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In a lengthy feature article in Isthmus (Madison, Wisconsin), SFI External Professor David Krakauer outlines the critical need to rethink and remake the university education system.

Krakauer, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has since his arrival at UW sounded what the article's author terms "a brash call for UW-Madison to re-imagine its place in the world. Above all, it is to climb out of the silos of intellectual pursuit and embrace a more creative mash-up of disciplines — hard scientists working with poets working with social scientists working with entrepreneurs."

"Before arriving in Madison in 2011, Krakauer worked at the decidedly unconventional and somewhat countercultural Santa Fe Institute," the author writes. "The Institute got its start in the early 1980s mixing physics from scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory."

"Sometimes those chance conversations don't yield anything, Krakauer told me. But you can't be afraid to fail or to look bad at them, because it's those freewheeling talks — often in the mash-up of artists, scientists and entrepreneurs — where the big breakthroughs are occurring today."

Krakauer is, the author wrote, "a guy who's going to mess with people's minds."

Read the article in Isthmus (January 30, 2013)