Engineering at the speed of relevance

For most of my career as a researcher, I’ve studied what happens when flow crosses a threshold. Think about air moving across the surface of a supersonic jet, or a shock wave racing through a volcanic plume.

It’s the very instant turbulence takes over from order. Past a certain point, the well-known models stop performing the way they were designed. The physics changes. And when the operating environment changes, successful systems don’t just work harder—they work differently.

I find myself thinking about that lesson often these days—not in the laboratory, but in university leadership.

Higher education is approaching its own transition. The pace of technological change, industry transformation and student expectations has accelerated into a fundamentally different operating regime. Artificial intelligence is reshaping disciplines and influencing how we educate, learn and work. New industries are emerging almost overnight. Employers are asking for new skills faster than our curricula have traditionally evolved.

Yet many of our institutions still rely on governance and decision-making systems designed for a much slower world. And that’s simply the reality of institutions built for stability and excellence over generations and centuries—not for responding to change measured in months.

And so the question in front of us is whether our operating model can evolve as quickly as the environment around it.

The real cost of slow

We spend a great deal of time in universities worrying about the consequences of making bad decisions. I’m increasingly convinced the greater risk is the right decision that arrives too late to matter.

For example, a curriculum revision that would have perfectly prepared students for where AI was two years ago does little for students graduating into where AI is today.

A research partnership that takes 18 months to approve may cause a corporate partner to walk away and invest elsewhere.

A strategic initiative delayed by a year may simply miss the moment it was designed for.

Opportunity has a shelf life—and leadership isn’t only about making good decisions. It’s about making good decisions while they still matter.

Designing for a different operating environment

One of the first things I realized after becoming College of Engineering dean was that our environment had changed faster than many of our institutional instincts.

This year—despite one of the most challenging budget environments higher education has faced in years—our college made a bold, deliberate choice: Rather than retreat, we leaned forward.

Our engineering enrollment continues to grow, industry demand for engineers continues to accelerate, and the breakthroughs we hope to make in health, energy, manufacturing, AI and national security all begin with exceptional people.

Waiting for perfect certainty would have meant falling behind—so we chose to invest: We recruited 25 new faculty members this year, our largest hiring cohort ever.

This was a significant commitment during an uncertain time. It was also, I believe, the right one. Leadership isn’t about eliminating risk. It’s about understanding which risks matter most—and sometimes the greatest risk is waiting too long.

The same philosophy has shaped many other decisions: accelerating new academic programs, expanding opportunities for students, deepening partnerships with industry. None of these are about moving fast for the sake of speed. Rather, they are about recognizing that opportunities are increasingly perishable, and that the world preparing to hand our graduates their future is not slowing down to wait for us.

Bureaucracy isn’t the enemy. Inertia is.

Universities are not startup companies—nor should they be.

Shared governance, faculty review and thoughtful deliberation are among our greatest strengths. But there’s a difference between rigor and inertia. Rigor protects quality; inertia just protects the calendar.

In higher education, our challenge is not to eliminate process, but to ensure every process we keep is still earning its place in today’s environment.

Engineering the future

Every engineering system has a response time. When the environment changes faster than the system can respond, performance suffers.

The universities that lead the next generation will preserve academic values while becoming dramatically better at recognizing opportunity, making principled decisions and acting before those opportunities disappear.

In high-speed aerodynamics, stability doesn’t come from resisting the flow. It comes from designing systems that remain stable because they anticipate it.

Higher education faces the same challenge. We can’t slow the pace of change until it matches our processes. Instead, we must design institutions capable of thriving in the world as it actually is. Every generation inherits universities built for the challenges of the time. Our responsibility is to prepare them for what comes next.

Engineering has always been about designing systems for new operating conditions. That may be the most important engineering challenge facing higher education today.

---