Lead the 21C Transformation of Higher Education!

If you're reading this, you're probably already living inside the disruption — watching enrollment curves flatten, listening to faculty debates about ChatGPT that circle without resolution, fielding questions from governing boards that want a strategy and from students who want reassurance. You may be exhausted by the pace of change and equally exhausted by commentary that is either apocalyptic or naively optimistic. You came here because you need something sharper: a way to think about what is actually happening, and a way to act on it with intention.

That is exactly what this school is designed to provide.

I built this curriculum because the analysis of higher education's disruption is too often conducted at the wrong altitude. On one side, you have the breathless edtech boosterism that treats every new platform as a revolution and every resistance as incumbency protecting itself. On the other, you have defensive institutionalism that mistakes nostalgia for principle. Neither serves you. What the moment requires is analytical rigor about the structural forces at work — the economics of unsustainability, the genuine capabilities of generative AI, the fracturing of the credential's social meaning — paired with equally rigorous thinking about what is worth preserving and how to preserve it without pretending the ground hasn't shifted.

The framework we work with — creative destruction as an analytical lens — is not a counsel of despair. Schumpeter's concept illuminates why existing structures are failing and what the destruction creates space for. That distinction between deliberate transformation and reactive dismantling is not semantic; it is the difference between institutional leaders who shape the next system and those who are shaped by it. Every section of this curriculum is designed to sharpen that distinction in your specific context: whether you lead a research university, advise on federal or state education policy, build edtech products, or study higher education as a scholarly field.

I also want to be direct about what this school will not do. It will not hand you a template that travels unchanged from one institution to the next — because the trade-offs are genuinely contextual and any framework that pretends otherwise is selling you comfort, not capability. What it will do is give you the vocabulary, the analytical tools, and the scenario-planning practice to make your own institution's trade-offs with clarity. The equity questions, the civic mission questions, the accountability questions — those get the same unsparing attention as the financial and technological ones, because a transformation strategy that ignores them will fail on its own terms.

This is a school for people who are serious about the problem. If that's you, I'm glad you're here — and I'd invite you to begin.