor degrees but they wanted to do it in a way that it wasn't what you so often see which is okay, we're going to have here are four certificates and three merit badges and you put them together and we'll call that an education. They wanted to do it in a way where there was an underlying taxonomy to the core ideas that they were teaching and so core principles and concepts and skills were connected across whatever the certificate or badge or degree you were going to get and they're just in their startup phases as you indicated but it's a fascinating example of an institution drawing on one of our universities that we featured and then adapting it to their particular needs and interest in context. Yeah, and this raises an interesting aspect of these universities, even though they're small many of them have as few as 400 students they're having an outsize impact in terms of how they're inspiring other universities. So Minerva has inspired this university in Mexico. Holland has all these different visitors around the world looking at their situation and their approach to engineering education. When I was at Yale and US College in Singapore we had people all over from India, from elsewhere even to Kunchan University looking at our design of the curriculum and getting ideas from it. So it's a really amazing kind of open source flowering of this kind of global arts that's happening and these schools are all learning from each other and as they grow toward maturity and stability and really becoming leading universities I think they can help inspire a lot of other startups giving an example of the fact that they could make it despite all the odds. Excellent, excellent. Well, that's a great question. Did my video just go black? Yeah, you're frozen. Either that or you're very thoughtful right now. I'm super thoughtful. Hang on one second. Let me just refresh my screen. Give me one second here. Anyway, we can keep talking I guess but this is something that Noah you wrote about and we wrote about deciding that we have a pluralist view of impact that these are not schools that have 300,000 students and yet even though they're small because they're producing these amazing leaders in their countries that are so dynamic and because they're sort of models of how to restructure curriculum to rearrange faculty to reinterpret the canon in different parts of the world really have an outsize impact. Yes, I think that what we came to a lot of the conversation particularly in the US has quite understandably been focused on questions of scale because scale is a way to achieve greater access and address equity issues. I spent a lot of time. I see there's some folks from ASU here. One of the most innovative, interesting kinds of places done so many good things. And yet at the same time they're, Brian and I had this sense that the conversation has become too dominated by the question of scale. If you know that you have to scale up to 100 or 200 or 300,000 or you have to be online and have some kind of technological product that you're offering. And our view is that's all important. Sometimes we wonder about the quality of some of those projects but our focus was to turn more on instead of trying to maximize and scale everything we think there's a lot to be learned from a network from an ecology of experimentation and innovation. And so we wanted to hold up examples of that which as Brian has indicated other institutions are not so much becoming, they're not joining forces and amalgamating but they are learning from that and then taking on their own view about what it would do, what would happen locally for them to matter. We find that quite inspiring and it's a more pluralistic ecology. Although there's always the downside which is everybody then reinvents their own thing and there's no mezzo level scale where you actually say, well, what have we learned across these institutions that we would want to replicate in more than one place? But in general, we're pro experimentation and ecologies in how we approach this. Yeah, and it might actually be sort of an American tendency to immediately point to size and scale and numerical measures as a way of engaging the importance of an institution but what we're really impressed by these schools and we selected them for this reason is for the depth and intensity of the education they provide. They're all residential institutions. They all form very tightly knit communities. And so in that way, they're also kind of a different kind of mission from some of the larger online universities. The larger online universities are doing fantastic work and they're pioneering lots of great things but that's not what this book is really about. It's about that really intensive, really interpersonal kind of dialogue-based education that's found in our best liberal arts colleges imagined around the world. So I think Brian has really had trouble connecting over there. Well, why don't we, if, since I think Brian controls the stage, but if there are comments or questions in the chat box that we could pick up on, please feel free. I'm not sure if we're all frozen right now. Yeah, maybe we're all just talking to a frozen world out there. So John has this comment about- It's a good question. Yeah. Sorry, I'm just on. Yeah, so Bill has this question in the chat about on the other end of scale, you've