







That’s a good thing.
the role of the university
i am over halfway through my degree at cambridge, and i am a little underwhelmed

Sustainability
The sustainable University – structures, individuals and questions around institutional transformation
Layoff University, Vol. 2: Progress Made, Lessons Learned - excellent notes
Reflections from my first month of unemployment
What It Means for Universities to Run Their Own PDS: The Potential of DID as Academic Infrastructure - Nightflight
This big university system is embracing AI. Students and faculty aren't all on board
The California State University system offers an early look at what happens when an administration commits to a technology that its own community isn't convinced will improve education.

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.

Stefan Collini · Squadrons of Pigs: Bonfire of the Universities
The problems with Britain’s universities are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent. Yet political and...

Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?
During a time when American trust in institutions is at an all- time low, A.I. is poised to accelerate a growing disillusionment with higher education.

What will be left for us to work on?
ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

Goodbye, forever, probably.
I’m leaving developer relations and developer education. Rather than disappear completely unannounced, I wanted to tell you why.

Understanding GenAI and Campus Expectations | Center for Teaching & Learning
The High School That Guarantees You'll Make $1 Million (Ep. 325)
Our conversation with Nat Eliason

Groundings from @rude1.blacksky.team in #AtmosphereConf - on the importance of leaving the campus and going to where the people are - real knowledge is sitting down together to reason preach brother!
I’m collecting visions of the university at least ten years out (i.e, stories about equilibrium conditions, not short term fixes). What interests me is that the ones I’ve seen so far are compatible. Molly Worthen’s proposal for a technology fast has a radical title, but when you dig deeper +
Opinion | Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries (Published 2023)
www.nytimes.comInspired by bsky.app/profile/tedunderwood.com/post…
College admissions insanity is substantially explained by this fact: The number of elite entry level jobs (e.g. McKinsey, Goldman Sachs…

Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education

Opinion | AI Is the Future. Higher Ed Should Shape It.

The University As We Know It Is Finished

Opinion | Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries (Published 2023)