Reinventing education in the 21st century: lessons from academic entrepreneurs

Prof. Noah Pickus, Duke Kunshan University and Prof. David Qingzhong Pan, Tsinghua University discuss making modern university education flexible, innovative, and tech-friendly.

Hi, this is Jia Yuxuan bringing you the latest on CCG Update. On November 13th, the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) hosted an event themed "The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century". Professor Noah Pickus, associate provost at Duke University and Director of the Institute for Global Higher Education at Duke Kunshan University delivered a speech and engaged in a dialogue with Professor David Qingzhong Pan, Executive Dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and an expert on CCG's Academic Committee.

Prof. Noah Pickus is the co-author of The New Global Universities, a chronicle 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 full video of the speech and the dialogue is available on YouTube and CCG's WeChat account.

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Speech by Prof. Noah Pickus

I want to talk to you today drawing on two sources. Primarily, I'm going to tell you about this new book that my co-author Bryan Penprase and I have written. Professor Penprase is an astrophysics professor. I am a public policy professor, so we are crossing divides here. But I'm also going to draw on a report that I did with Kara Godwin several years ago on the liberal arts and sciences in China. I'll mostly talk about global initiatives, but I want to make a few connections to China, and I look forward to learning from all of you more about that.

So if you look around the world today, there are calls everywhere for the reform of higher education and, in particular, undergraduate education that you can read report after report about the need for students who are more creative, who are more able to solve complex problems, who can collaborate and work in teams, who can work across disciplines, not just be in one narrow area, and who have the ability to engage inter-culturally with each other, representing both their own culture, but also knowing how to communicate with others. And as it turns out, as you all probably know better than I do, these are the same kinds of things that many government reports have called for from the Ministry of Education (MOE)'s 2035 modernization plan, the 20th Party Congress report, for reforming general education in China, investing in interdisciplinary studies, adapting and advancing the best pedagogical best practices, being more interdisciplinary, and using technology to leverage the possibilities.

You can see this report from McKinsey's Global Institute on the need for re-skilling in China, not only in undergraduate education, but across lifelong learning and the habits and the minds and the skills that everybody needs. And of course, it wouldn't be a talk on higher education if I didn't have an image of generative AI, which doubles down, triples down, underscores the existential importance of developing students who are capable of all of these kinds of ideas that I've articulated here, because so much of what a student used to do will be done by AI, and these skills and habits are what are absolutely necessary for the student success and if we're going to solve global problems.

In the US, there's a problem, though. The problem is it's very hard to make changes in higher education. This is a new book from the former president of Macalester College in Liberal Arts College in the US and at the Harvard Graduate School now, and his title is Whatever It Is, I'm Against It. In the US, there's so many stakeholders who have so many different ideas about what a college or university should be doing that it's hard to actually do anything bold. The faculty want one thing, the alumni want another thing, donors want a third thing, regulators want a fourth, the students want a fifth, I'm exhausted just listing it, and it goes on and on. And you can see, this is just a handful of books. I could give you 30 more calling for the need in American higher education for more robot-proof higher education, for new forms of innovation, new kinds of universities, and it's just very hard to actually bring this about.

Now, there is a "WeChat moment" here in China, right? As all of you know, Tencent had QQ and it was a perfectly reasonable messaging device and you could have kept improving on that, but that's not what they did. They created WeChat, which leapt ahead of all the other kinds of technologies that exist anywhere else in the world that combines, we all have it on our phones, we could link up right now and we could buy our train tickets and share our social media and do all the kinds of things that it takes five different apps to do in the US, and that draws on traditions, the red packet tradition in China that has a cultural dimension to it that is not simply global. And what I'm here to talk to you about, mostly not by focusing on China, but I want to note that I think there is a "WeChat moment" here if Chinese higher education was able to seize the opportunity, not simply to imitate and to follow, but to leapfrog, to leap ahead what we're struggling to try and do in the US and elsewhere.

So where does this book come in? The book comes from my colleague and my co- author and I's experience. I was helping to build Duke Kunshan university and my colleague was helping to build Yale NUS in Singapore, and we discovered that all these constraints that frustrated this in America for bringing about change were actually, if you looked all over the world, it wasn't just in Kunshan, it wasn't just in Singapore, but in India, in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, there was something we don't hear much about. There were academic entrepreneurs, not business entrepreneurs, although some of them came from business, but we're so used to lionizing the Bill Gates of the world and the innovators.

