About
Our story
From 2018 to a permanent home for the world's universities.
The World Universities Foundation was founded in 2018 on one conviction: that the university matters too much to humanity to be shaped in fragments. Its roots lie in the gatherings of university leaders that became the World Summit on Universities, now WUF’s global annual summit. Year after year, those gatherings showed the same thing. Leaders from every region faced the same questions, and none of them had a place where the whole university world could answer them together.
A summit could bring leaders to one room for a few days. It could not give universities a voice for the rest of the year. The World Universities Foundation was built to be that permanent home: an independent organization owned by universities, with a mandate, REACT, and a membership, the World University Family, open to every university and every stakeholder in the world.
Where the story goes next
WUF now works from two headquarters, in San Diego, California, and in Antalya, Türkiye. Its agenda, Re-Imagine the University, sets a shared direction for the decades ahead. Its initiatives give universities a day, a declaration, a report and a meeting place for ideas. Its gatherings bring the sector’s leaders together to decide, not only to talk.
The most important chapters are still to be written, and they will be written by the universities that take their seats at the table.
Read more: The road ahead · From the Founder