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From Preservation to Renewal: Reimagining the Future of the University

The Office of Academic and Learning Innovation will host its next public talk in the ongoing series “BoulderTalks: Insights from Education Innovators.” BoulderTalks invites education leaders from across the globe to share their insights on the future of online and higher education.

Headshot of Randy Bass

Join our next visiting expert, Randy Bass, Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives and Professor of English at Georgetown University, for his talk about how universities can navigate transformative change:

Beyond Preservation: Rehumanizing the University from the Inside Out
Wednesday, February 18, 2026, at 4:00 p.m. MT
Center for British and Irish Studies, Norlin Library (M549)

This talk explores the ways that institutions can move beyond incremental improvements toward true paradigm shifts, distinguishing between sustaining innovations that preserve existing structures and transformational innovations that enable an emerging ‘Human Flourishing Paradigm.’ Drawing from Georgetown University's 12-year "Designing the Future(s) of the University" initiative, and the broader higher education landscape, Bass explores how universities can navigate transformative change at a moment when placing human experience, relationships, and complex problem-solving at the center of education is more important than ever. Yet, this rehumanization is not about going back to an older educational model, but needs to engage some long standing binaries and biases in order to move past preservation to renewal.

More about the speaker

Randy Bass is Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives and Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he leads the Designing the Future(s) initiative and the Red House. For 13 years he was the Founding Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), and for seven years, Vice Provost for Education. He has been working at the intersections of university transformation, emerging technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning for more than thirty years. In 1994, the American Studies Crossroads Project, which he founded and directed for ten years, was the first ever Web-based project funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement for Postsecondary Education (FIPSE).  He is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles, spanning 35 years, including, Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem (with Bret Eynon, 2016); Understanding Writing Transfer: Implications for Transformative Student Learning (with Jessie Moore, 2017), and The New Learning Compact: A Framework for Professional Learning and Educational Change (with Bret Eynon and Laura Gambino, 2019). He sits on the boards of several universities and higher education organizations, and has been a Fulbright Scholar, and Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.  Since 2024, he has also been serving as Senior Advisor to the President at the University of North Texas.

This in-person presentation is free and open to the public. A recording will be available online after the event. Learn more about the event and register to attend.

BoulderTalks is sponsored by the Office of Academic and Learning Innovation and the Center for Teaching and Learning.