Here, we found that there were people from inside and outside of universities, and they were at these eight universities, there are many more, we just picked these eight, and we were fascinated by them because they started from scratch, right? And if you ask anybody who works in academia, Professor Pan, I think will agree with this, and certainly you had that experience when you were building Schwarzman, it's a rare opportunity to start from scratch and to say, what is the highest and best kind of university or college we can build now, not having to pay attention to what everyone already has invested in? And so we tell the stories of these academic entrepreneurs, and not just what they did, but how they did it, and the difficulties they encountered, and the ways they had to make their changes in order to succeed.

I want to tell you today just about three kinds of changes that they made.

I hope this interests you, and you'll want to read the book, and there's more there. One example is a small, tiny college of engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, in the shadow of the great MIT. And it was founded just over 20 years ago, and it was founded with the idea that engineers are too often taught to basically imitate Beethoven, to basically learn the notes over and over again, and as important as that is, there are huge challenges out there in society. Social challenges, engineering challenges, grand challenges of sustainability as an example, that engineers need to not simply be in the back room designing schemes, but need to actually be invested and involved in solving human needs and solving social problems.

And so they built an education there, which doesn't have departments, the faculty don't have tenure, everything there has an expiration date. They don't say, we have a curriculum, and it'll be that curriculum for the next 50 years. They're constantly innovating. They do things like, they take a first year student who has had no training in anything beyond high school, and they put them in a group, and they say, you have five weeks to build a pulse oximeter, go, go.

And it turns out, as none of you will be surprised, the students can do this. They can source the materials, they can get the mentorship, they can figure it out, and they can have that experience instead of what most engineers school do, which is wait till you're in your fourth year to actually touch something and build it. They start building from the beginning. And they start focusing not on simply creating new technologies, but imagining what the solutions are to world problems that engineers can contribute to. It's an adaptable school that focuses on creativity in a place often not considered to be creative, engineering.

Two examples of another kind of set of institutions. Very different schools, but there's a family resemblance I want to focus on. One is the African Leadership University, started in 2014 by Fred Swaniker. Fred left his native Ghana when he was four, fleeing a coup. And he lived in four different countries in Africa because of so much instability and leadership problems and corruption in Africa. And he came to the conclusion, interestingly, he then went to Macalester College, the Minnesota of the president I just mentioned. And then he went on to Stanford Business School.

And he came up with this idea, he wasn't even focused on education, he was focused on the idea that the problem in Africa is fundamentally a problem of leadership. So he wasn't talking about creativity and adaptability in engineers, he wanted to create 3,000 new leaders who were ethical, who were trained in complex ways, and who could really lead to bring wise judgment and sophisticated understanding. And his initial thought was he was going to build 25 new campuses all over Africa to do this. Well, he built two of them in Mauritius and Rwanda, they're remarkable places. And he started with a high school in South Africa that cost $30,000 American, then $16,000 in Rwanda, then 12,000 in Mauritius, then 12,000 in Rwanda, relentlessly driving the price down. But you can see where this is going. $12,000 is still too expensive in Africa.

And so he pivoted from building two campuses to creating a series of regional hubs all across Africa and leveraging online learning so students anywhere could access this. And he told the students that they were not there to do majors, to major in chemistry or history. They were there to find a mission for their life, to define a grand problem. And just like those students in Olin who built the pulse oximeters, they would spend at ALU three or four years sourcing from the best lectures and courses online to the local mentors and learning by doing. It fit the regional context.

Meanwhile, another innovator came out of Silicon Valley, Ben Nelson in 1914, in 2014, launched Minerva University. Interestingly, he launched it with venture capital, starting with benchmark ventures in the U.S., funded Uber and other big companies, then supported by two Chinese venture funds, the Tall Group and ByteDance. And this was a globally distributed university. There's no campus. There's no swimming pool. There's no library. There's no dorms. The students come from all over the world. They come from families, in most cases, that make less than $50,000 or less than $25,000 around the world. They live in these seven different cities. They go from San Francisco to Taipei to Buenos Aires to Munich to around the world. And they learn online.

Now, you might say, oh, these schools are doing a lot of online learning. It's not really high quality. Not true. Both of these institutions, and particularly Minerva, stepped back and said, knowledge is everywhere. It's exploding. You have more knowledge in your phone than the greatest libraries of the world have had for centuries. So surely we cannot simply teach our students more and more content.

