Alternative Models of Universities of the Future: On the Book «Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education» by David J. Staley (Baltimore, USA : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)

David Staley, Director of the Humanities Institute at OhioStateUniversity, historian and futurologist, summarizes his ideas about the possible paths to the development of higher education. He invites everyone interested to immerse into alternative worlds of the future, where education transforms in quite a radical way after the universities having acquired new models, whose prototypes we can find in today’s reality. Using his historical imagination, redirected from the past to the future, Staley describes 1) Platform University, an analogue of a supermarket; 2) a system of Microcolleges based on the authority of central professors; 3) the Humanities Think Tank, giving a new role to the social sciences and humanities; 4) Nomad University, located everywhere and nowhere at the same time; 5) the Liberal Arts College, radically developing the ideas of liberal arts; 6) Interface University, built on the interaction of human and artificial intelligence; 7) the University of the Body, aiming to promote information processing by all human senses; 8) the Institute for Advanced Play, which relies on games, imagination, and the construction of alternative worlds; 9) Polymath University, which implies mastering three different specialties at a time and forms different types of thinking; 10) Future University, teaching both pure and applied futurology. The book was published in 2019 and accumulated all the advanced ideas in the sphere of higher education development paths, which makes it extremely relevant in the era of active reforms in this field.Â