My friends and I founded a university over the summer and...it's going great?! And it's been surprisingly painless to start and run?!

It's a "network university," which is our fancy term for a new type of social institution: one that transforms an existing network into a social commons where ppl can learn, do research, and create groundbreaking work as adults.

I know “founding a university” sounds daunting. Our minds naturally go to giant institutions with millions of dollars and enormous gothic libraries. But here’s the truth: the startup costs for founding a university – complete with classes, research, residencies, and a business incubator – are actually very low. I think once people grasp this idea, we’ll see network universities, similar to FractalU, cropping up like wildfire.

"Don't you need degree programs?"

Degrees are not necessary for learning, research, and work to happen. In fact, degrees often get in the way, since people will be paying you *to get a degree* rather than to, eg, actually learn. The students at FractalU are dramatically more engaged than any university class I've ever attended because they are paying specifically to *learn.*

"But don't you need PhD'd professors?"

No. At least not if you believe the core of a university is learning, research, and work. For these things, here is all you need:

• Students/participants: this can just be you, your friends, your mom, and whoever else you invite.

• Instructors/facilitators: this can also just be you & your friends running classes, residencies, etc. These people don't need to be credentialed if they genuinely have something useful to offer. (If your friend has started 3 companies, then they don't need to have an MBA to run a business bootcamp. If you can make documentaries, you don’t need to be a prestigious filmmaker to teach other people to do the same.)

"But these instructors/facilitators do need to be domain experts, right?"

Not necessarily. One class that I ran with Alicia Botero called "Body, Mind, World," surveyed a bunch of body-mind systems and their applications to life. Neither of us are masters in any of these systems, so we invited a different guest instructor every week who *was* a master. It turns out that you can cold call these people and they'll often be happy to teach. All we needed to do was build the container, and the result was a class that was life-changing for a number of our students.

"Will adults really pay to learn if they don't get a degree?"

Yes. We now have ~25 in-person classes in NYC with over 200 students and it's only our second semester. Granted: it helps to be tapped into demographics that are excited about lifelong learning. But you can just find such people by attending existing classes in your city and inviting them.

"Don't you need advanced facilities, or at least have money for classroom space?"

No, you can host most classes & working groups in your friends' living rooms. Sure, your proto-university won't have a world-class chemistry lab, but you can build or rent one of those if your first few years are a success.

"What about dormitories?"

If you're working with adults, they typically already have housing. However, with a big enough student and teacher network, you can probably facilitate housing for people who need it by finding them roommates. In our case, we’re building off of Fractal, our cohousing collective. Over 2 years, @Prigoose & @__drewface have built up a network of apartments and group houses. This makes it so that we can easily house people who move to NYC from out of town. It also gives us ample living rooms for class space. (99% of our students are already based in NYC, but we have had a few students who have moved here specifically to attend FractalU.)

"Isn't it an insane amount of admin?"

There's definitely admin involved, but you can keep it much lighter than a normal university. Our model is to treat every class/residency/etc as its own microenterprise. We let our instructors & facilitators charge their own rates, create their own application forms, promote their own classes, etc. We just offer templates for these things that they can take or leave. The main work so far has mostly been (a) finding great instructors/facilitators, (b) helping instructors find classroom space, (c) giving new instructors assistance and feedback on their curriculum, and (d) facilitating a university community amongst all the students and professors with events, communication channels, etc.

But the main reason all this has been so painless is just that people *want* it. There has been a massive decline of the old community hubs: churches, professional societies, neighborhood associations, town halls, and – most notably – chautauqua assemblies. (In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, chautauqua assemblies all over America “brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, showmen, preachers, and specialists of the day.” – Wikipedia)

Adults want hubs within which to make friends, meet spouses, find collaborators, and have passionate conversations; and the structures mentioned above would fulfill that role. But as they’ve fallen away, society hasn’t been innovating many successors. I think network universities can be one of these successors. So far, the FractalU team has seen strong demand for a community hub based around lifelong learning and meaningful work.

"How can I start one?"

Here are a bunch of starters:

1. You can do what @__drewface did: just announce to twitter & friends that he's starting a university and start recruiting teachers & students.

2. You can do what I did: host a 3-week "residency" program for ppl to focus on their projects and gradually expand that into a uni. (The residency doesn't need to provide housing – the MVP is just to have an intro where ppl announce their projects and an outro where people present on their progress.)

3. You can just start with just one class. FractalU grew out of a bunch of friends gathering in person to take an online course. This could also be, eg, a book club or a writing group.

Sadly, I don't have the bandwidth to help other network universities launch anytime soon – too busy working on FractalU. But I hope that in a few months I'll have more bandwidth. Don't let that stop you! You can start building a network university tomorrow.

from Tweet by Tyler Alterman