Yes, of course engineers need to know how to stand up buildings, and we need to know history, and we need to know chemistry. But what both of these entrepreneurs understood, and what Ben Nelson in particular did, is they identified—remember that first slide, complex problem solving, creative thinking, collaboration—they identified, in Minerva's case, 80 habits and concepts that regardless of the content, every student should know, no matter your area, and that you should have to learn these concepts and show how you can deploy them, not just in one area, but across areas of knowledge. So take the concept of a feedback loop, right? We know in nature there are feedback loops, that we know ways in which nature can generate positive feedback loops, and the ways in which right now in our environment we're seeing negative feedback loops. Well, that's the same concept that happens in society. And they're training students who can learn about this in a sustainability class and apply it to solve the problem of homeless people, and vice versa. And so they're focused on durable skills, rather than just on content. And they've both driven down cost.

Third example, NYU Abu Dhabi, Yale NUS College, you can also think of NYU Shanghai here, you can think of Duke Kunshan University here. These are small institutions that have brought students from all around the world, truly global, global students, 60 countries, 80 countries represented in one university and faculty, with the idea that really what they need to do is build a core set of knowledge that is global, that is not just one country's history, but drawing on the best traditions from different countries and putting them into conversation with each other.

And intensively, we all know, there's some students here, you all know how hard it is to actually get to know people who are different than who you are. It's fine when faculty say, go get to know each other, but it's challenging. So they have designed, just as Schwarzman has designed, ways in which students engage each other in active ways. And they have built these problem-solving interdisciplinary majors so that you are creating the most fundamental thing that education can do.

Education is in the long run. Education looks not to what happens in five years, but 10, 25, 50, and 100. And these universities are bringing together and educating national leaders who will be able to represent their nation, know their history and traditions, but also become global leaders, able to talk with other global leaders, and literally able to speak English speakers who can speak Chinese, native Chinese who know not only English but other languages, ways in which our problems aren't going to go away. In some ways, they're getting worse. So this doesn't promise an answer. It just promises the ability of students who, when they become leaders, they've met when they're 18, and they know something about each other as well as knowing something about themselves.

So those are three different kinds of incredibly exciting universities that we tell the story of. And let me just close by giving you a few takeaways from all of these stories.

The first is here are some of the key elements that we've seen in some of these universities. You've heard me talk about them. And again, go back to that first slide where you saw generative AI and the McKinsey Global Report about the skills and habits that everybody needs to flourish nowadays.

So some have built these incredibly exciting global core curriculums. Many have built majors that don't just say you study computer science or you study economics. No, they do computer science and entrepreneurial leadership. They find ways of breaking things down. They have you study the brain and social behavior. They put them together. Skills-based education, this most fundamental thing beneath the content. Experiential education, actually getting out there and having that affective social experience that drives home the learning in a way that, let's be honest, I'm a professor. I understand the limits of the classroom. Sometimes you need to experience it, not just be in the classroom. But when you're in the classroom, you need to be there in active ways. You need to be there. The lecture—it is beyond doubt the science of learning has demonstrated. there’s no question—that the single worst method for students to learn is for a professor to lecture. And I will not embarrass anyone by asking how many times you sit through professors lecturing. I'm about to run out of time because 20 minutes is about the limit that anyone should talk before you get actively involved.

And last, flexible systems, building institutional structures so you can actually, what do companies do? They don't every 30 years redo their curriculum. They have ways in which it's a constant, continuous process of improvement. And that should be how universities operate. And at Duke Kunshan University, we are trying to do all of these things, right? This is challenging. It's a lot of change at a lot of time.

But the faculty and the students and the staff are all in on this. And for them, it's the most exciting pioneering experience. And I invite you to visit, and I invite you to join one of these universities.

One more slide on takeaways. These are small institutions I'm looking at, right? We're not looking at the PKUs and the Tsinghuas and the Fudans. And we do that intentionally, partly because we want to tell the story of the founding garage, the technology invented at the beginning, not when the company is already 20 years old. And partly because, actually, these schools can do things that traditional universities struggle with. And let me mention these three.

First, it's incredible, the rankings that these schools, right? I got my PhD from Princeton University, which has got to be 300 plus years old. It's hard to compete with 300 years of prestige when you're starting a new university. MIT named Olin College of Engineering amongst the top universities in the world for engineering education. Minerva University is ranked as the number one most innovative university in the world. Fast Company Magazine ranked African Leadership University as the number one most innovative company in all of Africa. Look at what NYU Abu Dhabi has produced in terms of student outputs. I don't want to dwell on rankings, but I don't want to ignore them. In 20 years, that's impressive. And it's gone beyond rankings. It's actually gone to a demonstration effect. So in countries like Vietnam, where Fulbright University is, or India, Ashoka University, they have opened a floodgate of government openness and of other institutions and other entrepreneurs trying to rush in and fill that. And sure, some of them are going to be fly-by-night. Some of them aren't going to be good. But we're going to experiment. The demonstration effect of small institutions leads to more pluralism, more experimentation, not just giant universities.

