Why This MIT Dean Is Leaving Her Job to Start a New Kind of University

This is the fourth episode of our new podcast series on the future of higher education. You can subscribe in iTunes to get prior and future episodes.

If you were to start a new university from scratch, how would you set it up? For Christine Ortiz, a dean at MIT, that question isn’t hypothetical. She announced earlier this year that she’ll take a leave from her prestigious job to found her own brick-and-mortar campus, and she hopes to make it just as large and prestigious as MIT or any of the best universities in the world. She plans to skip academic fixtures she sees as holdovers from the past.

You won’t find any classrooms, for instance, at least not the kind with desks lined up in rows. Instead, she envisions large lab spaces designed for project-based learning. And there won’t be typical academic departments. That way, professors can work together more fluidly across disciplines. When we first wrote about her plans a few months ago, the story went viral on social media, and people emailed in telling us about their own projects to reboot college.

Clearly she’s not alone in thinking that the research university as we know it is showing its age.

“You’re seeing cracks in a lot of the different areas,” says Ms. Ortiz. “It will continue to function as it is, but with everything that’s gone on with globalization, technology, there’s an opportunity to really redesign it and move it forward, modernize it.”

Listen to the full audio. Below is an edited transcript of Ms. Ortiz’s conversations with The Chronicle.

Jeff Young (voiceover): I’ve been curious about what would spark this MIT dean to go out on her own? Who is Christine Ortiz, and what is really driving this ambitious project?

I got to interview Ortiz on stage at a session at South by Southwest EDU last month, and I used one short clip from that in today’s episode, but most of what follows comes from another conversation that I had with her for this podcast. I found out the answer to why she’s doing this involves experimental body armor, and a retreat where she cut herself off from technology for a week.

Christine Ortiz has been at MIT for 17 years. She’s certainly not alone in trying to build a new kind of college, but many disruptive efforts these days are started by outsiders, often business folks. She’s a lifelong academic. She’s someone steeped in traditional higher education. To her that’s her strength, and she’s essentially trying to build the kind of university she wished that she had attended or worked in.

Christine Ortiz: I know that I would have been much more of a better learner going through a system where I could do projects. And I did projects all throughout, but they were always on the periphery. I know it intellectually as a faculty member, but it was really the core of my own educational experience of how I learned the best and what I got the most out of my education.

Jeff Young: When you were doing a project or developing something that was your own?

Christine Ortiz: Yes. Yeah. Even as a faculty member, I’d say, my whole experience in academia, I had this drive to really have freedom, creative freedom, in what I was doing. And it was probably very late into my career where I had true freedom to do all the crazy ideas in the world that I wanted to pursue. My research sort of exponentially took off at that point in directions that were so much more innovative than when I was constrained.

Jeff Young: Can you give an example of that? Where you’re looking beyond your disciplinary boundaries?

Christine Ortiz: Absolutely, yeah. We started about five years ago. I had gotten tenure a few years before. I had a number of very large research grants, and they didn’t have any constraints on them. So here I was, I had tenure, had millions of dollars in the bank, and there was no constraints really on it. What I found was there was a complete change in mind-set — first of all of being able to really explore things that were really, really out there.

We were studying the exoskeletons of animals. We were looking at that to create bio-inspired armor for the military — human armor, exoskeletons. At that point, what we were able to do was actually integrate architects into my research group. The whole thing really took off — doing computational design of armor, 3D printing of armor suits for soldiers, and just the fact of being able to fund many — I’ve had many students from different disciplines in my research group, but in particular putting some artists and architects into the mix because I always used to have scientists and engineers. It really changed the game for the entire group. They brought in all kinds of fabrication methods that are used in architecture — all kinds of design methods. It stimulated creativity in all of the students.

Jeff Young (voiceover): I asked around at MIT, and her colleagues say they were surprised. She is well respected by colleagues, but several people told me that they had no idea she was so interested in experimental institution-building. They didn’t see it coming. So there must have been something that set her off. Something that made her quit her tenured job to strike out on her own.

