A Futurist Year and the Future of the Futurists

In mid-September of 2023, I gathered with a group of eleven faculty members and two of my colleagues from the College of Arts & Science’s dean’s office who are my thought-partners and collaborators on this project — Kevin Mihata (Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education) and Greta Essig (Manager for Special Projects and Initiatives) — for a retreat to find the future of higher education. We had selected eleven Faculty Futurists through an application process, letting them know there were just three requirements for their first year of work: Attend three, three-day retreats over the course of the academic year (one per quarter); no cynicism allowed; and help us find the future we want and need for the liberal arts fifty years from now. We explicitly asked for no deliverables in the first year because the project felt too experimental to even know what a deliverable might be. And there was one further prohibition: No working to solve any nearer-term problems. Their sights had to be firmly set on the challenges of no fewer than three decades out, preferably five. With some pilot funding from the Mellon Foundation that would later be joined by some seed funding from the University of Washington’s Population Health Initiative, we embarked on the most open-ended experiment of my academic career. Here’s how it went (so far):

Knowing that futurist thinking would be unfamiliar and challenging for all of us, we needed the first retreat to feel as much like a break from our usual routines as possible, so at Kevin’s suggestion, we headed across the border to Vancouver, Canada, and used the University of British Columbia campus as our home base. We hired a professional Futurist to serve as a facilitator, someone who could teach us some of the history, theories, and approaches of futurist thinking. We did trend and signal analyses; We tried some forecasting exercises. We asked the group not to think much about higher education at all in this first retreat but to instead focus on the more abstract work of developing futurist thinking skills (this mostly failed — everyone understandably wanted to think about higher education). The group — faculty from across all four divisions of the college and from diverse disciplinary backgrounds including dance, physics, English and writing studies, political science, philosophy, biology, statistics, interdisciplinary visual art, and language programs — started to bond and feel like a cohort. They were by turns intrigued, amused, puzzled, patient, and (very rarely) impatient, but they were always engaged. And together, we struggled.

The first retreat showed us how difficult it is for people who are daily immersed in the challenges of the present to set those aside in order to creatively imagine a truly different future. Even though our faculty futurists spend every day working in higher education, they do so in a ‘heads down’ way, focused on their research, their teaching, their discipline, or their department and not on the much larger question of the enterprise itself. Repeated exercises in our first and second retreats revealed this to be so. As I reminded the group after each exercise that what they had produced was actually no different than what we have now, I quickly realized my job was not just to keep pushing us all to think outside the known box of academe as it exists today, but to find new ways to help us do so.

But that first retreat resulted in some important wins: The futurists had begun to form a sense of group identity; they remained interested in their charge even if they couldn’t yet see a clear path forward; they were intrigued; no one dropped out. Importantly, we learned that the imagination/predictive model of futurist thinking is really difficult for a lot of people — not because they aren’t creative and brilliant people (they are!) but because they are not trained to think this way for the most part and certainly not about higher education. Another obstacle that surfaced was that while our faculty futurists know their departments and disciplines well, many of them had little exposure to the complex workings of the university above the level of their department or of higher education more generally which made it difficult to think about big, structural change.

Although we quickly realized that continual speculation about the future — what it might hold, what it might not become — is not all that productive, it also wasn’t lost time. Rather, we began to see it metaphorically, that futurist imaginings were a stand-in for conversations about something we normally avoid discussing in higher education: Big Change.

In many respects, the Futurists are about exactly that: Change, the one thing to which higher education is notoriously resistant. But more than resistant, higher education as an enterprise is simply very difficult to change because the range of pressures from both within and without the institution are myriad and complex, but also because — at least in public higher education — shared governance (which has its many decided merits, I’m a big believer in its virtues) can make change either very slow and in some cases, depending on the type of change being addressed, impossible to achieve. Moreover, universities are generally — and somewhat surprisingly — risk-averse environments. The availability of true risk-capital in the academy is rare; Safe spaces in which risk-taking and productive failure are encouraged are equally so. But we needed our Futurists think tank to be exactly these things because the current model of higher education needs changing now — the problem is not one we anticipate finding only in the future.

It's also true that over the past three decades, faculty have rarely experienced change as positive since it has generally come about as a result of cost-cutting. Even if the change resulting from cost-cutting efforts is not negative, it is generally felt to be so if it involves some form of loss. If we were to enact Big Change, how could we make that change feel empowering, compelling even, and not just negative even if it also involves cost-cutting or the elimination of some things that have seemingly ‘always been’ part of our college?

We held the second retreat in February 2024 at the UW’s Friday Harbor Labs where former UW Regent, former Secretary of the Interior, and former CEO of the REI Company Sally Jewell joined us and offered inspiration as she shared some of the futurist thinking in which she had engaged in her prior roles.  At this second gathering, we asked a set of more focused questions in exercises that were meant take the group more deeply into the future of higher education: What are our assumptions about the future university? What do we want to navigate away from as we move towards 2075? What do we want to migrate towards? What do we want/need to take with us into the future? What can’t we bear to give up because it means so much to us, or because we just love it so much? (We now refer to this as the “take-and-leave” exercise and have returned to it whenever we get stuck and for problem solving in different contexts where change is involved). What are the scary things we are afraid to think about or ask? And perhaps most daunting for many in the group: What can we eliminate or leave behind so that we can do the things we want and need to do?

The biggest challenge for all of us surfaced again by the end of the second retreat: It is simply very difficult to imagine the future when we spend little time actively doing so in our daily lives and when we are so fully mired in the challenges of the present. Knowing this helped us think about the kinds of exercises we would need to use in future retreats so we could further develop those skills together.