Second, many of these universities are driving down cost while driving up quality. You saw that with ALU and Minerva. But even schools like Ashoka and Fulbright University Vietnam, while they are still expensive in the context of Vietnam or India, they are one- tenth the cost of going to the US or to the UK for that same education. So you can learn in your country, be connected to your country, and yet get the finest kind of education.

And last, I've already spoken to the power of training future national and global leaders together. I'll close with just these two things.

This book is part of a larger project. In this June, we are going to gather not eight universities, but 25 universities, including some from China, who have started in the last 25 years. And we're going to ask them, what are your lessons? And what can we learn from you? And how do we start a movement doing this? Then we're going to come and we will hold at DKU, we hope in partnership with the Center for Globalization and China, a China-focused conference on these. And if you're interested in any of this, if you scan the QR code, you can get a link to the book, which will be available here in China in January. And if you'd like the Chinese or English language version of our report on innovation in education in China, we are also happy to share that with you as well. I've gone over my time. You've been very patient. Thank you. And I look forward to our conversation. Thank you.

Dialogue: Noah Pickus & David Qingzhong Pan

Professor Pan: What's the number one challenge for all of the universities mentioned in your book?

Professor Pickus: The number one challenge for, well, I'm going to mention two. Because there's one to get started. There's one to get started and then there's one to succeed. The number one challenge to get started is that higher education is different from other economic markets. In other markets, if you have a better product at a cheaper price, you succeed.

That's not the case in higher education. And the reason that's not the case in higher education is because nobody quite knows what the product is. Nobody quite knows what is, particularly in education, research, a little clearer. But in education, it's hard to know what the product is. How do you know one student is better trained than another student? Right? It's a long term. And so people use proxies. And the proxy that is used in higher education is prestige. Oh, this school has a high ranking. It must be good. Well, what determines the rankings? Well, what other people think about it? So it's all about reputation and prestige. And when you start out, it's very hard when you don't have a brand and you don't have prestige. So the first thing these schools had to do was how to overcome that. And then the second challenge they face is they have these big audacious visions. That's how they attract people. That's how they drive the energy.

But sometimes they have to change course. And sometimes people who are good at coming up with great visions are not good at being flexible. And so the schools that have succeeded the best have been able to keep enough of the original vision, right, but also stay flexible.

At African Leadership University, when Fred Swanaker decided that they were not going to build another 23 campuses, well, a lot of people, they'd signed up for that. They wanted to build the Harvard of Africa. And Fred had to say, we're not here to build campuses, we're here to train leaders. We need to do it in a more cost-effective way, and we're going to pivot. That led to a lot of people leaving the organization. So audacity and flexibility is the hardest trick for these entrepreneurs to balance.

Professor Pan: How can we keep that sustainability for the universities?

Professor Pickus: It's a huge question, because in some ways, the drive for lower cost has led to higher quality. Why? So I'll come to the problem in a moment, but it helps to step back. You might think lower cost, why would that lead to higher quality? Well, the reason it does is because it leads these academic entrepreneurs to have to think differently about things, right?

So for instance, Olin decided they weren't going to have tenured faculty, they weren't, right? Now, that means that they have more flexibility. They can count on the faculty to be more flexible and adaptive, but there were enough faculty of high quality who were attracted to that—who wanted to do research—but didn't want to be pulled between their research and their teaching constantly. And so the lower cost at places like Minerva and ALU led to coming up with much more inventive ways. At Minerva, if you look at most universities, there's a big catalog, right? There's thousands of courses, and it just sprawls. There's no control over it. You get approved by the course committee and you're in. And what Minerva figured out was, no, we need to have courses that connect to each other.

So just because a faculty member wants to teach something, sure, sometimes we can do that. But in general, we need a smaller number of courses so that they can all be tightly connected to each other. The students still have choice, but the result is that the students get a more coherent education and the university doesn't have to staff a million different courses, right? So the parameter, you know, in engineering, when you have parameters of design, it helps you to shape in creative ways, and the low cost really helped here.

