The New Global Universities
Reinventing Education in the 21st Century
Reimagining higher education around the world: lessons from the creation of eight new colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and North America.
Higher education is perpetually in crisis, buffeted by increasing costs and a perceived lack of return on investment, campus culture that is criticised for stifling debate on controversial topics, and a growing sense that the liberal arts are outmoded and irrelevant. Some observers even put higher education on the brink of death. The New Global Universities offers a counterargument, telling the story of educational leaders who have chosen not to give up on higher education but to reimagine it. The book chronicles the development and launch of eight innovative colleges and universities in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America, describing the combination of intellectual courage, entrepreneurial audacity, and adaptive leadership needed to invent educational institutions today.
The authors, both academic leaders who have been involved in launching ventures similar to the ones described, offer a unique inside perspective on these efforts. Bryan Penprase and Noah Pickus show how the founders of new colleges and universities establish distinctive brands in a sector dominated by centuries-old institutions, secure creative sources of funding, attract stellar faculty and students, and design appealing curriculums and campuses — all while managing tradeoffs and setbacks, balancing local needs and global aspirations, and wrestling with challenges to academic freedom. These new educational institutions include two universities in Asia and the Middle East built by well-established American parent institutions, others in Africa and North America that offer holistic reform from the ground up and leverage new technologies to lower costs, and still others that adapted the American liberal arts model to Asian and African contexts. Their experiences offer lessons for future founders of new universities — and for those who want to renew and rejuvenate existing ones.
Bryan Penprase is vice president for sponsored research and external academic relations at Soka University of America. He was a founding faculty member of Yale-NUS College in Singapore and an American Council on Education (ACE) fellow at Yale University and taught physics and astronomy at Pomona College for over twenty years while conducting astrophysics research at Caltech. He is the author of STEM Education for the 21st Century, The Power of Stars, and Models of Time and Space: The Foundations of Astrophysical Reality throughout the Centuries.
Noah Pickus is associate provost at Duke University and dean for academic strategy at Duke Kunshan University. He was formerly chief academic officer at Minerva Project, director of Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, founding director of the Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University, and cohort codirector of the Arizona State University-Georgetown University Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. He is the author of True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism and coauthor of Liberal Arts and Sciences Innovation in China.
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