talked about campuses taking on their own view or having an epistemological focus. Do these ideas sustain past a certain size? And at one level, we can't fully answer that. That is some of the schools we look at intend to stay small. Others are, ah, Brian, we're mid-set. Yeah, we were just building questions. So we're making you- Obsolete. Obsolete, yeah, exactly. So- Well, my- Control, get a cool drink. We'll take it. No, we're just trying to fill in for you, Brian. Well, you two are marvelous. My apologies, my Mac Mini has been having some interesting issues of videoconferencing lately. So I've switched to another laptop and it apparently has the approval of one of the cats. Nice. Who is here to say hello. So you're literally hurting cats then, as you mentioned earlier. Every day, it never stops. We have a, would you mind if I dealt into some of the questions that have come up? Please. This is one that is from a wonderful, great student, Vyn, Annelle Albertow. And she asks this classic question, which is, how do you navigate, how do these universities navigate the politics within their community, state, and country? Yes, with great care. No, you wrote a lot about that in one of the chapters. Yeah, so let me just pull out one aspect of that, which is most of these are broadly speaking, liberal arts and sciences institutions. And a number of them are operating in non-democratic or authoritarian settings in the UAE, in Singapore, in Vietnam. And part of the story we tell is how they try to navigate those tensions. On the one hand, you have critics, often from home campuses whose views are, this is destroying liberal education. There's not gonna be any academic freedom. You're teaching students things that they can't possibly practice. In the book, we articulate those views and we articulate the views of many of the founders and leaders of these institutions, who I think take an approach of, they have to be careful about the risks, but it's too easy just to say, well, let's keep things in our nicely tended campuses with flower beds and where we think we have academic freedom, although that's a whole question unto itself. In the West, we need to actually try to do this in places where it is challenging and where it is difficult. And how we navigate that is what you should judge us on. And there's a deeper level question here, which is on the one hand, there's a desire in many parts of the world for an American style liberal arts education, often because it seemed to be a driver of innovation in the economy and technology. But of course, it brings with it a lot of other issues. And the question of whether a Western-based liberal arts approach is fundamentally individualistic, less community-oriented, less collaborative, how it works with not only authoritarian governments, but cultures that have more communal dimensions. So Confucianism is one example in Singapore and in China. You can find it in lots of other places. All I can tell you is we try to tell the story of where we think the risks are and how the people have navigated them, but our own view has been that trying to navigate them is worth doing rather than just writing it off. Yeah, and if I might quote from the book, we're talking about how it's easy to criticize the hard task of advancing intellectual freedom and human creativity in what in the book we call imperfect and fraught circumstances. And the book points out that there's sort of a moral division of labor, and as the book says, in which proponents of unfettered academic freedom defend the garden walls, and in some cases, institution builders are tending the new vines that must grow in more inhospitable terrain. And I thought that was, I mean, I think you wrote it Noah, so I'm gonna give you credit for a very nice sentence. But it's not a perfect situation, but it's a situation where these schools can really play an important role in maybe redefining citizenship in some ways and really opening up conversations that hadn't happened otherwise. And the one example we write about is the way the Vietnam studies course at Fulbright Vietnam took life as a response to the government requiring a Ho Chi Minh thought course. And they actually did it so well that other people from the government and other universities have started to adopt parts of their curriculum. That's so huge for Vietnam. I mean, that's a very very fraught environment. And that was a very inspiring story. Thank you. Thank you both for these answers. And Annel, good to see you. What a great question. We now have a video question coming from our friend, Chris Janssen at Ed Studio. Let me just bring her up on stage. And there she is. Hello, Chris. Hello. Okay, I have to tell you, I got this in my stocking for Christmas. It is emergency mustaches. So I'm so excited that I can break one out because even though I can't put a barrier on it, I'm gonna do it. So, I can sit on stage here with you guys. Welcome. So try to take me seriously here, okay? Very seriously now, very seriously. Yes. Okay, first of all, I already bought your book. I just bought it. Great, great choice. And I'm like so, so excited. My heart's racing, my belly's on fire. I love this fricking topic. I used to be a professor. I'm in New York City, Chris Janssen. I used to be a professor at Fordham in the business school for 12 years, direct of