Now the challenge comes that, for instance, using Minerva again as an example, the challenge comes with when you're also trying to make sure anybody can have access to this. And Minerva, by offering this education originally at $10,000, now $30,000, drew the most incredible students from around the world, but it turns out those are needy students and Minerva doesn't have an endowment built up over centuries. And so the sustainability problem becomes, it's hard to scale a single institution. And I think what these, and so I think what we're seeing is a kind of pluralism, which is to say you get cost savings if you go to scale, but you can also simply have more experiments in more places around the world that can sustain themselves without always having to get big. So getting big is not bad, but it can compromise quality, and a thousand pluralistic Minervas and Ashokas can, I think, be the equivalent of 10 giant institutions.

Professor Pan: Traditional universities have three roles, one for teaching, one for research, and one as think tanks, or policy providers. How do the new era universities balance these three roles?

Professor Pickus: Most universities have to do, there's the triangle, right? You've got research, you've got teaching, and you've got various forms of social engagement, whether it's technology transfer or public policy engagement, or finding ways to serve society's needs. And those issues have gotten only more demanding, because the demands for research have gone up, right? The cost of research. The demands for better teaching have gone up. The demands, in many countries, universities get turned to to solve all kinds of problems. We have childcare problems in the city. Can the university help, right? These kinds of issues are very difficult. And I think that if you look at that triangle, you can look at any university, and it's very, very hard to maximize all three of those. In fact, at some places, it's hard to maximize two. And to some degree, I think that's okay. Not every university has to be simply a carbon copy of every other university. You can have, Arizona State University has done great work in improving their research in significant ways, and in creating access for many more students at a low cost.

They've also improved their quality. Now, I don't know that their quality is the same as Minerva's quality, but they're working on all three. And I think the challenge is, when it comes to education, even the established universities can think creatively about, even when we have faculty that are very research-focused, we still have an obligation to not put those faculty in the classroom who are just going to lecture. That should be malpractice. And it shouldn't be allowed. They may not be the best teachers in the world, but they should not be the worst. And at the same time, you can incentivize and build cores of faculty, whether they have tenure or not, who are really leading and most engaged in students. So I think existing universities can get this balance. It's not going to be perfect at any one place, and many of the schools we ended up focusing on, Yale-NUS and NYU-Abu Dhabi really balance in Ashoka high-quality research and teaching. The other schools made a decision that if you really want the highest quality of education, then you need to make sure people are not fundamentally focused on their research.

Professor Pan: How are today's challenges, for example, AI and big data changing the future's education?

Professor Pickus: I think there are two things going on there. One is structural, and one is educational. The structural part, let's talk about established universities, not new ones. So established universities can't do what a new university does, right? They already have departments and faculty and research and commitments. And they're doing great things.

Professor Pan: A lot of negative things as well.

Professor Pickus: Yeah. But they're, you know, PKU, Tsinghua, Fudan, doing remarkable things. But our universities are themselves complete ecosystems of innovation. I think what established universities can do is try to give permission for some parts of the university to experiment, to iterate, to prototype.

One thing I love about Olin is, and anyone who works in a university knows, you have a new idea, and you have to get it all approved before you've ever tried it. And at Olin, you come up with a new idea, and you get two years to pilot it. Because who knows if it's going to work? And after two years, you come back to get approval, right? And if you can give permission to faculty who want to iterate and prototype and experiment, you can create incubators on the campus to do that. And that has a demonstration effect. Because suddenly, the students start coming to all those places. And the other colleges start to notice that. So that's the structural part. I think the educational part is, between AI and online technology, we have either a recipe for disaster or the kind of constraints that are going to actually power new educational innovation.

So what do I mean by that? We know that AI is going to require students to learn much more authentic, individual skills than they've ever needed before, because AI will be able to do so much for them. So all those skills we talked about earlier are really underscored even more.

OK, but let's say you want to deliver this online. Well, the advantage of online is you can reach more people. It's more mobile, right? You could be doing an internship at CCG and taking a class in the afternoon and say you're from Fudan and not have to fly back to Shanghai, right? There's lots of ways for a more mobile, flexible education. The problem is most of our educational practices are so bad that when we put them online during the pandemic, everybody saw it. They saw that courses didn't connect, that professors were boring, that there was no active learning, that students turned off their videos, right? It showed the emperor had no clothes. Our education systems were rotten. The foundation has rotted. So now that that's been exposed, the opportunity to do online is that you can bring much more intentionality. OK, not professor, go into the classroom, close the door, and we'll never see. Let's give you some help to how to design an active, intensive, engaging, skills- based course that is not just your lecture notes from 50 years ago. And that way, online can power better education to keep up with AI. So still can be engaged, right?

