Duke Launches Global Higher Education Network

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Duke University is launching the Future Universities Alliance, a global network that brings together leaders from startup, emerging and established universities around the world to accelerate innovation in learning, expand access to more learners and share practical insights to improve educational quality across diverse institutional and national contexts.

“Innovation cannot thrive in isolation, nor can it stop at incremental change,” said Duke Provost Alec D. Gallimore. “By creating a platform for leaders to learn with and from one another, we ensure that promising ideas spread and that together, we tackle the systemic challenges reshaping higher education.”

A sector at an inflection point

Globally, universities are under pressure to demonstrate value, prepare students for complex and unpredictable careers and operate amid increasingly polarized political environments. At the same time, access to higher education remains uneven across countries and systems, limiting opportunities for students and impeding sustainable economic development.

“These pressures are forcing institutions to revisit some fundamental questions,” said Noah Pickus, Head of Global Strategy and Partnerships at Duke. “What does high-quality learning actually mean today? And how can we make that kind of learning accessible to more people, in more places, without sacrificing depth or ambition?”

From new universities built from the ground up to established institutions redesigning curricula and credentials, experimentation is accelerating worldwide. But too often, those efforts remain isolated, limiting their broader impact. The Future Universities Alliance is designed to address that fragmentation. 

Rather than promoting a single model of higher education, the Alliance operates as a pluralistic, open-source learning network that helps promising innovations travel from one context to another. The network creates structured opportunities for institutions at different stages of the innovation journey to share work in progress, learn from one another’s experiments and adapt ideas to local realities.

Duke’s role

The Alliance emerged from Duke’s ongoing engagement with global higher education innovation, including the New Global Universities Summit it hosted in Washington, D.C., in June 2024. That convening brought together leaders from more than two dozen institutions worldwide and revealed strong demand for deeper, more sustained collaboration.

 “In Africa, only 9 percent of those eligible for higher education are currently enrolled,” said Veda Sunassee, CEO of African Leadership University, a summit participant. “You need more and different types of universities. Being part of a global network helps validate ideas and accelerates learning.”

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Randy Bass, vice president for strategic education initiatives at Georgetown University, highlighted the importance of moving beyond competition toward collaboration: “What’s needed is a network of collaborations with the capacity to carry out a distributed program of innovation.” 

Inspired by those perspectives, Gallimore committed to launching the Future Universities Alliance as a platform for shared learning and coordinated innovation.  

Pickus has led the Alliance’s development since inception, with strategic guidance from 18 higher education leaders who serve on its inaugural advisory team. The group brings experience spanning startup universities, large research institutions and global education initiatives, helping ensure that the Alliance remains grounded in diverse perspectives as it begins its work.

“For Duke, this is about convening and catalyzing,” he said. “We’re not exporting a Duke model. We’re creating the conditions for institutions to learn from one another as they pursue solutions that fit their own missions and contexts.”

How the Alliance works

The primary focus of the Alliance is the Innovation Sandbox, a 12-month, cohort-based experience that brings together startups, early-stage innovations within established institutions and institutions seeking to responsibly scale proven models. Applications to join the first cohort, which begins in July, will be accepted through March 6. 

The Alliance will also host an annual Global Summit, a gathering of Innovation Sandbox participants; faculty, staff and students from Duke; and other guests from universities, foundations and the media, with a focus on sharing work in progress, synthesizing lessons from across the network and discussing critical topics on the future of higher education. The first summit will take place October 3–5 on Duke’s campus.

Additional Alliance activities will include targeted capacity-building support for institutional leaders and thought leadership to document and share insights emerging from the work.

By creating a platform for collaboration and experimentation with forward-thinking institutions around the world, the Alliance aims to generate opportunities at Duke for faculty partnerships, student engagement and alumni involvement. Over time, relationships formed through the Alliance may also lead to deeper bilateral and multilateral partnerships aligned with Duke’s research, educational and global engagement priorities.

“Higher education has always advanced through exchange and adaptation,” Pickus said. “The question now is whether we can build a global ecosystem that helps that learning happen faster, at a moment when so much is at stake.”