Imagining the Future of Higher Education & the Liberal Arts

“No cynicism allowed.” That was one of the key requirements for participants in the inaugural year of the Dean’s Academy Futurists, a bold multi-year initiative to imagine the future of higher education and the liberal arts.

Eleven faculty from across the College of Arts & Sciences and two collaborators from the Dean’s Office — Kevin Mihata, associate dean for undergraduate education, and Greta Essig, manager for special projects and initiatives — committed to participating in three Futurist retreats over the course of the 2023-2024 academic year. The goal: to help the College find the future we want and need for the liberal arts fifty years from now.

With some pilot funding from the Mellon Foundation, followed by seed funding from the University of Washington’s Population Health Initiative, we embarked on the most open-ended experiment of my academic career.

The Futurists’ first three-day retreat was held in September 2023 at the University of British Columbia. We explicitly requested no deliverables in the first year of the project, since the work felt too experimental to even know what a deliverable might be.

We hired a professional Futurist as a facilitator to teach us some of the history, theories, and approaches of futurist thinking. For this first meeting, we asked that the group not think about higher education but rather focus on the more abstract work of developing futurist thinking skills. This mostly failed, since everyone understandably wanted to think about higher education. The faculty 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 to creatively imagine a truly different future. 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.

That first retreat resulted in some important wins. The Futurists had begun to form a sense of group identity and remained interested in their charge even if they couldn’t yet see a clear path forward. 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, but because they are not trained to think this way.

Futurists are about change — the one thing to which higher education is notoriously resistant. Over the past three decades, when there has been change at the University, it has generally been the result of cost-cutting. Even if the resulting change was not negative, it often felt that way since it involved some form of loss.

So the question became: If we were to enact Big Change, how could we make that change feel empowering, compelling, 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. Sally Jewell — former UW Regent, former Secretary of the Interior, and former CEO of the REI Company — joined us and offered inspiration as she shared some of the futurist thinking in which she had engaged in her prior roles.

To take the group more deeply into the future of higher education, we now asked more focused questions: What are our assumptions about the future university? What do we want to navigate away from? 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? 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?

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 "Little Bets," a book by Peter Sims that provides a model for iteratively taking small risks that can add up to larger successes, even/especially when there is failure along the way. Using the “bets” model, we asked the group to make a series of “little bets” to try something new.

By the time we convened for retreat three in April, this time in the Cascade mountains, everyone had read "Little Bets." What would little bets be for us? What could we try and fail at but learn from? Within an hour of getting started, Futurist and political science professor 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 are having fun, when our brains are relaxed enough to stretch further into imaginative, creative realms. We don’t talk about this enough in academia; we ought to do more of it. 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 with two design-based degrees (in architecture and landscape architecture). I used my design training more in my year working with the Futurists than I had in the past two decades. Kevin, who is very comfortable with outside-the-box, imaginative work, 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, who is gifted with an innate sense of playfulness coupled with great organizational skills, 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, the faculty told stories about the development of close relationships with mentors, of challenging travel, of new discoveries, and 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.”

From this conversation, we took away a lesson that would become a Big Bet: The value proposition for higher education in the future will not be content delivery — or at least not primarily so, though content delivery will likely continue to hold some importance. 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 strategic and sustained advantage of the unique locations in which those campuses exist.

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, building an experience that will be fun for both faculty and students while limiting the scale and complexity. The plan was that the courses would in some way be place-based, taking advantage of our location in the Pacific Northwest, with the first being offered in Spring 2025.

Then something happened.

A new challenge required rethinking our plan. The College’s costs had risen while revenues had stayed flat or declined. Unfortunately, this is a familiar scenario for US colleges that offer a liberal arts education within large universities. Now the College faces a 24-month period of analysis and change aimed at helping us realign costs with revenue. If the College is to have a meaningful, healthy future, Big Change will be necessary, sooner than anticipated.

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 productive Big Change.

The Dean’s Academy Futurists began as something of a thought experiment, growing out of the College’s Rethinking the Academy initiative, but now this group is fundamental to creating a future vision for the College — a vision that will help the College become less expensive to run but also the college that we truly want and need, both now and in 2075.

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 eight faculty joined with last year’s cohort for our fourth retreat in November 2024, this time focusing on the ways that artificial intelligence is likely to transform the liberal arts education of the future, and how the possibilities 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.