By Hélène B. Ducros
Universities all over the world, the US included, have started facing novel and acute challenges: declining student enrollment for some, rising skepticism about the value of higher education, stricter budget constraints, program closures, the advances of AI, growing confusion in campus culture, and shifting job markets for outgoing students. For many in higher education it has become clear that business as usual is not a feasible way forward and that retrenchment into habits that have become obsolete may be riskier than experimentation with new practices whose outcomes are yet unknown. What has also become evident is that a collective response is more likely to succeed than isolated efforts, a response that takes into account the world’s interconnectedness and incorporates this global entanglement as a resource for the building of solid networks moved by the quest for innovation in education. In this pursuit, established universities have an important role to play, as they are uniquely positioned to absorb a higher level of risk, not only to effect change for themselves but also in support of emerging, innovative educational programs and institutions across the globe. This is the responsibility Duke University is assuming.
We speak here with Noah Pickus, Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships at Duke University and founder of the inspiring Future Universities Alliance. The initiative is officially described as “a global learning network that brings together start‑up, emerging, and established universities to co‑create innovative academic solutions and expand access to high‑quality education worldwide.” More simply, Pickus describes the program in entrepreneurship language as a “start-up,” a term encapsulating the trials and tribulations such an ambitious program can expect to face. Pickus has long pondered the necessity for higher education institutions to communicate among themselves, and he shares here his awe of the many innovations he has seen around the world, which he also documented in a recent book (with Bryan Penprase), “The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century” (Princeton University Press, 2024). Indeed, the book tells the innovation journey of eight universities from around the globe, valuing what these changes mean for the future of higher education everywhere, including in the US. In this interview, we discuss Pickus’s personal trajectory from his research interest in nationalism and citizenship to his vision for what the university of the future could or should become to better serve students and communities at large. For him, innovation is at the center of a needed renewal and (re)invention of educational systems that must be led thoughtfully and without the erasure of specific “rooted” learning cultures. Keeping us in a hopeful mindset and away from spelling the end of the large US research university model as we know it, with its superior resources and buoyant activities, his reflection and determination encouraging and enabling institutions from across the world—whether large or small, technology- or liberal arts-focused, public or private—to share their innovation pathways with each other are sure to trigger a call into question of academic practices and goals everywhere.
As Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships at Duke University (Durham, NC), what is your institutional role and mission?
I have been a professor at Duke for almost 30 years. I am currently the Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships and Senior Advisor to the Provost. My role evolved over time rather than following a predetermined path. I often get involved when there is a need to pilot something new, build a platform, or connect people and institutions in new ways. Much of that work involves helping bridge the gap between where an organization is and where it hopes to go. Some of these projects have been large, some small; some successful, others less so.
Over the last ten years, my work has become more globally oriented, and today a large part of my work is with Duke Global to align the university’s mission and global strategies to make them more focused and impactful across a number of partnerships and collaborations. That means working inside and outside the university. The largest initiative I lead is incubated here at Duke, the Future Universities Alliance, which is supported by Duke but does not mean the exportation of the Duke model. Rather, it is about Duke building a platform and a force multiplier to support innovators in higher education around the world.
Before delving into the Future Universities Alliance, let us talk about your recent book “The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century” (Princeton University Press, 2024). In this “reinvention,” what would you say are the most critical interventions that need to be made in twenty-first century education? We are already a quarter into the twenty-first century, have you seen some of those changes taking effect already?
Higher education does many things well, but it is often insufficiently creative in addressing the challenges before us. We need to renew public confidence that universities can help societies address important problems while preparing students for lives of purpose, contribution, and adaptability. The book represents an exploration into this moment in the US and elsewhere. What my colleague, Bryan Penprase, and I had begun to notice in higher education is that there was much innovation happening around the world, whether in Asia, Europe, Africa, or India, as well as in the US. We wanted to tell the story of this diverse wave of innovation and the people behind it. In addition to telling these individual stories, we wanted to draw lessons from this upsurge of institution-building around the world and to make the conversation global, rather than focused only on the US.
