Project Polymath: Help Start an Interdisciplinary University

Project Polymath is an ongoing effort to create a new type of interdisciplinary university dedicated to the universal pursuit of knowledge and the development of students' full potential as thinkers, doers, and leaders.

Our key differences in a nutshell:

We train students in cross-disciplinary creativity and leadership as well as specific subjects.
Students choose their learning goals at the beginning, and collaboratively work on "dream big" projects to support those goals. An example is 5-10 like minded students coming together to build a car which runs on water.
Courses, research, independent study, industry experience, competency exams - all are valid for credit, and the student can choose how to mix and match them to fulfill requirements - whatever best fits the student's goals and prepares the student to make headway in his or her chosen projects.
Full success at any of these projects entails a worldchanging opportunity. Even if students do not fully complete their projects while at school (which given their magnitude is acceptable), the nature of the projects will likely motivate students to continue working on them after they graduate ("We give students callings").
Students and alumni can audit an unlimited number of courses for free, space permitting. This creates a closely knit community of (highly successful) alumni who will seek out students to collaborate with.
Within accreditation requirements, the entire program will be highly student-driven and highly flexible.

Our beliefs and ultimate goal:

We believe that many students have talents that lie across multiple disciplines, and that it is possible to fully develop all of these talents in the standard timeframe of a university curriculum by blending disciplinary instruction with creativity courses that draw parallels between ideas from different disciplines. Furthermore, we believe that we can provoke the development of self-determined values (and ultimately self-actualization) required for moral leadership by allowing students to explore many different subjects and set their own courses in a goal and problem-directed, rather than subject-specific, curriculum. On that level, our goal is to promote the identification and pursuit of students' individual visions, training them to make full use of their talents as leaders, professionals, artists, scientists, and human beings. Because their training will focus on cross-disciplinary reasoning as well as individual fields, it will span all boundaries. In short, we will graduate polymaths.

However, as glorious as the individual effects of such a plan are, our ultimate goal is to provoke a second Renaissance by raising a new generation of polymaths, or "Renaissance people". Such training would vastly reduce the complexity of current interdisciplinary research challenges, accelerating the rate of artistic, scientific, and philosophical progress. The effect would be more profound than mere expediency, however: in the past, very few polymaths existed because they were all autodidacts. However, because an unprecedented number of polymaths will be taught under our system, they will drive new problem-solving approaches based on interdisciplinary fusion into the very fabric of human inquiry, deriving elegant solutions to existing challenges while posing exciting new challenges for the next century.

http://www.projectpolymath.org

We also have a group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=88434915172

Donated funds are currently allocated towards offering future courses (ultimately a curriculum) and procuring classroom space (ultimately a campus).