Letters from America Act 2

I have recently concluded a 5 week tour of US higher education institutions and its people in the great city of New York. This follows eye-opening insights from the west coast and Salt Lake City (reported on in Act 1 of my Letters from America) that showed great variability in how institutions were being exposed to recent tumultuous change and how they measured themselves in their mission.

New York has been a place of new starts and opportunity for many people over many years. It is the heart of enterprise and the home of bold vision. It measures itself by both.

This second instalment of my US drama on higher education didn’t feature on Broadway. I did enjoy a great performance of Hamiltonwhile there and reflected on the symbolism of its story of new beginnings for new lands, told from regimes from different times.  A message from the sidelines might have been:

“The king is dead, long live the new president”

Act 2 Scene 1 – Building new lands for HigherEd

My great friend Ann Kirschner has made a career of pioneering new ventures in HE since her initial forays into online universities with Michael Crow from Princeton more than 20 years ago. She has since advised many corporate and university leaders across the US, before taking the reins of presidency herself at Hunter College at The City University of New York two years ago

With 450k students, the many colleges of CUNY form the biggest urban university in the world. As a public university, serving diverse learners, it is facing significant challenges with the rising tides of political, technological and market change.

Ann writes the most thoughtful pieces on where higher education is going. She was the first, that I noticed, to coin the term omni-channel universities which is now guiding thinking in chancelleries around the globe.

Last year at HEDx, she likened our need for innovation to drawing on bonsai gardening techniques involving strategic pruning and growth towards clear visions from strongly led cultures. Her latest writings have just emerged around the need for higher education to find new ground to build on after being shaken and she shared the ideas with me over a lunch. I strongly recommend you look out for her writings on Forbes and elsewhere with links below.

Act 2 Scene 2 – Students at the heart of NYU

A visit to New York University in the centre of Manhattan showed me the insides of the most diverse of R1 research powerhouses imaginable. With a world class business school and a pioneering medical school, here is a classic elite US private university with 62k students and comprehensive research at scale. It has so many parallels to Ivy League, Russell Group and Go8 institutions around the world, and the many that seek to emulate them.

In John Burdick, Marni Passer Vassallo and Holly Halmo, EdD, I met the core of an outstanding student success team bringing human student support to serve the needs of some of the highest achieving and highest paying students. New ground is clearly possible, in established providers that develop a distinctive mission and focus on students, at a time when it is so needed by learners.

How political challenge and AI advancement would impact their strong student support culture is explored in a forthcoming HEDx podcast episode out later this week.

Act 2 Scene 3 – A New State with a difference

While in New York, I interviewed Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich Ph.D. for HEDx at her base in Cleveland Ohio. It was the week before she launched the newest US university called Newstate University. It takes its first students on July 1st 3 weeks after launch.

As a competency-based, online, credential-stacking, subscription-priced university, offering only courses about AI, and extensively using AI, it gave a different perspective on new ground higher education futures might be built on. Sasha outlined her attempt at disruptive innovation, to overcome the lack of agility in incumbency, in a HEDx podcast here. The story told could not be more different from established and current providers elsewhere.

New grounds in a new state can be quite different from those to be found in innovative existing providers. There are clearly many scenes to view in acts in the drama of higher education that is playing out before us all.

I think these need to be new grounds in areas where we have been most shaken by the challenges of damaged student and staff experiences, in broken connections to the world of work, and in engaging or not with the public and communities. But as the chancellor of University of Technology Sydney Catherine Livingstone said earlier this year,

“We need to move on from analysing our challenges to doing something about them.”

I am making the next HEDx conference about how we honour our commitments to students through their learning, our engagement of staff, and through our links with employers and communities. I’m delighted Ann Kirschner will join us. Details are now being released as we countdown to November 5th at The University of Queensland.

Make a note in your diary and I hope we all take inspiration from a city that never sleeps. See you there. You will not want to miss it I can assure you.

What we are reading

Ann Kirschner’s latest piece on new ground is in Forbes with a title The Great Education Earthquake: Building on New Ground. You can read it here.

Ann has previously written equally compelling op-eds around the concept of omni-channel universities and the application of bonsai techniques to university strategy.

Spotlight on others

Sasha Thackaberry-Voinovich Ph.D. can be heard in our most recent HEDx podcast with her demonstration of how hyper-agility in a disruptive innovator is hard for incumbents to match.

Ann Kirschner articulated the idea of omni-channel universities in a HEDx podcast episode from November 2023.