Is it that hard to start a university?
Seeds of civilization, surviving the current zombie apocalypse, and why future universities will not look anything like Harvard
When we think of a university, we picture imposing buildings and stuffy professors. But I’ll submit the essence of a university is a dinner table conversation with the right people—we’ve forgotten this. A university tries to capture the universe under a single roof in as much depth as possible.
Universities are seeds of civilization. It should be place from which civilization flourishes in the wake of a zombie apocalypse—one that is actively ongoing. We cannot expect to succeed as we tumble toward an ever-accelerating future unless we understand the university not as an institution to go to or be a part of, but a social technology that we can mold like clay. Universities are calcifying. Innovation is increasingly finding more fertile ground elsewhere. DARPA, Founder’s Fund, etc. Innovation is finding it’s refuge in the paradoxical corners of our social fabric: government programs, monopolistic businesses, and small one-off programs funded by individuals.
What makes a university special is it’s the place where disparate subjects meet one another. Being associated with a university shouldn’t be an achievement as much as it should be a home for people with a certain kind of disposition.
A university’s success should be judged by the ratio of autists within it’s walls as compared to those outside. If your university has a monopoly on autists, you’re doing something right. If I meet an autist out in the wild and find him not associated with any university, I’m sorry but a great injustice has been done, and some university is to blame.
A university tries to capture as much of the universe, and in as much detail as possible under one roof. These two goals appear to be at odds. You’d expect depth to come at the expense of breadth and vice versa. In practice, people who enjoy getting lost the details of complex problems enjoy others who do the same. The more you’re like this, the more structure you require to sustain you. The deeper you go, the less able you are to manage normal human activities like feeding yourself, clothing, etc.
I have a friend who told me he noticed people respected him more when he dressed better. It somehow never occurred to him until later in life that others really do seem to notice and care. Everywhere I go, I seem to meet people like him. Intellectually, they’re more engaging than people who’ve come from more prestigious backgrounds. They are vast stores of pent up knowledge.
Many modern universities are not this. If they are able to produce something new, it’s because people continue believe the label on the tin. The internet is more fertile for new ideas than anything I’ve experienced in a university, but it may not last. The modern university is a shell of what it once was, and it needs to be reinvented just as it had to be reinvented after the advent of the printing press.
I’m not here to tell you that universities will go away. But I will say that in the coming decades, some universities will experience a RUD (rapid, unscheduled disassembly). No, I’m not implying someone should blow up the universities. I believe the explosive potential is already inside. But also, there’s enough pent up friction from accumulated technological advances that when it gives, it will shake up the foundation on which universities now stand.
One way to picture the university is as society’s corpus callosum. Universities should form the bridge between the left brain and the right brain. We’ve got the orderly, traditional, and law-abiding conservatives on one side, and we have the chaotic, creative liberals on the other. We should keep the two in tension. It’s not either or—it’s both. The university should be the shore from which wet primordial life can evolve into desert-dwelling survival machines. We emerge from the warm, entropic gray goo onto the shore. We aim up toward the mountains, and even up toward heaven.
To create the university of the future, we don’t need to emulate the imposing buildings, and scurry around pitching our new-fangled university to professors in existing institutions. No, instead we need a motley crew of self-motivated autodidacts with the weight of God’s thumb on their side. We need mechanics, mathematicians, musicians, philosophers, and chefs. Finally—hesitantly—we need a Judas: someone in change of the money who will inevitably betray the university, and fill it with listless administrators (as entropy dictates).
“The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.”
— Peter Theil
The university of the future will not be like Harvard; it will instead be built from materials and objects easily found at your nearest Walmart or Target, and it will reign for generations to come.