In the book, you describe a number of universities located around the world, from Africa to Asia, the Middle East, and North America, that have reimagined education. What are some common factors that have facilitated this reimagining? Why was this reinventing possible at those universities specifically? Is this change scalable and spreadable to other contexts? What might be some obstacles in other places?
These universities asked themselves how they could create wise entrepreneur-leaders and realized there is no single answer to that question. Some of the examples we describe include Minerva University, which operated in seven countries, and the African Leadership University, based in Mauritius and Rwanda. Both institutions created flexible pathways through curricula that are more integrated than those of traditional universities and that undergird a set of habits and skills. They focus on teaching skills that are durable and transferable across circumstances. Rather than studying biology or history in siloed ways, students learn concepts that help them become adaptable.
Another example in the book is a pioneer college of engineering. Traditional engineering education is highly structured and regulated. But the Olin College of Engineering understands that students need more time for hands-on application to face the grand challenges of the world. So, they train their engineering students to develop their problem-solving skills through issues such as demographic change or climate change. And we found that places such as Yale-NUS or NYU Abu Dhabi were trying to create a new form of education drawing on a truly global student body. Those examples show that there is no single story and that there are different types of innovations, which are powerful but difficult to actually accomplish.
Why is that hard to do? What are some limits or obstacles? How do you change stubborn systems that have worked? Is it easier to reinvent within a system that already exists, or is it easier to start from scratch? In other words, is being an “established university” a hindrance for reforms or new ways of doing things? Do you think that the new university of the future will emerge out of those places with a history of weaker educational institutions, where in effect all is still possible?
It is hard to innovate or to renew, for different reasons. A new institution benefits from starting from scratch; it has freedom and agility to imagine from the ground up. Many of the universities we profiled in our book are led by people who had an idea to do something fundamentally different. But emerging institutions also face challenges, in that they are start-ups that must find capital and navigate highly regulated structures. And they lack something critical in higher education: reputation.
For established institutions, the challenge is almost the reverse. They have know-how and reputation. But the challenge they face is how to manage an existing system while creating a new one. One of our central convictions is that innovation and renewal need each other. New institutions often possess freedom and imagination, while established institutions possess expertise and experience. Higher education benefits when each learns from the other. Innovation is not always about inventing something entirely new. Sometimes it is about recovering valuable practices that institutions have forgotten.
When you say that institutions can learn from each other, when a program is piloted by a US-based organization, even if it includes organizations from other places, how is it perceived? Could it be perceived as an imposition of a certain system that is not necessarily feasible in other contexts?
Let us start with understanding why people turn to the US in higher education and then talk about the limitations that can create. The American research university has had a great impact on higher education. Traditionally, these institutions have been valued for their openness and the way they integrate research and teaching. They operate on the residential model, have institutional autonomy, and have often been inspirational to many around the world. At the same time, the American university faces its own problems: higher education in the US is extremely expensive, and people’s trust in the model has been declining. Teaching is often secondary to research, which can be overly specialized. And pathways to access are limited in many cases.
We do not think there is a “right” model that should be exported. When Duke first began building relationships with Singapore to launch a medical school and with China to create Duke Kunshan University, we tried to think about these differences through the concept of “rooted globalism.” In other words, what are the ways in which we can enter in these partnerships and, as an American institution, offer lessons and opportunities without proposing a carbon copy of ourselves. When people build something new in partnership, what is learned benefits both the host country and the American institution. The fundamental premise of the Future Universities Alliance is that many challenges in higher education are shared across borders, even when local contexts differ dramatically. We need to move away from a pattern of model replication and toward a model of adaptation.
What do you mean by “rooted globalism”? Is it akin to glocalism, where something “foreign” might be adapted locally to serve the local context, incorporating the local needs. Or is it something different?
