Topic: Frank Rhodes Lecture Series

The University Design Institute and Arizona State University welcomed Dr. Michael D. Smith on September 13 for the latest lecture in the Frank Rhodes Lecture Series to discuss higher education in the digital world and its implications on learners, institutions, and communities around the globe.

Dr. Michael D. Smith, J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, Heinz College will join Arizona State University as the Fall 2024 Frank Rhodes Lecture Series speaker.

Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, President Emeritus, UMBC joined the University Design Institute and Arizona State University in Fall 2023 for our annual Frank Rhodes Lecture Series. Dr. Hrabowski's lecture, titled “Leadership, Empowerment and Resilience in Higher Education: Reflections on the Past Fifty Years", discussed the importance of public universities in American society and around the world.

Thille discusses transforming how learning research and instructional practice serve adult learners and society, citing examples from academia and beyond. She highlights economist William Baumol's 1967 call for a teaching revolution and argues current conditions support a breakthrough in human learning. Thille outlines these conditions, discusses reshaping education and culture for all learners, and presents her vision for higher education's role in the future.

In this lecture, Daniel Markovits explored how over the course of the past half-century, the United States invented a new, unprecedented, and extreme form of economic hierarchy, which might have been called meritocratic inequality - not because it was justified, but because it was tied to winning at competitions in school and at work.