entrepreneurship. And I left three years ago and they created my own campus in virtual reality. I wanted to, I can't wait to talk to you guys. It's the demands of the workplace, the needs of students all the stuff. It's just not happening within the animal. And I'm like, let's engage, you know, emerging technology, whether you want to talk VR or AI, focus on experiential learning. I put this whole consumer program together. And quite frankly, I haven't pivoted after a year because to get people to, as much as there's demand out there for something new, better, different, we're so ingrained with higher ed means going to a college, a four year college and paying a boatload of money and da-da-da-da-da and alma mater this net. And then, but we're, too many people aren't thinking of, well, what's the end result? What, why are you even doing this? Is it supposed to be, you know, you get you ready for a career? So I have a lot of thoughts on that. Grades, how we assess people, are we even listening to industry and giving them students with the skills or in demand? Poof! Kapawi. But anyways, I would love to talk to you guys more about this because there's so much opportunity out there and it really is what's best for the students and preparing them for, you know, fast-paced, fast-changing world that we live in. But I cannot wait to read your book and thank you for doing that. And Brian, great to see you and thank you for hosting this. I'm gonna stop talking, but I really look forward to talking to both of you. I'm so on the same page with you and so event and making some change. So anyway, the end. Oh, oh God. Oh. Can I really respond? Just because I love your energy and the mustache as well, Chris. And I think what you're pointing to is really, we're all in this together. You know, this is a community of people who really see that things can be different and are actually making it different. And in our book, we tell the stories of people who've left secure, comfortable circumstances and at great personal risk and difficulty jumped into this crazy world and they did it because they had that vision and they had that commitment to students. They really believe they deserve better. And we write a lot in the book about how a lot of universities are kind of old and a lot of them may be resting a little bit on their laurels based on their prestige. And one quote that we use from Steven Trakenberg, he says, college is like a vodka of labor less average that people will spend more on if it comes with a brand name because the name signals something about the buyer but not about the product. So the truth is building something that actually substantively is high quality and is different. And I think these schools are all striving for that and almost every case have actually done it. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Yeah, kudos to you guys. This is really awesome. It is. It's also an idea. Thank you. And once again, we have the idea of offering a future transform line of beard supplements for anybody too. The product idea. Yeah, I think it is. There's a branding opportunity. We've had a couple of questions about libraries in this respect. And I wanted to put one up and Noah, you kind of answered one in the chat. And here's one take of this from Elaine Lasta at Albany, Sydney. Did you examine how these concepts of continuous improvement, audacious vision, flexibility, et cetera, affect the libraries of these institutions? What is the role of the library? And then she goes on to say, how does it contrast to R? And I think how does it contrast to everybody else's role? I can think of two things right off. One, Minerva University, which Noah, you would know, but it doesn't have a campus. So it's entirely online with its library, I would imagine. And Yale and US College, where I used to work, they merged the IT and the library together along with the maker space and they had a dean level position managing all of those functions. And so I think in a lot of cases, they've had the freedom to reinvent libraries and construct them in a more modern context and really emphasizing the need for a lot of electronic materials, but also the way that a library is kind of more of a collaborative space and it takes on a lot of other functions in these days more than storing books as its historic function. And so that actually is a big cost saver too for these universities because nowadays you don't need to build a library with a million volumes, which used to be the draw of the college. They would always list how many volumes the library had. Yeah, yeah. I think I'm honor bound to say my wife who I think is on this call is works in the archives. Rubenstein archives here at Duke and we debate this often because I think there's also a trade-off here, which is on the one hand, there are lots of libraries as I'm sure the questioner is part of are reinventing themselves and have become hubs for so many different kinds of things. And at the same time, a lot of the new universities they lack the depth and the archival resources and the ability that we provide to many of our students right there locally. And so, we're not holding up these global institutions or these new universities. They've had to make trade-offs about what they're gonna do that are I think appropriate to their setting and to their financial plan, but