What are universities actually for?
Wisdom … Recovered # [01]
March 4th, 2026
In This Issue
This inaugural edition of Wisdom … Forgotten brings together two works that, separated by three decades, ask the same unsettling question: What are universities actually for?
Ernest Boyer saw it in 1990. The university had reduced scholarship to a single dimension, publishing, and in doing so had starved teaching, integration, and application of the recognition they deserved. He offered a broader architecture for intellectual life, one that made room for the full ecology of academic contribution. Institutions embraced his language. Few rebuilt their structures.
Tim Dasey sees it now, through a sharper lens. In a world where artificial intelligence masters expertise faster than any curriculum can deliver it, the university’s obsession with knowledge transfer becomes not just limiting but obsolete. What remains, what machines cannot replicate, is wisdom: the capacity to navigate ambiguity, to exercise judgment, to ask questions no algorithm would conceive.
Read together, Boyer and Dasey reveal a striking continuity. Boyer argued that the university had narrowed its understanding of what scholars do. Dasey argues it has narrowed its understanding of what learners need. Both diagnoses point to the same institutional habit, the tendency to mistake a part for the whole, and both call not for reform but for reimagination.
This is precisely why Wisdom … Forgotten exists. Across decades and many classic and modern books, we keep encountering scholars who saw clearly what institutions chose to forget. The wisdom was never lost. It was set aside. Our work, in this newsletter and in the broader series, is to recover it, not as nostalgia for what was, but as liberation for what could be.
Dr. Christopher Washington and I each bring a different book to every edition, a different lens, a different experience. But we share a conviction: the future university will not emerge from incremental adjustment. It will emerge from the courage to remember what we once knew and the imagination to act on it.
We invite you not just to read, but to respond, to challenge, to build with us.
To those who dare to reimagine.
When Machines Master Expertise
Prof. Bassem Khafagy
We’re still teaching students to compete with AI. And losing. Badly.
In 2023, Dr. Tim Dasey, after three decades leading AI development at MIT, delivered an uncomfortable diagnosis: universities are training students for a world that no longer exists. “Wisdom Factories” argues that while we frantically debate whether to ban ChatGPT or integrate it into classrooms, we’re missing the far more urgent question: What happens when AI does expertise better than experts?
The answer is already here. AI writes better code than most programmers. It drafts better legal briefs than junior associates. It analyzes data faster than analysts. And it’s improving exponentially while our institutions evolve at the pace of committee meetings.
Dasey’s insight cuts deep: “Schools currently spend most of their energy teaching students to do what AI does best.” We reward mastery of content that machines can retrieve instantly. We value precision in tasks that algorithms execute flawlessly. We measure success by how well students replicate what AI does automatically.
This isn’t a critique of teachers. It’s a critique of a century-old model built for a world where human expertise was scarce and valuable. That world is gone. What remains? What AI cannot replace? Wisdom.
Not the platitude kind. The operational kind. The capacity to navigate complexity without clear answers. To make judgment calls in ambiguous situations. To understand context machines cannot perceive. To ask questions algorithms would never think to pose.
Dasey argues: “Learning wisdom can only be done well with a new educational model that’s nearly upside down from the current one.” Not tweaked. Not improved. Inverted.
This means experience over lecture. Play over memorization. Tacit knowledge over explicit content. Problems without single right answers over problems with answer keys. “Experience, play, meta-knowledge, and multidisciplinary curricula are the new fundamentals.”
Consider the paradox: we protect students from failure in controlled academic settings, then expect them to navigate unprecedented complexity in the real world. We teach them to solve problems we’ve already solved, then wonder why they struggle with problems we haven’t.
Dasey proposes games as the foundation, games that mirror real complexity, where students fail safely, learn transferable patterns, and develop intuition that transcends domains. Not gamification. Not points and badges. Actual complex systems with emergent properties and no predetermined solutions.
The clock is unforgiving. “AI evolves very rapidly, but we humans don’t. If we aren’t wise, then AI will consume those roles too.”
Re-imagining the university means confronting an existential question: Are we preparing students to complement AI, or compete with it? Because if it’s the latter, we’ve already lost. The only sustainable advantage is the one machines cannot replicate.
Wisdom, unlike expertise, cannot be downloaded.
Prof. Bassem Khafagy 24 February 2026
Book: Wisdom Factories: AI, Games, and the Education of a Modern Worker
Author: Tim Dasey, Ph.D.
Published: 2023, Rejuvenate Publishing
Core Insight: As AI masters expertise, education must shift from knowledge transfer to wisdom development through experiential learning, complex problem-solving, and multidisciplinary thinking.
#HigherEducation #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfWork #EducationReform #HigherEd #AIinEducation #FutureOfEducation #WorkforceDevelopment #ReImagineUniversity
Boyer: On the Lost Ecology of Academic Excellence
Christopher Washington, Ph.D.
In the late 1990s, I joined a faculty in the process of experimenting with instructional technology to provide access to a broader population of learners. During that period university leaders were also confronting growing public concern about cost, access, and relevance.