Rooted globalism highlights a productive tension, whereas glocalism can sometimes sound like a win-win formulation in which the tension itself disappears. Rooted globalism recognizes that our lives are increasingly shaped by global forces, yet people continue to draw meaning, identity, and purpose from particular communities, traditions, and places. The challenge is not to choose between the global and the local, but to learn how to navigate both. The more interconnected our world becomes, the more important it is to understand what people are rooted in and why it matters. For universities, this means preparing students to engage global challenges without losing sight of the histories, cultures, and communities that shape them. The goal is not to eliminate the tension between rootedness and openness, but to cultivate the judgment needed to live productively within it.
As a scholar specialized in nationalism and citizenship, what led you to your interest in education and pedagogy and to this rethinking of global education, away from nationalism, national consciousness, or national education schemes?
Looking back, I see continuity. My early scholarship was focused on nationalism and how societies educate citizens, particularly immigrants. It was about the global coming into the national, with education always central to that process. It led me to think about how higher education needed to change to form citizens and about how globalism was changing higher education. As I took leadership roles and saw the creation of new universities in different parts of the world, I started focusing on ways we could prepare students for citizenship in a world that is at once more united and fragmented. I do not see my interest in nationalism and globalism as opposites, because we need individuals and institutions that are simultaneously global and rooted. We must live in this tension rather than try to make it disappear. For me, it is key to understand how well our institutions enact rooted globalism and institutional adaptability against the many pressures our societies and universities feel today—economically, socially, and educationally.
Do you think that the idea of rooted globalism remains inspirational, or does it have concrete feasibility? Are people and institutions ready to receive this idea in the world?
There are tensions and clashes, but I do think that there is something deeply hopeful and even inspirational about the kind of education I see being built around the world for the future. New institutions, for example Habib University in Pakistan, simultaneously seek to create an education that is world-aligned and focused on how their students can get jobs while also leaning into the strengths of their own civilizations and cultures. I think there is something hopeful about this approach, but it requires a combination of audacity and humility. Audacity to create something truly new, and humility to recognize when you can adapt ideas from other contexts.
You founded the Future Universities Alliance. It is described as a “global learning network.” “Global learning” is one of those buzz words that anyone involved in the internationalization of education has heard often. What does it entail? And how does the Alliance’s “network” get enliven?
We are a network, a global platform of builders and renewers of higher education. We facilitate their learning from each other as they work on their own projects. We are not trying to solve every problem for every institution, as we recognize that contexts vary, but there are common issues to tackle, whether about AI, workforce, access, or cultural education.
Higher education is often homogeneous: Research universities talk to other research universities, and liberal arts colleges talk to others like themselves. This is fine, and there are good reasons for it. But what we found is that the founders of new universities all over the world were getting support and insight by speaking with established universities and with each other. And the latter were getting access to innovation that they wanted to implement and were learning from the experience of the new universities. We lean on the idea that heterogeneity is a virtue. That is why the Innovation Sandbox is global, with 49 institutions across 23 countries and 5 continents.
How do you build and animate the network? Do people come to you, or do you have a list of universities you think might be potentials that you prospect? How does the network stay alive in between meetings? What is the process by which universities join or are selected to join the alliance? Are there set criteria or set promises about particular actions to be implemented in the future?
We selected institutions not because they shared a common model, but because they were engaged in meaningful efforts to innovate or renew. We organize participants into small peer groups that meet throughout the year as they advance their own projects. The goal is to create a community of practice rather than a one-time event: institutions work on their own initiatives, share progress, exchange successes and setbacks, and bring those lessons back to their own campuses. We initially thought we would start with ten to fifteen institutions. But anyone could apply and we received over 100 high-quality applications from all over the world. So, we have a small institution in Botswana, a “communiversity” in Nepal, a coding university in Germany, and an interdisciplinary liberal arts school in London. Our hope is that we will attract more institutions to participate.
These are definitely beautiful ideas and virtuous goals. The Alliance is described as aiming at closing off the gap between what students learn and their needs. Concretely, what happens when you have in the same room institutions from countries with very different economic situations and resources? How do you discuss innovation implementation in a poor country in Africa, for example, at the same time as you discuss the feasibility of innovative projects in rich countries? Does the Alliance account for this global asymmetry?