Professor Pan: In Tsinghua, there's a former, former, former president called President Mei Yiqi. And he has a very famous saying, and it's a university is not only about the building, it's about masters. So how to find the masters?

Professor Pickus: Well let me see if I understand the question. To find, you know, I was at Sustech in Shenzhen last week. And I was, a new university in China, 11 years old. And I was struck by two things. One was, how many of some of the best practices I talked about, they had tried to build in from the beginning. That they, as a new university in China, were really understanding experiential education, skills-based education, interdisciplinary education. There's a school of design there that really is doing enormously. I took a tour of the labs and the creative. It felt like being at Olin College doing engineering and design. So I think there's, that was fascinating.

The other thing that was fascinating was the global strategy they used to recruit international faculty to come, so their position, they're new. They can't compete with Tsinghua at the beginning. But they can get international professors, Chinese, non- Chinese, worldwide. There's a worldwide race for talent here. And they made opportunities for those faculty, and it lifted them up. And my belief is that universities are like cities. You know when you go to a place, if you go to a city and there's coffee shops on the streets and there's people buzzing around and there's energy and there's excitement, you feel creative, right? And if you go to a city and nobody's there or everybody's indoors or there's, right, then you don't get any energy back.

And it's the same thing with universities, that some of the best researchers in the world want to be surrounded by other creative people, right? They want to be surrounded by a poet who's doing creative things even though it's completely different from their work in engineering because it's inspiring and it's engaging and it means that there's a whole cauldron and a culture there. And that can embrace, thank you, that can attract, I think, we think that you need to attract faculty. You need to just give them a lot of money, and that's true, let's be honest. You need to provide them labs. But ultimately you give them that and then they'll go somewhere else. So how do you create a university that's like a city that you never want to leave? It's the ecosystem.

And if I can say, you know, China has opportunities here. One of the great things about the U.S. system is it's very decentralized. So you can get some experimentation. But one of the terrible things about the U.S. system is when you actually get a good idea, nobody else adopts it, right? And China has, what is it, 600 new universities that have started in the last, is it in the last 20 years, in the last 20 years, 600 new universities in China. We've started a research project at the Institute for Global Higher Education at DKU to try to understand which ones of those are doing innovative kinds of things here, which are imitating Western or other universities, and which are being more like WeChat and trying to leap ahead. And is it all 600? Is it only six? We don't know. And if this is an area of your knowledge, we'd love to talk with you. But that's where the opportunities to make systematic change are so much more possible here than it is in many other countries.

When you, if, if the change is real, I remember being in Shanghai at a conference put on by the Chaoxing Group with universities from all over China, and I was stunned. Every university stood up and said, well, we're doing “通识教育”. We now do general education. We're doing interdisciplinary. We're doing experiential. So everyone had got the message. What is not clear to me is how much it actually changed and where the universities are that are really excelling in that, and where are there ones where it's 通识教育 means that you're studying economics and you have to listen to a philosophy professor lecture to you.

Professor Pan: What kind of the students do you love most?

Professor Pickus: I love all my students. One of my students is, is here right now, Linda Zhang, is from Tianjin. She came to Duke University. This is, she graduated two years ago, three. She went on to work for McKinsey. She is now the chief of staff to a new university, the Nigerian University of Technology and Management. It's a startup. And then she's on her way to Stanford Business School. And our plan is to keep building these universities. And this relationship that we've had for now almost seven years was really driven by one thing, agency, agency, that what I'm going to embarrass Linda

here. But she is passionate about change and she is motivated to want to learn outside. I've never had her in my classroom. We just worked on a series of projects that are outside the classroom and have, and have led to reports, have led to publications, have led to new projects, have led to the presentation you saw today. She was the research assistant on this book.

And what I saw at African Leadership University, for example, is their hashtag, their motto is do hard things. And they're trying to instill in their students, and I saw it in listening to these interviews with students, how a student can come in and not think they can compete, not think that they're there in Nigeria or Rwanda or anywhere in many parts of the world. How do I compete in this global world? Silicon Valley seems like it's a long way away, right? And do hard things, pick a mission, don't just pick a major, really instills a sense of agency, and you see the students start to believe in themselves. And if they believe in themselves, and then we can give, and again, we didn't have a single class together. And yet, Linda's agency, her drive, my desire to engage, to mentor, to learn from her has led to a seven-year collaboration, and that's the most exciting thing that any professor can have.