For those of us expanding our instructional toolkit, Ernest Boyer’s Scholarship Reconsidered was both liberating and destabilizing. It expanded our idea of what counted as scholarly work, and challenged us to rethink what it meant to be a faculty member.
Boyer argued that universities had narrowed scholarship to research measured primarily by publication in elite journals. In doing so, they marginalized teaching and distorted the broader purpose of intellectual life.
His core insight was simple: scholarship is larger than research. He proposed four interrelated forms:
Discovery advances knowledge
Integration interprets knowledge across disciplines
Application connects knowledge to the consequential problems of our age
Teaching transforms knowledge for learners
Boyer’s question was uncomfortable and enduring: What if we are rewarding too narrow a slice of intellectual work?
As a provost, I experienced Boyer’s framework as both moral and transformative in practice. It allowed me to encourage and recognize excellence beyond journal prestige and classroom hours. Boyer did not diminish discovery; he contextualized it. I came to see academic excellence as ecological rather than hierarchical. For me this meant:
If teaching is scholarship, curriculum design is intellectual architecture
If assessment is scholarship, learning is investigable rather than anecdotal
If integration is scholarship, interdisciplinary and transnational adaptation is synthesis, not dilution
Innovation often occurs at boundaries; between disciplines, theory and practice, and classroom and community. Integration and application are not secondary. They are catalytic in assuring and advancing transformative learning experiences for faculty, staff, students, and communities.
The tragedy is that universities adopted Boyer’s language faster than his structures. For example, promotion and tenure rarely shifted in proportion to rhetoric. “Teaching matters” became a slogan rather than an incentive redesign.
The pressures facing higher education around the world today; declining public trust, financial fragility, technological disruption, and demands for demonstrable impact, are precisely those Boyer anticipated. He did not call for abandoning research excellence. He called for expanding the idea of what matters.
Artificial intelligence makes Boyer’s framework more urgent. Faculty must design learning that builds discernment, ethical reasoning, and collaborative problem solving. They must integrate knowledge across fields and engage communities as scholar-practitioners.
In other words, the future university will not be sustained by research output alone, but by communities of scholars who see discovery, teaching, integration, and application as mutually reinforcing.
If AI is making knowledge more abundant, then cultivating wisdom through learning ecosystems can become the distinctive work of universities.
Boyer, long before AI algorithms, described how to go about it.
Christopher Washington, Ph.D. 24 February 2026
Book: Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate
Author: Ernest L. Boyer (1928,1995), President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Published: 1990, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ. Expanded edition with new contributions: Jossey-Bass, 2016
Core Insight: Universities have narrowed scholarship to research and publication alone, starving teaching, integration, and application of legitimacy. Boyer proposed four interconnected forms of scholarship, redefining what it means to be a scholar and how universities should measure faculty contribution.
#ScholarshipReconsidered #HigherEducation #FutureOfTheUniversity #AcademicLeadership #ReImagineUniversity #WisdomForgotten
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.
📧 Share your comments and let us all learn from you.
👉 If there is a book that you believe deserves a place in this conversation, tell us. Recommend it. Make the case for it.
Dr. Christopher Washington, Provost Emeritus of Franklin University, is the Founder and CEO of ResiliencePlus Advisors LLC, an executive coaching and advisory firm focused on equipping leaders to navigate complexity, disruption, and rapid organizational change. He also serves as President of the ILI Think Tank at the Innovative Leadership Institute, leading a global network of scholars and senior practitioners advancing the theory and practice of innovative leadership. A contributing author to Forbes Nonprofit Council, Dr. Washington publishes on leadership innovation, organizational culture and performance, and learning ecosystem design.
Prof. Bassem K. Khafagy: An academic leader, best-seller author, award winning researcher, and strategic thinker whose work spans the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently dedicating his time to rethinking the “University” as a transformative force in society. Prof. Khafagy is the founding force behind several global academic initiatives, most notably the World Universities Foundation, WUF, World Summit on Universities, WSU, and the Re-Imagine University Newsletter & book series.
“Wisdom … Forgotten” is a weekly LinkedIn Newsletter by Prof. Bassem Khafagy, and Dr. Christopher Washington, Together, they bring six decades of combined experience spanning global higher education strategy, institutional leadership, governance, workforce innovation, and organizational transformation across multiple continents. Each week, this newsletter surfaces ideas from two classic academic works that were often written for moments very much like the one higher education is navigating today, and ask what becomes possible when those insights are brought back into active practice. This newsletter is not a book review. It is a conversation between two thought leaders and a growing community of academics, university leaders, practitioners who believe the future of the university is strengthened when we reconnect with the intellectual foundations that shaped the field and reinterpret them for today’s realities. Many scholars and leaders have carried these ideas forward. Our goal is to help reconnect them to everyday leadership, policy, and institutional design decisions. Read with us. Think with us. Reimagine with us.
The visual compositions throughout this newsletter and the series are original works by Prof. Bassem K. Khafagy. They are crafted using advanced technological tools, including artificial intelligence, guided entirely by the author’s artistic vision and design sensibility. In a series about reimagining the university, it felt only right that the art itself reflect that spirit of creative possibility. © All rights reserved, 2026.