One of inDrive’s ambitious inVision projects is the creation of a university unlike any currently operating. It’s up to Andrew Wachtel, inVision’s Director of Education, to realize this.
Wachtel has his fair share of experience of top universities: he graduated from Harvard, earned a PhD from Berkeley, and then taught at Stanford and Northwestern University, where he was Dean of the graduate school. He served as the president of a university in Central Asia, overseeing the creation of a new campus and several programmes, before going on to establish a startup, a college of art and design. Now, he’s designing a university for inDrive – from scratch. He talks about the challenges that lie ahead for what is arguably one of inVision’s most ambitious projects.
inDrive CEO, Arsen Tomsky has a clear picture of the ideal outcome: A university where students, working as teams, engage in solving real world problems that affect their societies. A university where most graduates remain in their home countries/regions to help develop them. And at the beginning, it should have a reasonably high percentage of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. My job is to work with him to figure out how to operationalize pretty much everything in between.
This will be an unusual kind of university, because we have unusual possibilities, and to do things the same old way if you have unique opportunities seems pretty stupid. The question now is: just how radical are we going to be?
There are four factors that keep us from being completely radical:
First, what students and their parents will accept - they’re still pretty conservative when it comes to wanting, say, an undergraduate degree that says sociology or economics - so you have to convince them that they want something else, but there’s probably a limit to how far you can take this.
Then, ministries of education, which have rules about what constitutes a university and how it should look and be run.
The third factor is Arsen, because ultimately he has to buy into what we're doing, since he's going to pay for it. Fortunately, he is open to significant innovation.
And finally, what are the limits of our imagination?
The old 19th, 20th century model of the university has gotten tired, even at the very top. I think we’re all in agreement about that. So, what would be the best thing to replace it with? How do you educate students so that they’re able to solve complicated, real-world problems, and to figure out which problems are actually worth solving?
We know how to do that in engineering and computer science faculties. By the fourth year, many students come up with unique questions and create a program or a product that provides an answer. The problem though, as a wonderful friend of mine who’s a dean of an engineering school says, is that engineers can solve any problem – but they often don't know what problems to solve. And when they do come up with a solution, they usually don’t know what to do next.
Our goal is not necessarily to create individuals who can do everything. Rather, we want to create people who can work together as a team, and who can bring their various expertise to bear on the problem. So, we might have humanists and social scientists who can help the scientists decide what the right problem to solve is, and what the non-technological barriers to solving it are. Then we might have journalists or storytellers who will put together a description of the project that people can understand; and students in business, finance, or marketing who can say, ok, we can create a company based on this solution, and determine whether and how it will be financially viable.
So we’re building a model for the university from what we want at the end. If we want students who have these qualities and skills when they finish, what do we need to give them earlier, and at what stage do we need to give it to them?
We also need to figure out what use we want to make of technology. So, for example, we’re thinking about how to use large language models to create simulators that students can use to help them solve problems - we’re kicking around interesting technological ideas. But technology is the ornaments; it’s not the Christmas tree. The Christmas tree is composed of the people who teach students to think, who inspire them, and unfortunately technology doesn't do that. So it's not going to replace people any time soon, at least not in education.
We’d like to start the university program in the fall of 2025. We want to have a first year curriculum, a core curriculum where everyone learns different modes of thinking, so that they understand how various types of people approach problems – then, when they start talking to each other, they’re not talking completely different languages.
We’re having a big brainstorming meeting in Istanbul. I’ve invited six pretty amazing experts on how to organize new university programmes. There aren't that many people in the world who’ve had the opportunity to start their own university project. Usually, we academics flock into existing universities and slot into them. All of these people either started their own universities or completely transformed universities they were part of. [This took place in June 2023].
The most important thing is to get the initial design right, because once you start building your house, it's hard to redesign things on the fly. Especially because, with a university, once you begin, you have to go through the whole four-year cycle – you can't make a radical change in the middle, because that will harm your students. You really have to get it right from the get-go.
I think that the biggest challenges we face are the limits of our imagination and the inertia of the higher educational system. Ultimately, people don’t do that many brand new, incredibly different things. Especially when it comes to universities – they’re conservative places, they haven't really changed very much in 150 years. And people are going to say, there’s Harvard, there’s Yale, there’s Princeton – what the hell are you doing, why are you so smart? Why are you doing this thing that none of them is doing?
So, we have to know what we’re trying to accomplish, and be convinced that other people can't accomplish it with the tools they have available to them. And it seems pretty obvious that they can't. We need to do things in a new way, because the world needs people who can solve different kinds of problems than the kind that were envisioned when the big research universities that exist now were developed.
