Home

A partnership of Duke Kunshan University’s new Institute for Global Higher Education and
Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education
Hosted at Duke in DC

The New Global Universities Summit is an invitation-only gathering of founders and current leaders of universities that have been launched in the last 25 years. The Summit will begin with an evening reception on Wednesday, June 26, 2024 and run through lunch on Friday, June 28, 2024.

Participants include a remarkable group of founders, presidents, and provosts from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East. A full list of current registrants is available on the Attendees page.

What to Expect

Rather than traditional panels and keynotes, the Summit will be a working session consisting of small and large roundtable discussions. Participants will work shoulder-to-shoulder with peer senior leaders and focus on three questions:

• What have we learned collectively about the opportunities for and obstacles to launching new universities in the 21st century?
• What lessons do new start-up universities offer for higher education writ large? For established universities, governments, foundations, and others?
• Are there collective needs – for research, strategy, support, or otherwise – that this group has going forward?

Additional information will be provided closer to the event date. Our aim is to build on the stories and lessons learned from The New Global Universities: Reinventing Education in the 21st Century (Princeton, December 2023; copies will be provided in advance of the Summit) as well as from “Advances and Challenges to International Education” (forthcoming in a special edited edition of Daedalus).

The Summit will expand on the stories and lessons learned from the new universities featured in these publications to include a wider range of schools, raise the profile of our institutions collectively and bolster commitment to international education.

Pre-Summit Reflection

Prior to the Summit, we asked founders and current leaders of new universities to share brief summaries of their own views on lessons learned, and are collating and summarizing the information in those responses into a Summit pre-read.

Additional Information

After the Summit, we will publish a report summarizing what we have learned during our time together. We believe this report will both gain public attention and serve as a guide to other founders who are imagining their own future new educational institution, as well as to leaders seeking to reinvent their established institution.

We expect to have several journalists as part of our deliberations. The Summit will follow Chatham House rules under which participants are free to report on what was said so long as there is no attribution to specific participants.

If you have questions about logistics, please contact learninginnovation@duke.edu. If you have questions about the program, please contact Noah Pickus, Associate Provost at Duke and Dean of Academic Strategy and Learning Innovation at Duke Kunshan University, at pickus@duke.edu.