The Duke Today magazine had a nice article about our New Global Universities Summit in Washington, DC. The meeting was organized by my co-author Noah Pickus and his team at Duke, and I was able to help with the planning and interviewing of some of the speakers and attendees for a booklet that summarizes some of the lessons learned from founding new universities. The article is entitled “The New Ventures in Higher Education” and was published on July 16, 2024.
In the article, they describe how Noah and I met during our ACE fellowship year in 2012-13. As the article states, “Twelve years ago, Noah Pickus, a Duke ethics professor, and physicist and astronomer Bryan Penprase found themselves discussing the state of higher education at a bar in Chicago. Over hazy IPAs, we discovered a mutual frustration with the ways in which colleges and universities imitate each other in a race for improved college rankings and prestige.”
The article also recounts some of the ways in which the new universities are innovating in Teaching and learning. As the article states, “Bryan Penprase says many of the innovations at new global universities offer new types of curricula and teaching in undergraduate education that can be replicated elsewhere. Here are examples:
- Yale-NUS College, which merges both natural and social sciences and Asian and Western philosophical and political ideas
- a four-year course at Ashesi University in Ghana designed for developing entrepreneurial and ethical leaders for Africa
- a Vietnam studies course at Fulbright University Vietnam that presents both American and Vietnamese views of the war”
Below are a couple of images from the article, showing some our academic leaders during the meeting in Washington D.C. in June.
Left to right: Bryan Penprase, co-author of “The New Global Universities”; Gilda Barabino, president of Olin College of Engineering; and Mabel Miao, co-founder for the Center for Globalization and China
Duke Provost Alec D. Gallimore with Joanne Roberts, president of Yale-NUS College