Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education

Imagining the universities of the future.How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today—MOOCs especially—focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university placed the pursuit of play well above the acquisition and production of knowledge? By asking bold "What if?" questions, Staley assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. This book specifically addresses those engaged in university strategy—university presidents, faculty, policy experts, legislators, foundations, and entrepreneurs—those involved in what Simon Marginson calls "university making." Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden age" for higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.

What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?

We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out

Ali Alkhatib: On techno-optimism

I’ve got a longer draft in the works, but I don’t think that’s going to become a blog post, so I figure it might be useful to publish something here and solicit feedback, or just plant a flag in the ground that this was a thing I did. Last week Several weeks ago I gave a talk at Wayne State University titled “the uncanny pessimism of techno-optimism”. In this post I’m going to breeze through some of the stuff I talked about and give a sense of what’ll be coming. Eventually.

PhD/papers/Network Relativity/Network Relativity Theory.md at main · leo-guinan/PhD

Open notebook for my research in memetic economics - leo-guinan/PhD

The University As We Know It Is Finished

That’s a good thing.

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Foresight Institute supports ambitious, interdisciplinary science through grants, prizes, fellowships, and events.

Technology without Industry

A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway

Moving Forward from Hot Fable Summer

Suggestions on how to move forward on the craziest 90 days in cyber and AI history.

A People’s History of Tech

A collective storytelling project to build a more representative history that reflects the human impacts of technology.

The Strategic Foresight Book — IFRC Solferino Academy

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What will be left for us to work on?

My keynote at ICML 2026

What will be left for us to work on?

My keynote at ICML 2026