About the declaration

The Unfinished Inheritance was written by Dr. Mark Naufel and first published in November 2026. It sets out, in nine sections and twelve articles, what its author believes education owes to those it teaches and to the civilization it serves.

The author

Dr. Mark Naufel is President and CEO of the University of Silicon Valley. He founded the Luminosity Lab at Arizona State University and served as a member of the Arizona Board of Regents.

An independent work

The declaration is an independent intellectual work. It is not an official policy of the University of Silicon Valley and does not constitute an endorsement by that university or by any other institution. This website is its home and belongs to no university.

Those who endorse it do so as individuals, unless an institution has endorsed it separately.

I author these pages as a student of their ideas, one who believes in them and aspires to put them into practice. I do so in full recognition that they draw upon centuries of thought and the work of countless educators, past and present.

I watched the millennium turn in my youth, and with my peers witnessed the rise of online education and its promise to make learning accessible to all, only to find that access alone did not guarantee a meaningful education. We now witness the arrival of reasoning machines, and with them the possibility of overcoming limitations that once seemed unavoidable. This manifesto is a manifestation of the frustrations, hopes, and questions shared by many of my generation, and of our conviction that we can do better.

I was fortunate to be educated at Arizona State University under the mentorship of its president, Dr. Michael Crow. There I saw what was possible when an institution refused to choose between access and excellence. There, too, I was given the opportunity to demonstrate a model in which the students themselves are the principal researchers, inventors, and creators. These experiences shaped much of what I believe education can and should be.

I have recently been given the privilege of leading an institution founded in 1887. Years of recent hardship have given it the will and the capacity to change, in keeping with its founder’s original charter. There we mean to build the education described in these pages, and we expect it to be the labor of years. Yet these twelve articles belong to no single institution. They are our aspiration before they are our achievement, and we ask to be held to them as we begin this endeavor.

I call upon all who lead institutions of learning, and all who have the power to shape them, to make these articles their own. Let them be questioned, amended, and enlarged as freely as they are given here. Let us together take up the unfinished inheritance, and pass it to our posterity greater, better, and more beautiful than it was entrusted to us.

Dr. Mark Naufel