Universities are already doing extraordinary work to educate students, advance knowledge, serve communities, and respond to a rapidly changing world. I wonder whether their potential goes even further. Universities may be one of our most powerful leverage points for transforming society’s systems. They have catalyzed transformational change before. From the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, universities helped reshape medicine, public health, science, and the professions. They did more than transmit knowledge. They helped establish new institutions, professional identities, norms, and ways of understanding the world. Graduates then carried those ideas into hospitals, governments, businesses, communities, and other institutions, helping new paradigms spread.
We are living through another period of profound change. AI, declining institutional trust, chronic disease, loneliness, environmental change, and shifts in how we work and relate to one another are reshaping society. Could universities build on the remarkable work they already do while questioning some of the educational and professional norms we have inherited? What would it look like to form students not only for workforce readiness, technical competence, or professional success, but as stewards capable of helping institutions and systems evolve toward a larger aim: human flourishing? This session will explore that possibility, not as a prescription, but as a hypothesis. I hope to learn from educators about where the idea holds promise, where it falls short, and what it might mean in practice.
About Chad
Chad Swanson, DO, MPH, is an emergency physician, public health expert, writer, and advocate for health systems transformation. His work explores the intersection of history, complexity science, institutional transformation, and human flourishing. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and has published in leading journals such as the Lancet on health systems transformation. Drawing on frontline experience in emergency medicine and research into the historical development of American medicine and public health, he is particularly interested in how universities and the people they educate can help catalyze transformational change across institutions and society.
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