Despite our assertion that no deliverables would be required in the first year, at the end of the second retreat the futurists expressed their desire to produce something concrete. So, between retreats two and three, Kevin Mihata introduced the group to Peter Sims’ book, Little Bets (2009) which provides a model for iteratively taking small risks that can add up to larger successes even/especially when there is failure along the way. We decided to use the “bets” model: If the Futurists were the big bet Kevin, Greta and I were making, we would ask them to make a series of “little bets” to try something new.

By the time we convened for retreat three in the nearby Cascade mountains that April, everyone had read Little Bets. Most importantly, in the intervening months, they’d had time to think about the learnings from retreats one and two. What would little bets be for us? What could we try and fail at but learn from? And within an hour of getting started, one of the futurists, Tony Gill said “we need more play and more fun in the academy.”

Tony’s statement was important, because we are all at our creative best when we engage in a playful spirit and when we are having fun, when our brains are relaxed enough to stretch further into imaginative, creative realms. We don’t talk about this enough in academe and I believe we ought to do more of it; “seeking joy in our work” is one of the guiding principles adopted for our College of Arts & Sciences leadership team. So, the Futurists agreed that they wanted to have more fun in the future university; this was a start.

At this point, I should note something about the skillsets that Kevin, Greta and I brought to this work: I’m a historian of the built environment — my PhD is in architectural history — but I also have two design-based degrees (in architecture and in landscape architecture) and these proved immensely useful for working with the futurists. Kevin is an incredibly creative thinker who is very comfortable with outside-the-box, imaginative work, and Greta is gifted with an innate sense of playfulness coupled with great organizational skills that enhance all of her work in the college. I used my design training more in my year working with the Futurists than I had in the past two decades; Kevin applied his imagination and productive cynicism (he was the only cynic allowed) to push us in new directions and to keep us from replicating the present; Greta kept us focused and moving forward as she co-facilitated with Kevin. We talked with the futurists about productive failure — how intentional, iterative failure is a normal part of a design process and how important it would be for us to support small bets that fail.

We then shifted gears asking each of the Futurists to recall their single most powerful memory from their time as an undergraduate. One by one, they told stories about powerful experiences that were based in the development of close relationships with mentors, of challenging travel, of new discoveries, of unexpected opportunities that took them way outside their comfort zones; They told moving stories of deep personal transformation that came in surprising moments. Not a single person described anything related to content delivered in a classroom, laboratory or studio. Unsurprisingly, they described experiences that might now be referred to as resulting from “high impact educational practices” but they helped us take a step forward in our futurist goals:

From this conversation, we took away a lesson that would be a Big Bet: That the value proposition for higher education in the future will not be content delivery (or at least not primarily so — we are willing to bet that content delivery will continue to hold some importance in the future). Instead, it will be the delivery of deeply transformative, profoundly and positively life-shifting experiences. In many respects, this is true now and, again, it’s one of the reasons experiential learning is considered a high-impact practice. We know that our students today can learn almost anything by accessing content delivered through a range of technologies and formats whether for a fee or gratis. Our Big Bet belief is that what universities will uniquely provide in fifty years is experience-rich, high-touch, dramatically transformative education that may look and feel very unlike our current models. And if the bricks-and-mortar campus is to have any real meaning in the future, it will need to house educational experiences that take advantage of the unique locations in which those campuses exist; they will need to house radically place-based educational experiences.

What then, would a series of small bets look like, bets the futurists could make now to test that big bet hypothesis? By the end of retreat three, and in response to their request to do something tangible, we asked the Futurists to design little bets courses that start with experience, not content, that build an experience that will be fun for both faculty and students, keeping the scale and complexity small and light. And the courses would in some way be place-based, using our location in Seattle and in the Pacific Northwest to teach with, and with the first of these courses being offered in Spring 2025.

We agreed that the Futurists could be the mechanism for making productive little bets to lead the college forward. But could they only work in low stakes situations?

And then something happened and it was in some ways the most predictable thing that could happen in public higher education: Like most colleges that offer liberal arts education within large universities across the nation, our costs had risen while revenues had stayed flat or declined. As a result, the college faces a 24-month period of analysis and change aimed at helping us realign costs with revenue. If the College of Arts & Sciences is to have a meaningful, healthy future, Big Change will be necessary. Luckily, we spent a year laying the groundwork to do just that.

Now, the Futurists will be working in a somewhat higher-stakes situation. As we make strategic reductions to the college’s expenditures, we will need the Futurists to help us imagine not just little bets but instead we will need them to help us imagine productive Big Change alongside the Big Bet and the Little Bets they have already begun to consider. What began as something of a thought experiment is now fundamental to creating a future vision for the college, one that will help us not just become less expensive to run, but one that is truly the college we want and need both now and in 2075.

The Rethinking the Academy initiative I launched in 2022 and of which the Futurists are a part now serves as an umbrella structure for Rethinking Arts & Sciences. We’ll be leaning on the Guiding Principles we generated as a way to stay true to our values; We’ll be using the charrette format with which we successfully experimented last year to engage our faculty in solving some of our most pressing near-term problems; and our Futurists think tank will continue making bets both large and small to help us envision a compelling, deeply transformative liberal arts education. A new cohort of 8 faculty joined with last year’s cohort of 11 Futurists for our fourth retreat in November 2024, focusing on the ways AI is likely to transform the liberal arts education of the future and how the range of affordances presented by those technologies may intersect with our Big Change challenges and opportunities. We’re still not sure what the future looks like, but the Rethinking armature is proving to be resilient and meaningful in ways I’ve not previously experienced when it comes to higher education change and leadership. Its biggest test is about to begin.

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