Teaching Progress Studies at Universities
A workshop for professors, May 21–24 in DC, hosted by RPI & JHU
Progress studies has emerged as a vibrant intellectual movement over the past few years. But despite Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen’s original call that ”We Need a New Science of Progress”, progress studies has remained largely outside the university classroom. Most students today graduate without a basic understanding of industrial civilization, how it works, and why we need it. Call this a lack of “industrial literacy”.
We want to change that. This May, the Center for Economy and Society at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the Roots of Progress Institute are co-hosting a workshop in Washington, D.C., with financial support from Coefficient Giving. The goal: help university faculty design courses incorporating progress studies into their own disciplines.
The Teaching Progress workshop
The Teaching Progress workshop will bring together faculty members from engineering schools, business schools, and social science and humanities departments, along with public intellectuals from RPI and other stakeholders in progress studies.
The workshop is hosted by Steven Teles (Professor, School of Government and Policy, Johns Hopkins University), Simon Halliday (Associate Research Professor, Center for Economy and Society, Johns Hopkins University), and Jason Crawford (Founder, Roots of Progress Institute).
Participants will alternate between presentations by progress scholars and intensive working sessions developing syllabi for their own courses. The range of possibilities is wide: a political economist might design a course on state capacity and innovation policy; a business school professor might focus on organizational design for breakthrough R&D; an engineering educator might explore why construction costs have soared while computing costs have plummeted.
The workshop will include sessions from:
Kevin Bryan (University of Toronto) will give a keynote on Progress, or How Big Things Get Done. This is a graduate seminar that integrates economic history, the history of technology, institutional economics, and philosophy to examine why extraordinary achievements occur at particular times, places, and organizations.
Simon Halliday (Johns Hopkins University) and Matt Burgess (University of Wyoming) will respond, presenting their undergraduate courses designed for students encountering these ideas for the first time. Simon’s course includes experiential components like factory visits and industry guest speakers. Matt’s course, “American Economic Success”, integrates progress studies with foundational readings from Pinker, Henrich, Koyama & Rubin, and others.
Ohid Yaqub (University of Sussex) will lead a discussion on industrial policy, bringing an international perspective on how governments fund and organize progress.
John Handel (Baylor University) and Lee Vinsel (Virginia Tech) will present complementary views on “Maintaining Progress”, discussing what happens as technologies move from breakthrough to implementation at scale and the bottlenecks, second-order effects, and longer-run problems as new systems grow and decay.
… and more.
Participants will leave with draft syllabi, curated reading lists, and pedagogical strategies ready for implementation. Our goal is that the workshop produces publicly available resources—model syllabi, case studies, and teaching guides—that other faculty can adapt.
Details
When: May 21–24, 2026 (Memorial Day weekend)
Where: Washington, D.C.
How much: No cost to participants (travel stipend, hotel, and food included)
This workshop is made possible by generous support from Coefficient Giving.
Interested in participating?
We have room for a few more attendees at this invitation-only event. If you teach at the university level, can commit to teaching a course on progress in your discipline by the end of 2027, and are interested in attending, we’d like to hear from you. Please email us at teaching-progress@rootsofprogress.org with what you teach and why you’d like to be invited, no later than April 17th, 2026.
This is sorely needed. The progress studies movement is still largely organized by a disparate online community. No formal certification problems exist, let alone standardized coursework.
This is a travesty. To progress forward, we need to understand how we got here. That’s why it’s so important for organizations like Roots of Progress and others to exist and to continue the work they do.
This is, in part, the mission of R&P as well: to understand the origins of human progress from the first principles of physics, prepare for the perils we face in the 21st century, and develop solutions, new “pathways” to a better future for all.
Can we get some informal proceedings from this or a podcast or something? Those of us who are not full time faculty are still highly interested in the exchange and content 👀