it doesn't mean that everything, they are also missing things. And we just need to acknowledge that. And so when students are comparing universities, we all know they can all look the same on the surface, but you look a little deeper and you see some of these differences. And it also is kind of a paradox of a university. They're kind of poised between a curatorial mission to preserve the past and its culture and a future-facing mission to launch students into a very uncertain and changing future. And I think it's safe to say that these schools being newer universities are emphasizing a little more of that future component and a little less of the traditions. And I think there's room for both. And I think one thing we found in this study is that there's a whole diverse taxonomy of universities that have different missions and different strengths, but these ones are definitely looking forward to more than trying to preserve the past. There's a rapid exchange going on in the chat right now with quite a lot about how libraries are already changing and how these might be. But again, it seems to me that what you've identified in this work is glimpses of possible universities to come and that includes definitely the library. We have two questions left. One is a very specific technical question. And one is a grand strategy question. So can we start off with a technical question? Because then you can build on the grand one. And this is one for our good friend, Tom Hames, coming to us from, I believe, from outside of Houston. And he asks, is there a correlation between immigration visa restrictions and universities opening campuses abroad? Was this a driving factor? I mean, absolutely, like for African leadership university, for example, they began in Mauritius, which was a much easier place to get visas than South Africa. And they ended up in Rwanda also. And Singapore being a natural home for lots of different nationalities, same with UAE, it was a natural spot for the global university. So yeah, I think definitely countries that were either already cosmopolitan or seeking to become more so were ripe and good sites for these kinds of universities. That's a great answer. That's a, Tom, as usual, your question puts a finger on the pulse really, really well. That's a very, very important aspect of this. Yeah. There's an interesting book out that I really like, it's called The Geography of Genius. And it talks about like these idea capitals throughout history. And I think that was also part of the ambition of say NYU Abu Dhabi, which is very much wanted to become a talent magnet from around the world. And also Singapore, what really wanted to be a hub of knowledge industries. So I think there's definitely that kind of inspiration driving a lot of these universities. I've heard that from some different stakeholders in Southeast Asia wanting to be a regional hub. Well, thank you for that great answer, Brian. And let me now just step back and ask the larger question, which comes from our good friend, John Hollenbeck, the other end of the US in the capital of winter in Wisconsin. And John asks, what problems were these new universities trying to solve? And what does the facet of being global bring to bear in the solution? Now, you two have been speaking to this question for the past hour in different ways. And I'm wondering what you would add to this. It's a design thinking question, what problem are you trying to solve? And then what makes this, what else does global add to the picture now? So I'll start and hand it over to Brian. I think at one level, they were trying to solve very different things. And global was not necessarily, global was relevant in terms of the ideas they drew on. But it wasn't, as I said, Fulbright University Vietnam was trying to create a new kind of educated, innovative, more liberally trained citizen and worker. That, it's an explicit regional strategy. Whereas Yale and US and NYU Abu Dhabi were basically not only related to the regional strategy, but the global thing they wanted to do is they wanted to create a new incubator for truly a global leadership. Most of our American campuses, the leadership being trained includes some international students, right? But it is still within an American context. And so they were truly more global in their student bodies. Others like Minerva, basically they were incidentally global, which is to say they had a critique of higher education that they believed was just fundamentally flawed, curricular and pedagogically. And they had a technology that they believed enabled them to do better. And then it turned out that you won't be surprised in attracting students. The students were less focused on the pedagogy and the curriculum than by the tagline seven countries in four years. And so the global dimension was part of their strategy to shake up how students learned, but it wasn't, but it was a downstream from their specific larger goals. So there's really not a single answer, I think, across all of these. Lisa, I don't think so, but Brian may disagree. Yeah, and the fun thing about the book, which I think everyone should buy and enjoy is that every one of these founders had a vision. So they definitely were trying to solve a problem. And the one example of all eight, everyone has these stories, but the one I think is particularly dramatic