The first thing we accept is that we cannot solve every problem or eliminate all differences in resources and capacity. The purpose of the Alliance is not to make institutions more alike. It is to create opportunities for them to draw lessons from one another while pursuing their own goals. Sometimes innovation emerges precisely because institutions face constraints. In our book, we describe the African Leadership University in Mauritius and Rwanda, which could not sustain a traditional model built around large numbers of PhD faculty. Instead, it developed a very different approach that combines online learning, facilitators, collaborators, and faculty support. In some respects, that model is more experiential and student-centered than approaches found at much wealthier institutions.
We see similar examples in the Alliance. The Nigerian University of Technology and Management is developing experiential STEM entrepreneurship education in Lagos, while Academic City in Ghana is building new approaches to innovation and incubation. What makes these conversations valuable is that institutions learn not only from success, but from how others respond to constraints and opportunities that may differ from their own.
Do you work with both private and public institutions? Is it harder for public institutions to be innovative, especially when the curriculum might be set nationally?
We have a mix of private and public universities in the cohort. Public institutions often face regulatory constraints and competing obligations that can make change more difficult. At the same time, they educate enormous numbers of students and can have tremendous impact when innovation succeeds. One of the lessons from our book and from the Alliance is that innovation and renewal take different forms. New private institutions may have greater freedom to experiment, while established public institutions often have greater scale and reach. Both have important advantages. The point is not to decide which model is superior, but to create opportunities for each to inform the other.
Do you think students are ready for something different in their education? Sometimes, students themselves can have set expectations about what higher education should look like and how it should be delivered to them.
This is a great question. Students are a lot like their institutions. Despite all the criticisms facing higher education, students are attracted to many of its enduring strengths, including intellectual community, opportunity, and prestige. At the same time, many sense that the world is changing and that existing structures are not always preparing them as well as they could.
What students often need is evidence that different models are both innovative and credible. The first 140 students who joined Duke Kunshan University were pioneers. They were willing to take a risk, and their willingness to explore was remarkable. Over time, DKU earned recognition and standing of its own. Students could see that they did not have to choose between something new and something respected. I think many students around the world are eager for that combination.
So, this is also about easing the anxiety of students and regulators about innovation in higher education?
Yes, in some ways. Students, regulators, and university leaders all need confidence that trying something new does not mean abandoning quality. Innovation can feel risky when institutions are acting alone.
One reason we created the Alliance is to make innovation more visible, more credible, and less isolated by connecting institutions that are tackling similar challenges. When people can see how others are approaching questions of AI, access, workforce preparation, or curriculum reform, they often discover that their own challenges are not unique. That makes experimentation less isolating and helps institutions innovate with greater confidence. We invite institutions to come with projects they are already pursuing. The goal is not to determine a single correct model, but to support thoughtful experimentation and create opportunities for institutions to learn from both successes and setbacks.
In October, Duke will host the Alliance’s first Global Summit. What are the stakes and expectations for this summit? What will happen at the October summit?
The Summit is first and foremost a working meeting. Its purpose is to build relationships, create trust, and engage deeply with the challenges participants are tackling. We are deliberately emphasizing collaboration and problem-solving over conference-style presentations because meaningful collaboration requires trust, and trust takes time to develop. We hope participants leave not only with new ideas but also with a community of peers they can continue learning from throughout the year.
At the end of the program, how do you assess the success of the Alliance’s first cohort? Do you have a plan in place for assessing it? Will there be a plan for diffusion of its results?
We are creating a year-long collaborative process designed to support institutions pursuing ambitious innovation projects while helping us better understand how universities can benefit from one another’s experience across very different contexts. The goal is not simply to study innovation, but to accelerate it while drawing lessons from the field. We will look at whether institutions make meaningful progress on their projects, whether new collaborations and relationships emerge, and whether participants adapt ideas from other contexts in ways that strengthen their own institutions.
Today, the US is considered in many places, notably in Europe, as somewhat leaving the international arena on different fronts. How do you navigate this context in creating a strong global alliance program from Duke University, a US-based institution?
