“There are four different skill sets, or competencies, that I’ve found are essential for creative expression. The first and most important competency is “capturing”-preserving new ideas as they occur to you and doing so without judging them… the second competency is called “challenging”-giving ourselves tough problems to solve. In tough situations, multiple behaviors compete with one another, and their interconnections create new behaviors and ideas. The third area is “broadening.” The more diverse your knowledge, the more interesting the interconnections—so you can boost your creativity simply by learning interesting new things. And the last competency is “surrounding,” which has to do with how you manage your physical and social environments. The more interesting and diverse the things and the people around you, the more interesting your own ideas become.”
--Robert Epstein, Psychologist and author of the generativity theory of creativity, on “How to unleash your creativity”.
“There is no legitimate reason why we can’t develop more creative problem solvers from nursery school on up. There are many techniques that could be introduced into the curriculum alongside the content domains. But, as Robert said, the emphasis right now is more political than educational.”
--John Houtz, Professor of Psychology and author of “The Educational Psychology of Creativity”, on “How to unleash your creativity”.
Many steps must be taken before Project Polymath's implementation will be complete. Starting a university, after all, is not at all a trivial endeavor, especially when it is as radically different as Polymath will be. For the moment, the project is too early in its lifecycle to give a firm founding date, but we estimate a timeline of about a decade from idea to full realization of our vision, depending on the support we receive.
Because maintaining an online presence is far cheaper than procuring a brick-and-mortar campus, we plan to initiate the university (without using the term “university” until we meet criteria for use of the term but always planning to do so) by offering online certifications, perhaps in conjunction with an existing university that shares some of our values, such as Olin or Soka. As the university becomes financially secure, we would then begin developing degree programs for accreditation (starting with traditional Associate's, Bachelor's, and Master's degrees) and moving to a brick-and-mortar campus at a location that has yet to be decided.
We have recently began offering courses in “practical” subjects, such as Web Design and Management, at local community centers and online. We are hiring adjunct faculty and recruiting volunteers to teach these courses. We emphasize directly “useful” subjects simply to maximize the number of students interested in taking our courses without receiving credit towards a degree - once accredited, we intend to offer the full range of courses taught at a standard university, as well as courses in creativity and idea synthesis (which are not typically offered at current universities). Our primary strategy is to bootstrap our entire curriculum, using the tuition income from one course to fund the next. The courses will serve as outreach programs, fundraisers, demonstrations of our concept, evidence that our organization is operating, and a small sample of what we can offer.
It is important to note that we cannot institute all of the changes we desire immediately. The nature of the certificates and degrees initially given by the university will be contingent upon the proficiencies of the faculty and the composition of the student body, but will likely not resemble the final degree programs we have envisioned. We do wish to emphasize creative problem solving as early as possible, however, as we believe it is key to fostering polymathic thought. Because the university would begin online and with individual brick-and-mortar courses, we forsee an initial class composed largely of nontraditional students looking to gain skills for career advancement and/or personal interest. During the first few years, we will schedule semiannual educational reviews, where we will assess the percentage of university goals that are being met by our current curriculum and make corrections as our budget permits. After the university becomes financially stable, these reviews will begin exploring new educational techniques and examining observed and reported deficiencies. The frequency will then decrease from semiannual to annual.
The university's primary source of income will be student tuition, at least initially, unless an alternative is found. Once we can afford to do so, we plan on offsetting this cost to students by giving out merit-based scholarships. Ideally, we would like to phase out tuition entirely, but this is unlikely to result in financial solvency.
Financial stability is one of the greatest challenges the university will face. However, accreditation poses an equally important challenge. For its degrees to mean anything, Polymath must gain regional or national accreditation. This will likely impose additional constraints upon the university's operations and curriculum, particularly because of the university's unique nature. However, most accreditation agencies seem concerned with fairly similar proficiency standards among graduates as we would request anyway; thus we do not anticipate significant difficulties in accreditation.
Once undergraduate operations are normalized, we would begin working on establishing research-oriented graduate and professional schools. As students and faculty will be encouraged to participate in research and design their own curricula from the beginning, this should not be difficult, as it would be merely a formalization of the activities already taking place. However, this would form an integral step in the development of the university because it would allow us to begin offering doctoral programs, receiving federal funds and endowments, and ultimately performing more significant research in many fields of inquiry. This is vital to our ultimate objective of sparking a new Renaissance. Once financially stable, we also plan on allocating funding for “free” research by students and faculty to permit researchers to follow their own interests, rather than what is simply well-funded - something that is ultimately important to making breakthrough discoveries and establishing Polymath as a leading research institution.
This plan will leave the university in a stable state in which it is making progress towards its objective. While still somewhat incomplete, it extends sufficiently far into the future to allow for further planning at a later milestone. We will extend this plan and fill in missing details as circumstances necessitate.
We hope for support from another university or corporate entity, as well as an eventual research endowment. Failing this, however, we must rely on individual donations. The proposed timeline for implementation of this plan depends very much on the nature and amount of financial support we receive.