I first met Noah Pickus on a cloudy fall morning on Duke’s campus, several months after I started in 2022. He had just returned to Duke as an associate provost working on strategic initiatives and to lead academic innovation at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). We met in front of the Allen Building and walked to an open area across from the bookstore, grabbed coffee, and started chatting. In less than five minutes, we had already bonded over the recognition that DKU presents a great opportunity for Duke’s global impact and our ability to create more access to Duke education. We realized there was so much we could collaborate on to benefit from each other’s work, linking Duke and DKU in structural, practical, and organic ways.
Over the next six months, Noah and I worked on a leadership position funded through DKU and embedded in my team to benefit from the learning innovation infrastructure we were building. We found an excellent candidate, Ying Xiong, who has been propelling not only learning innovation but also broader academic innovation at DKU, with a keen eye on assessing interventions and innovation.
Noah and I then shifted gears to discuss his idea of gathering global higher education leaders, some of whom he had featured in his new book with Bryan Penprase, The New Global Universities. Our discussions led to the decision to hold the New Global Universities Summit at Duke in DC. We envisioned bringing together Duke and DKU officials for this intimate, invite-only gathering of innovators, where we discussed the benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from these global leaders.
What can Duke or my organization, Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education, learn from those who have started new universities? These new institutions, built on a fundamental redesign of existing structures, practices, and habits, represent “macro innovations.” Most of what many of us engage in are “micro innovations” involving individual faculty members and their students. While this continuous improvement of teaching and learning is essential, it rarely changes the face of higher education. Progress is incremental, and mainstream habits prevail. Listening to the leaders of these “macro innovations” was fascinating because it became clear that micro-innovations alone will not lead to fundamental change in higher education to make it more accessible and achievable. I believe Duke can be unique in charting a path between the two.
When we look at established but highly innovative institutions like Arizona State, Georgia Tech, and the University of Illinois, we see a series of mid-size innovations that have propelled significant change. These changes are neither an accumulation of iterative course or faculty-level adjustments nor a fundamental reset of the institution’s parameters. For example, Arizona State’s transformation began with Michael Crow’s declaration, “We will define ourselves not by whom we exclude but by whom we include.” With subsequent investments in various access initiatives, ASU is now known as not only the most innovative but also the most connected to learners of all kinds. Georgia Tech’s intentional experimentation with MOOCs led to a deep understanding of the pedagogical power of digital learning delivery and its associated costs, resulting in the creation of the nation’s most affordable online master’s degrees in analytics, computer science, and cybersecurity. Almost half of Georgia Tech’s 40,000 students are now online, while it remains a top-ten ranked public institution, more selective than ever.
My intellectual curiosity now lies in these mid-size innovations, which Noah helped me dub “mezzo innovations.” These mezzo innovations are what we can all pursue to make room for change at our institutions without altering the brand or rebuilding from scratch. This is where I see a lot of hope for us innovators in higher education.
All photos by Jared Lazarus.