🧭 The Growth Rate University: How Ohio State (or Any University) Can Lead the Age of AI

A Manifesto for Conscious Academia

I. The Next Era of Higher Education

Every century gives the world one university bold enough to redefine what learning means.
In the 19th century, it was Humboldt’s Berlin — research as exploration.
In the 20th, it was Stanford — the startup factory of the digital age.
In the 21st, it will be the first university that learns faster than the world changes.

That race is already underway.

At Ohio State, President Ted Carter has announced a decade-long moonshot: Education for Citizenship 2035 — with AI fluency for every graduate and $100 million invested in world-class faculty.
It’s an extraordinary vision.
But the deeper question is this:

What does it mean to be the best university in the age of artificial intelligence?

It’s not about compute power. It’s not about research citations.
It’s about how consciously and how quickly a university helps humans grow.

II. The End of the Information Advantage

Knowledge is no longer scarce.
Every lecture, every paper, every lab technique is one query away.
The monopoly universities once held — information — is gone.

AI made it trivial to know; what matters now is how you learn, integrate, and grow.

Universities that still measure seat time or GPA are training for a sport that no longer exists.
The new game is growth velocity — how much development, self-understanding, and applied mastery a student can achieve per unit of time.

The institutions that learn to measure and accelerate that will define the next century of civilization.

III. What DEI Got Half-Right

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement was a moral correction to centuries of exclusion.
It saw suffering and tried to build fairness.
But it made one crucial mistake: it treated equality as synchrony.
It assumed everyone should be on the same footing at the same time.

That’s not fairness — that’s flattening.

Humans grow at different velocities.
Some sprint through mastery and crash into burnout.
Some move methodically and discover depth.
DEI’s tragedy wasn’t intent — it was tempo.

It focused on access to systems rather than adaptation of systems.

Those who led DEI were doing their best in a chaotic era — asked to manage cultural change without data, psychological modeling, or adaptive tools.
They were given language, not systems.

Now, with AI, we can give them what they were missing:
the ability to understand the student body in motion — to synchronize development instead of standardizing it.

DEI was the moral foundation.
Velocity alignment is the operational upgrade.

IV. Belonging as Synchronization

Belonging is not about inclusion.
It’s about rhythm.

A student feels they belong when their rate of becoming matches the rate of support the university provides.

When they feel themselves accelerating — not being dragged or left behind — they stay. They thrive. They lead.

That’s the core principle of the Growth Rate University:

Belonging = Alignment of Developmental Velocity.

Universities that master this will no longer need to advertise inclusion.
Students will feel it — in their calendars, their feedback loops, their growth charts.

V. The Rate-of-Growth Promise

Every university should publicly define its Growth Velocity Band — the rate of expansion it promises to deliver.

A university’s reputation should not rest on selectivity, but on growth specificity — knowing exactly whom it serves and how fast it can help them evolve.

Students will choose institutions by developmental fit, not by ranking.
Belonging becomes a form of physics: find your natural velocity and align your orbit.

VI. The Growth Velocity Index

We can measure this.

This Growth Velocity Index tracks how quickly a student integrates knowledge, deepens self-awareness, and expands agency.

AI can support this through learning analytics, journaling companions, and reflection dashboards that visualize growth across semesters.

Universities that measure progress this way can promise something radical:

“You will become who you want to be, and we will show you the curve of your becoming.”

VII. The Ohio State Advantage

Ohio State is built for this moment.
It’s not a small lab school or private think tank.
It’s a living ecosystem — diverse, public, and proudly competitive.

President Carter’s call to make OSU the global leader in AI for universities is more than a research goal.
It’s a call to consciousness.

Ohio State already has the infrastructure:

• AI Fluency initiative — ensures every graduate is AI literate.
• Education for Citizenship 2035 — binds knowledge to civic growth.
• Massive athletic culture — understands excellence through measurable improvement.

All that’s missing is the philosophy of belonging through growth velocity — the human operating system beneath the AI layer.

Ohio State can declare itself the first Conscious University in America:

• Every student’s growth trajectory mapped and supported.
• Every faculty member’s time freed by AI, not consumed by it.
• Every system measured by how much human time it returns.

“Time and change will surely show” — the university’s own song calls for this evolution.

VIII. Lessons from Ryan Day

If Ohio State wants to dominate higher education the way it dominates football, it must treat learning like sport.

Ask any elite coach: greatness comes from synchronized acceleration — each player improving themselves and the system simultaneously.

That’s what Ryan Day’s teams understand.
Film study, strength training, play design — all revolve around one question:

How do we make everyone on this field faster, smarter, and more aware?

Now imagine that applied to the university as a whole:

• Departments as teams.
• Students as athletes of learning.
• AI as the analytics layer.
• Professors as coaches of consciousness.

That’s what it takes to win the academic national championship in the age of AI.

Ohio State knows how to build championship systems.
It’s time to extend that mentality from the field to the classroom, from the body to the mind.

IX. From DEI to DGV: Diversity of Growth Velocity

Let’s retire one acronym and upgrade to another: DGV — Diversity of Growth Velocity.

True diversity isn’t demographic, it’s developmental.
It’s the recognition that people bring different speeds, not just different stories.

AI can help map those velocities.
Faculty can learn to modulate teaching intensity like strength coaches modulate load.
Peer groups can form not just around identity, but around growth tempo — fast integrators, reflective processors, iterative builders.

Diversity of Growth Velocity turns inclusion into evolution.
No one slows down. No one is left behind.
Everyone grows at their edge — together.

X. A Challenge to the World

The future of higher education will not be measured by rankings or research grants.
It will be measured by how much human time and growth each university returns to the world.

So here’s the challenge:

Which university will be the first to publish its Growth Velocity Index?
Which will guarantee every student belongs by design?
Which will turn AI into the infrastructure of awareness, not the automation of apathy?

Ohio State can lead — or another university can beat them to it.
The race has started.

It’s a race of consciousness.
A race to design systems that accelerate human potential rather than extract it.
A race to prove that education can once again be the world’s most elegant competitive sport — the sport of becoming.

XI. The Final Word

Universities once competed to produce knowledge.
Now they must compete to produce awareness.

The Growth Rate University is the new standard.
The league is open.
The clock has started.

“Every player on the field improves themselves and the system they are in.”
That’s football.
That’s research.
That’s consciousness.

And that’s how you win the future.