SelfReliant was not where I started as an educational entrepreneur, it was where I ended up.  The following 3-part series, which will be eventually converted into a YouTube online video – discusses the path that led to SelfReliant’s founding in September 2007.

If you want to understand how I got to “self-reliance” as my theme for educational change in the 21st century, I’d have to explain my first year at Duke University as an undergraduate.  As a freshman, my mind overflowed with cool ideas about how I could connect with students, professors, and researchers.  The density of talent is literally overwhelming at places like Duke.  But step outside your dorm room, and some days you wouldn’t even know it was the case.  Arbitrary and unnecessary stress was a feeling that had been familiar to many of my fellow students who had come to Duke from “pressure cooker” boarding schools like Exeter or Andover, or elite charter schools, and this daily stress was once again the order of the day at an institution like Duke.

And this was not the kind of positive internal stress that gave focus to personal goals.  As I entered into Duke I saw brilliant minds boxed in and locked down; beholden to insane schedules, GPA requirements, pressure from parents, and frustration with often arbitrarily difficult curricula.  Intellectual life at Duke was a shambles, and in fact had been that way for many years.  I discovered this very much on my own, by using my free time to comb through some of the oldest records of the University:  The Duke University Archives.

The archives were amazing, fascinating sources of information for me.  I learned about the secret societies Duke had played host to – the Red Friars and the White Duchy, of which Elizabeth Dole had been a member.  I learned that Duke Presidents had received written complaints from students for decades, since the 60s, about the lack of real intellectual interest and class cohesion among students.  I read about Duke administrators valiantly attempting to spend money on architectural fixes for the intellectual life problem – meaning that they literally were spending millions of donor dollars on “collaborative” buildings and spaces, that they believed could cure a jaded and disinterested culture of “Organization Kids” – See David Brooks’ famous article by the same name for some context:  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200104/brooks.  There had to be a better way.

As a sophomore at Duke, I enrolled in a class that changed my life.  Tony Brown’s Enterprising Leadership course at the Sanford Public Policy Institute was my first brush with a growing trend in higher education known as “experiential learning.”  The idea was simple – develop a social enterprise and launch it from the class, potentially continuing it well after the course was done.  Your grade was given on the basis of your project’s rigor, and the degree of learning perceived to have taken place by Tony.  Having already discerned a solution to Duke’s intellectual life problem, I enrolled with a full plan in mind.  I called it, The Duke Renaissance Society , and it was originally supposed to be a return to a sort of secret society, minus the secret.  Basically, I wanted to create a lobbying group of students who wanted to play the role of “educational innovator” and ultimately solve the problem of anti-intellectualism by making creative inquiry cool, but also a bigger part of the normal day-to-day outside-of-class experience at the University.  Of course, this group would also be semi-elite because in my mind, it would give other students something to shoot for.  I’d find students with perhaps dismal GPAs who were spending their free time reading Kant instead of going to class.  Or artists frustrated with the art department, computer geeks hacking Linux or incubating a couple dozen startup ideas.  Rebel geniuses – diamonds in the rough.  And they would comprise the DRS, as I was quick to acronymize it.

Over the course of the class though, the DRS didn’t sell well and my fellow social entrepreneurs wanted to know just what my group would actually do rather than just who would comprise it.  It was also suggested that a “Renaissance Society” evoked images of people wearing odd pants, riding horseback, and having archery contests.  So, after partnering with a student who was most sympathetic to my cause, Meenakshi Chivukula, we renamed the project IdeaNet.

Now at this second iteration, IdeaNet was conceived of as a student group that would essentially provide resources to other student groups on campus.  My preference at the time was to empower the “nerdier” groups, like the Word Club, which played Scrabble regularly, rather than sports-related groups.  The idea morphed into a sort of student-run consulting firm for the floundering to non-existent intellectual culture on campus.  My leaning toward exclusion of less intellectual student organizations was an outgrowth of the fact that I have always thought learning was fun – not a chore.  Apparently many elite university students don’t share this feeling, and how could they after years of treating academic achievement as a crushing rat race for grades and instructor approval?  Unfortunately though for us, IdeaNet would never officially launch at Duke…

That’s it for Part 1 of what I hope to be a series of posts over the next week.  Looking forward to your comments.