Sian Bayne and Jen Ross recently ran a workshop on Higher Education Futures with a group of 30 leaders from 10 European universities, as part of the Lighthouse Strategic Educational Leadership Programme.
The group were asked to create a draft teaching and learning strategy based on one of our speculative future scenarios for Higher Education. We wanted to share a snapshot of these, as a way of advocating for this kind of futuring which works so well to open up space for leaders to talk and think about the future of their universities, beyond the immediate operational needs of their roles.
One heartening meta-theme emerged from these discussions: the importance of taking care of the communal life of the university .
And here’s a very brief snapshot of where the group landed in discussion of the scenarios they were given.
Scenario – The University of Ennui: Ubiquitous automation plus universal basic income means that everyone has almost unlimited time for learning, but a declining sense of human purpose.
Strategy pillar: With time abundance, we can afford to entirely remove the differentiation between teachers and students – everyone passes through university with a commitment to both teaching and learning something.
Scenario – The AI Academy: AI runs the entire academic show: we’ve stopped caring about surveillance and extraction because no critical space remains outside the big-tech normal.
Strategy pillar: All practical infrastructure is managed by the AIs, so the strategic priority for all human teaching interactions is a focus on leading edge discipline-knowledge, creative problem-solving, ethics and critical thought.
Scenario – Enhanced Enhancement: Pharmaceutical and cognitive enhancement of students and faculty is normalised – academic performance expectations have intensified accordingly.
Strategy pillar: The tech enables development of a form of ‘precision education’, optimised for each individual. But the strategic priority is support for physical and mental health, bildung and reflection.
Scenario – The Extinction-era University: Climate catastrophe and societal breakdown mean that universities in their current institutional forms no longer exist.
Strategy pillar: This is an urgent, do-or-die moment – a degree is nonsense in such a context. Instead, a lifelong learning system is the strategic priority, with a focus on citizen science and the hyper-local in order to support immediate survival need.
Scenario – Justice-Driven Innovation: Massive political shift has pushed universities toward radical transdisciplinarity, swift responses to complex challenges and local learning collectives.
Strategy pillar: Most of all, create a culture that centres the development of empathy and understanding: collaboration and cooperation are the main strategy imperatives.
More on our scenarios here, and a big thank you to the brilliant colleagues who brought the ideas, from Aarhus University, Arkitektskolen Aarhus, University of Copenhagen, IT University of Copenhagen, KU Leuven, Stockholm University, University of Edinburgh, University of Southern Denmark, Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.