Christine Ortiz: If I had to pinpoint a moment in time, it was actually a few years ago. I participated with students on a leadership retreat. It was a weeklong retreat where we were out in a camp, no Wi-Fi and all this stuff. We had one full day of deep self-reflection, where we took the students through this deep, structured self-reflection. While I was facilitating, I said, “OK, I’ll do it with them.” I sort of knew all of the things I was interested in, but I would say it was that moment where it all sort of came together — that there’s a limited time in your life, and it takes a long time. At MIT it took 50 years till it really got going. I don’t have too much longer on earth, so I figured for the rest of my life at least maybe we can get this going.

Jeff Young (voiceover): Access is a driving force for Ortiz. She feels that MIT welcomed her, and scholars from a range of backgrounds, and she wants to make her new institution a “exemplar of diversity and inclusion.” I asked her how she plans to do that, especially since other recent experiments have struggled with the access issue. Take MOOCs for example: those free online courses from MIT and other colleges. They were supposed to bring education to the masses, but they’ve mainly served the education haves. But Ortiz has some novel ideas for doing outreach through research.

Christine Ortiz: There are opportunities for the research university to actually go back and support the pipeline of students. That’s something I’m really interested in thinking about. For example, how could you bring research into the high schools? Who better than to try and lead that but a research university? I get emails from high-school students, many high-school students say, “Could you be my mentor for a research project I want to do because I don’t have it in my high school?”

High-school students can do research. They can do very high-level research. People sometimes say, “Oh, freshmen can’t do research.” No. I’ve had many, many, many students, undergrads, freshmen, who can do research. Can we, as one of the founding principles of access and being a societal platform, can we use our university to actually help the pipeline remotely with massive open online research projects or with remote mentoring, with all kinds of things.

Jeff Young: It’s not just waiting, “they will come,” but just basically go help high-school students that are prepared.

Christine Ortiz: Yes. I would like to have that as part of the whole thing and really explore how we can do that.

Jeff Young: You’re tackling — I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fans, but you’re tackling very hard problems. Because these are systems that — by starting your own you’re admitting that the colleges are not easy to change. Then in K-12, there’s so many issues within that.

Christine Ortiz: Right, but I think there may be a way in the K-12 system. I mean you’re right — to change the actual curriculum is very difficult. But there may be ways to engage students in continuous research projects outside of that curriculum.

Jeff Young: As opposed to curriculum?

Christine Ortiz: Yeah. As an extracurricular. That’s sort of how I’m thinking of it right now. They’re already taking MOOCs. They’re already participating in a lot of these competitions, but there’s a huge drive, I think. When I talk to prospective undergraduate students, that’s what’s most exciting to them is the idea of coming to do research and to do projects. That’s actually the defining thing in their mind, at least the students that we were recruiting, on their choice of a university.

Jeff Young (voiceover): As I talked to other people about her project, I realized something else. The time just seems right to do something like this. One provost I talked to at another college, who is at the point where he’s looking around for his next job, says the idea of just starting his own institution has occurred to him as well. I don’t think that would have been the case even a couple of years ago.

That said, her biggest challenge may be raising the money. After all she wants to make a nonprofit, not a corporation.

Jeff Young: Is there a chance you’ll have to scale back your plans, or are you feeling like this is definitely going to happen?

Christine Ortiz: We’re actually developing a number of scenarios: enrollment plans based on different scenarios. MIT started tiny. We’ll see. I say we’d like to scale up, and have access as a core principle, but we’ll have to see when we do the fund raising what that —

Jeff Young: Yeah, you’ve got to be a realist in a business plan.

Christine Ortiz: Yeah. We’ll have different enrollment scenarios and things like that.

Jeff Young (voiceover): Is this the university of the future? No lectures, since so much is online now. A focus on projects. And just ignoring old disciplinary lines and trying to solve big problems? Will it take starting over from scratch to bring real change, or is this all straying too far from the important traditions of the academy?

We’ll be watching.

This has been the Re:Learning Podcast. It’s part of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s coverage of innovation at colleges, and you can read our articles at Chronicle.com/Re:Learning. If you like this podcast, take a moment to give it a rating on iTunes. Apparently that helps others find the show. You can also follow us on Twitter @ReLearningEDU or like our Facebook page.

Today’s show was produced by me, Jeff Young. Our theme music was by Jason Caddell. We’ll be back next week, with more stories about the new learning landscape.

Christine Ortiz talks about her plans for a new university at SXSWedu:

Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.

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