Introducing "Wisdom ... Forgotten"

The University May Have a Memory Problem

And we have a solution: “Wisdom … Forgotten”. Higher education leaders are not short on ideas about how to build stronger, more adaptive universities. What we have struggled with, over time, is consistently translating those ideas into everyday leadership practice.

Today, many institutions are rediscovering insights earlier scholars mapped with remarkable clarity. Over six decades, leading thinkers diagnosed -with extraordinary precision- many of the pressures universities face today.

They warned about the prestige trap we are witnessing today. They mapped forces that resist change till nowadays. They showed how institutions can reproduce inequality while working to address it. They explained why governance models built for elite systems strain under the realities of mass access.

This wisdom did not fail. But over time, parts of it moved from the center of how we design universities to the margins of how we talk about and operate them. We think there are ways to learn and benefit from the wisdom of the past six decades. Our goal is not to critique the present. It is to reconnect today’s leaders with scholarship written for moments exactly like this one.

The future of the university will be shaped by those willing to connect yesterday’s wisdom to tomorrow’s possibilities

That is why we are launching “Wisdom … Forgotten,” a weekly LinkedIn newsletter revisiting classic higher education texts and connecting them to one urgent question:

What should the university of the future become?

We came to this question from different directions. Christopher has spent decades inside university leadership, working across governance, workforce and curricular innovation, and faculty-driven transformation. Bassem has worked globally exploring the future of higher education, reimagining the university not just as an institution to preserve, but as an idea to continually renew.

What unites us is a shared conviction: The path forward does not begin by discarding the past. It begins by recovering durable ideas, translating them into modern contexts, and applying them with courage and discipline.

Each week, we will each take one book. Not to review it. Not to summarize it. But to ask:

What ideas deserve fresh attention now?

What wisdom are we not fully acting on?

What would change if we translated these ideas into today’s leadership practice?

This is not nostalgia.

It is a practical effort to reconnect leaders to ideas that can help reimagine higher education.

If there is a book that you believe deserves a place in this conversation, tell us. Recommend it. Make the case for it. Best selections will not come from two people alone. They will come from a community of practitioners, scholars, and leaders who have lived inside these questions.

Across more than 35,000 universities worldwide, the future will be by all of us.

Subscribe to “Wisdom … Forgotten.” Join US. The conversation starts next week.

Prof. Bassem Khafagy, Chairperson, World Universities Foundation (WUF)

Christopher Washington, Ph.D., President of the ILI Think Tank, Innovative Leadership Institute

Read with us … Think with us … Reimagine with us.

If you like Wisdom … Forgotten , and want to support it, there are a few ways:

⏩ Forward the newsletter to a friend with an invitation to Join US.

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👉 If there is a book that you believe deserves a place in this conversation, tell us. Recommend it. Make the case for it.