Our open, global institutional design engine is not just another consortium

It has become fashionable to say that the era of global higher education collaboration is over. Geopolitics is tense, budgets are tight, demographics are diverging and the public is asking hard questions about value. In such moments, universities usually turn inward.

Yet the benefits of sharing successful approaches across the planet have never been greater. And that is particularly true for Western universities, because innovation in higher education no longer flows only in one direction: from North to South.

Emerging institutions are experimenting with competency-based curricula, lean organisational models, and integrated learning designs – from global common cores to challenge-based majors – at a pace legacy institutions rarely match.

And while established universities often struggle to coordinate change across complex governance systems, they have research depth, scale and staying power. So each pole of the obsolete North-South divide has what the other needs. To meet this moment, we need mechanisms that convert that complementarity into shared capability.

That is why senior leaders from institutions as different as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Karachi’s liberal arts start-up Habib University have joined the new Future Universities Alliance. Incubated at Duke University, the alliance, which was officially launched at the end of last month, also takes in senior leaders from the likes of Stanford, Penn and Northeastern, as well as Tecnológico de Monterrey, Delhi’s Ashoka University and the African Leadership University, and other institutions around the world.  

Scepticism about such ventures is healthy. Higher education has seen alliances launch with broad declarations and fade with little to show. But we are structuring this one differently. Our alliance is not a mere prestige badge. Rather, it is an open, global engine devoted to the practical craft of institutional design. The advisory team guiding the work are not formal members, and the alliance is open source by design. We exist to surface what works, test it across contrasting contexts, and share it – freely and fast.

Yet we will respect our members’ differing contexts. Our approach rests not on borderless cosmopolitanism but on what I call rooted globalism. The idea is that institutions stay grounded in their histories and communities while learning across differences and allowing those lessons to reshape how they serve their own students.

We want graduates who can navigate local, national and global identities; who understand the tensions among them; and who can turn those tensions into civic and professional competence. If universities cannot do this work together, we should be honest about the limits on how much we will accomplish alone.

Our work centres on three mutually reinforcing activities, beginning with the one that makes everything else tangible, the Innovation Sandbox. This brings together leaders from our very different institutions to work on real design problems through a disciplined, studio-style process.

A university enters the sandbox with a concrete challenge, such as redesigning a core curriculum or developing a new credential pathway. It presents its current architecture, constraints and early results, and its peers in the cohort offer guidance informed by their own design work, supplemented by alliance staff and advisers. Each participating institution pursues a specific project with leadership support, so the sandbox is a working space, not a talking shop.

Nor is it only for universities far along in the work. We welcome engagement and nominations from founders of new institutions, government teams, foundations seeking durable models, and colleges and universities pushing beyond existing structures. Formal applications must come from accredited educational providers (or those seeking accreditation), but many other stakeholders can recommend potential applicants to the sandbox or offer partnership, mentorship or resources to the sandbox cohort or to the alliance.

To support early participation, we have launched an open global application, with initial expressions of interest due by 6 March.

The work of innovation does not end with design. As part of the sandbox, we also provide consultative support to senior leaders whose institutions are undertaking significant change. This includes structured opportunities to assess whether their aspirations require adjustments to faculty roles, governance processes or resource models, and to examine the political and organisational factors that shape reform.

Over time, we see potential for the alliance to offer leadership consultations and targeted capacity building directly to institutions, separate from the sandbox cohort process. Our aim is not to prescribe solutions but to accelerate progress and reduce avoidable failure.

The alliance is designed to diffuse what works, openly and without proprietary barriers. Rather than producing abstract toolkits or glossy case studies, we focus on design patterns: specific configurations of curriculum, assessment, staffing, partnerships or governance that allow promising ideas to take root – along with insights into which choices can travel and which depend on local conditions.

All of this rests on a simple conviction: quality and access must be designed together. For decades, the sector has treated them as trade-offs, but high-quality learning is defined not by prestige or selectivity but by the depth, coherence and durability of what students can do in complex and evolving real-world situations.

Universities will continue to face political pressures, cost constraints and demographic challenges. But there is a path between isolated pilots and wholesale disruption.

It begins by sharing the practical craft of institutional design through unlikely alliances, both rooted in place and connected to the world.

Noah Pickus is head of global partnerships and strategy at Duke University and the founder of the Future Universities Alliance. His most recent book (with Bryan Penprase) is The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2023).