is Patrick Oua, who had a very comfortable life in Microsoft. And then he actually was triggered by the Rwandan genocide, the war in Sudan and the birth of his first child. And when he looked at his eyes of his child, he talks about how he needed to give back to Africa. And he talks about this as his new mission and he realized he'd turned his back on the continent. So now, as he described it, he's thinking about an African renaissance. And he says, and this is one of his quotes, I'm thinking about an Africa that has emerged to be an equal partner in the world polity, economically doing well, culturally doing well, an equal player on the world stage, an Africa that is more interconnected within itself and an Africa where the young people on the continent feel a sense of pride and confidence. And every one of these leaders in all eight chapters have stories like this, where they're really trying to solve very, very deep and very, very heartfelt problems. And I don't think we have time to go into all eight, you're gonna have to read the book. But that's what's so exciting about these leaders is that they're so passionate about their project. It's not an academic project in quotes, it's actually something they feel very deeply. That's a very, very powerful conclusion. I'm wondering which of these eight or perhaps which of the 32 others that you're looking at is the most global, you know, the most non-local, the one that is closest to the closest thing we have to a civilizational university? You know, I don't know what I have on this one. Well, I mean, my answer, I think there are two that presented themselves. I think Yale and US, which Brian helped create, really had the most remarkable, they built the most global core curriculum. So if you just look at that and you say there's a Western core curriculum, what do you do when you include China, India and other countries in that? It really is remarkable. They then ran into the problem, of course, of well, who else are they leaving out as they expanded that? And I think Minerva sought to be the most global in not only in having students go to seven different countries, but their proposition is that there's a set of underlying habits and concepts that across the world are relevant. And so it's less about great books or great traditions and more about a core set of 100 key concepts. Now, you can challenge and question that, but the aspiration was that's what everybody should know everywhere. Yeah, and don't forget NYU Abu Dhabi, which was sometimes called the world's honors college, had 115 nations represented, would admit a student from anywhere on earth and pay all of their expenses and genuinely wanted to bring in the best talent from anywhere. And we tell stories about street kids who heard about the place and got full scholarships and now are working in the government at UAE. Just fantastic stories like that. Well, these stories are what your book tells and this vision is what your book relays. Friends, we are unfortunately out of time. This has been an extraordinary hour. The two of you have showed us an alternative version of higher education that is both inspiring and audacious, fragile and yet still rewarding. Thank you both so much for all of this. Let me ask, how can we keep up with the two of you? Brian, my name's sick. How can we keep up with you in your sabbatical? Should we follow you on LinkedIn? Is that the best way? You can do that. And I also have a blog that I write to less frequently than I should, but it's called BrianPentraise.org and it's sort of a media platform that has lots of posts and other materials related to the book and other projects I work on. Excellent, thank you. And Noah, besides bringing you back on a regular basis, how else can we keep up with you in your work? I'm still struggling with social media, but LinkedIn is probably best. That works, that works for all of us. Brian, Noah, thank you so much. This has been an honor and a delight and we're really looking forward to what you do next. Brian, thank you for hosting us. It's great to be back and thanks everybody for sticking with us for the hour. It was great to engage. Thanks everyone, this has really been great and thanks Brian for the opportunity to share this with everyone. A real pleasure, thank you both. Friends, don't go away yet. We need to tell you just to wrap things up. Thank you all for the great questions that have kept everything going. If you'd like to keep talking about this, about Yale National University of Singapore and global universities and all, you can do this actually on the various social media forums. Use the hashtag FTTE to keep up and you can find me here on Twitter, Master Don Threads, Blue Sky and my blog. If you'd like to look into our previous sessions, we'll have talked about international education as well as some of these institutions. Just go to our archive at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If you want to look ahead, here are some of the sessions coming up. We've got a whole bunch. Just go to our website forum.futureeducation.us and thank you all again for a terrific hour of conversation. Great questions, great thoughts, wonderful projects. I hope everybody is doing well and please join us next week where we'll talk about our eighth anniversary. Hope you're all well. See you next time. Bye-bye.