One lesson we have learned is that people often think about higher education innovation through a national lens. Yet many of the most important challenges universities face today are shared across countries. Questions about AI, workforce preparation, access, public trust, and civic education look different in Lagos, London, Durham, or Delhi, but they are questions that nearly every institution is confronting. For that reason, we do not see a tension between supporting American innovation and global collaboration. In fact, each depends on the other. Institutions become stronger when they gain insights from experiences beyond their own borders while remaining responsive to the needs of their own societies.
Have you received applications from Ukrainian universities? Although still in the midst of war and survival effort, Ukrainians are already thinking about and planning their post-war recovery, in effect planning to reinvent their society. Ukraine seems to be ideally situated for reinventing and renewing systems.
We are trying to figure out how we can help in a situation like that. When the need is so immediate, there are other institutions—large NGOs for example—that can help. We are still a small operation, but we must ask ourselves how we can help with this grander set of projects.
That leads me to the issue of funding. Is the Alliance entirely funded by Duke University? Do you foresee that funding may be coming from other organizations in the future, maybe even the European Union, which has deployed a lot of funding for education?
We are currently supported entirely by Duke, in alignment with its global strategy and its commitment to incubating promising new initiatives. The Alliance allows Duke to serve as a force multiplier, bringing together institutions that might not otherwise have opportunities to collaborate and expanding its own reach.
As we build the Alliance, we are beginning conversations with foundations, governments, and other organizations, including in Europe. We are seeking both co-funders and thought partners who share an interest in innovation and renewal in higher education. The challenges facing universities are too large and too varied for any one institution to address alone, and we believe the Alliance will benefit from partners who bring different experiences and perspectives to the work.
To your knowledge, when we talk about countries in Europe, is the sort of innovation-driven American spirit, entrepreneurship, aspiration for innovation and change the Alliance is based on as present there? Do you find this spirit more readily in the Global South out of need and newness, since everything is possible when starting from scratch?
I am not an expert on European higher education. My impression is that in some parts of Europe, the regulatory environment can make experimentation and scaling more difficult, even when innovative ideas are present. At the same time, Europe possesses important strengths in institution-building, public coordination, and cross-border collaboration that others can benefit from. There are several European interdisciplinary schools in our inaugural cohort, particularly in Germany and Spain, as well as in the UK and Turkey. I think that there are real strengths and I look forward to learning about the kinds of networks that are established in Europe.
Is there anything else you would like to add or reinforce about the Future Universities Alliance?
I would underscore two ideas. The first is audacity. Universities face significant pressures, and meaningful renewal requires people willing to imagine alternatives and act on them. The second is humility. Context matters, and no institution possesses all the answers. The Future Universities Alliance is built on the belief that universities become stronger not by replicating one model, but by learning across differences.
What gives me hope is the number of founders, institutional leaders, and innovators I encounter around the world. Despite very different circumstances, they share a commitment to creating better opportunities for students and to strengthening the civic and educational role of universities. The Alliance begins with that optimism and seeks to translate it into practical collaboration. It is both aspirational and deeply practical: a way of helping institutions adapt ideas from other places while remaining true to their own missions and contexts.
Noah Pickus is Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships and Senior Advisor to the Provost at Duke University. He is the founder of the Future Universities Alliance and a Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Duke. A founding architect of Duke Kunshan University, he has held leadership roles across higher education in the United States, China, and internationally, including as Chief Academic Officer of Minerva Project. He is co-author of The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Hélène B. Ducros (JD, PhD, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) is a human geographer whose research focuses on the reinvention of rural territories and identities and the circulation of models of placemaking through heritage-making. She has published in various venues and co-edited Decentering European Studies: Perspectives on Europe from its Beyond (UNESP – World Society Foundation, 2025) and Justice in Climate Action Planning (Springer, 2022). She has been dedicated to place-based pedagogies and experiential learning, as well as the role of language in knowledge acquisition and critical thinking, in particular through the languages-across-the-curriculum approach. She is the founding editor of GlobalEurope Journal.
References
Penprase, Bryan, and Noah Pickus. 2024. The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
