NEXUS III

<p>The Third Nexus: what a university is for when the information is everywhere. A seven-part series on education, from the symposium to the argument.</p>

Data on Deck The difference between nice reading and a report worth paying for The difference between a report that reads nicely and one worth paying for is usually the method — the part that says how you know what you claim. Most people are never handed that expectation. I wasn’t either. I saw the gap most clearly in a piece of desk research I’d set a group of students. I asked them to… 08 September 2026
Data on Deck Do I give away what I told the university to "sell"? The content is largely free now. Not because I think it should be — because it is. The models, the frameworks, the standing advice to check everything: none of it is behind a wall, and most of it is a search away. That is the fact this series has been circling. What’s worth paying for is the part that can’t… 08 September 2026
NEXUS III Two university systems, and what it's all for - or better: who. Where you stand changes what this argument is. Two universities mark the poles. Humboldt, in Berlin, is public and state-funded. It charges no tuition, to anyone, and treats education as Bildung — a public good, the forming of a person. Humboldt is no accident here — the history kept pointing back to him, and, by chance, I studied there myself. 08 September 2026
NEXUS III How you could build the modern university None of that — inquiry, judgement, resilience, the check on the machine — is built by a better lecture. It is built by real work, real dependence, and honest feedback. The same idea in three settings: a real-world problem where someone downstream depends on what you produce; a small piece of live research, handed over early; and the university as… 08 September 2026
NEXUS III What's gone, and what's gone with it When the content is free, the obvious thing goes first: the university’s oldest job, passing on knowledge, can be done outside it, faster and cheaper. Reduce a university to delivering content, or to making people job-ready, and you have built a trade school with worse economics. A second thing has gone, more quietly. Forming a person — independent, resilient, willing… 08 September 2026
NEXUS III Three times the ground has shifted The lecture was built for a world short of books. This is not the first time the ground under the university has moved. It is the third. Start with the word. “University” never meant universal knowledge. Universitas was a guild — a union of masters and scholars. Bologna, usually called the first, was a guild of students who hired their… 08 September 2026
NEXUS III What is a university for when the content is free? Almost everything a university teaches, you can now find online. Cheaper, faster, often free. Sometimes better. So what is a university for? Start with the oldest habit in the building: the lecture. The word means a reading-aloud — lectio. For most of the university’s history, books were scarce, copied out by hand, one at a time. So the master read… 08 September 2026
NEXUS III The road to a symposium on Higher Education Thriving in Uncertain Futures: Education, Employability and Professional Agility — a symposium at the University of Melbourne The food-scenarios work convinced me of one thing: the hardest part of the next twenty-five years is not technical. It is the not knowing what’s coming. And we do nothing meaningful to prepare our youth for this. I have one key personal flaw. 02 September 2026
Field Notes Why a shrimp company got me interested in education In mid 2024 I spent a few months building scenarios for what the world eats in 2050. Twenty-five years out. Which sounds like a long time, and reads like somebody else’s problem, right up until you turn it around. Twenty-five years back is Y2K. Most people my age can tell you where they were that night. It does not feel… 22 July 2026