It is 2035. Georgia Tech’s president, deans, professors, staff and a scattering of alumni and students are gathered in a ballroom in Technology Square to look back 25 years.

In 2010, Tech “had an amazing reputation, it had extraordinary alumni loyalty and its growth in its campus, both physically and fiscally, had been quite remarkable. But equally clear were the challenges that it was then facing,” including diminished state funding, challenges in the overall economy and growing global competition for talent, said Joe Bankoff, president and CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center and a member of the College of Computing advisory board.

President G. P. “Bud” Peterson invited Bankoff to deliver the Back to the Future-like presentation in January as part of the ongoing development of a strategic vision that will be unveiled this fall.

“In 2010, Georgia Tech set out to reframe its courses, its calendar, its performance incentives and its interactions between faculty, students and alumni. Flexible course structures were adopted,” Bankoff said, and “the resulting innovation was transformative for the university, for education at several levels and for the cultural and economic environment of Atlanta.”

He said Tech took advantage of plummeting real estate prices by acquiring vacant Midtown Atlanta office buildings “to create the new home of the Georgia Institute of Innovation.”

“Georgia Tech’s collection of research and innovation facilities and programs attracted willing, anxious and renowned collaborators near and far,” Bankoff said, and breakthrough innovations resulted in such areas as biomechanics, nanotechnology, low-carbon technologies and robotics. “These innovations were not only technical advances, they incorporated aspects of design aesthetic that made them cool. Making them cool made them usable. Making them cool and usable made them valuable commercially, and so the innovation institute spawned an explosion of the redevelopment of the old areas of Midtown Atlanta.”

The Alumni Association figured into Bankoff’s vision to attract graduates back to campus in the future.

“A new benefit of membership in the Alumni Association became the lifetime option to engage in campus discussions and periodically participate in a class or a project. In exchange, the alum was asked to contribute to the dialogue online or in person, and the community of continuous learning was therefore extended to all alumni and built an even stronger commitment to the institution,” he said.

Between 2010 and 2035, “big, hairy, audacious goals” would be realized, Bankoff said, including the creation of an institute for intellectual property and competition law.

Peterson called Bankoff’s ideas exciting and scary. “It gives you some sense of how important what we are doing today will be to Georgia Tech in the future,” he said.

“One of the things that’s clearly come out of this is the need for flexible-degree programs,” he said. “One of the statements that’s been made is: If we believe that many of the new and exciting fields of discovery that are going to help shape the future are in fact going to lie at the intersection of traditional disciplines, then why in the world would we continue to educate students in a structured, traditional disciplinary format?”

He said a four-year degree probably will no longer carry an individual through his entire working life.

“What if Georgia Tech were to guarantee all undergraduates that they could come back, that we’d guarantee their education for life?” Peterson asked. “You can come back and take any undergraduate course for free for the rest of your life … on a space-available basis.”

Peterson said Tech could take the lead in intellectual property policy. “No institution of higher education has really figured out how to handle intellectual property. We spend an awful lot of time pitting our attorneys against our research sponsors’ attorneys, fighting over something that may never exist, may never transpire. Maybe we can take a national leadership position … and set the bar at a level other people will strive to achieve.”

There are opportunities for Tech to serve as a model to foster health-care excellence as well as to establish virtual-learning environments, he said, and Georgia Tech could set up an office with the sole purpose of working to acquire green cards for international graduate students.

“We bring in this tremendous amount of talent into this country in graduate schools, then we make it very, very difficult for those students to stay in this country and contribute to the economy and the well-being and the technology development that is so important,” Peterson said.

In his closing remarks, Bankoff told the audience, which largely consisted of people crafting the strategic vision, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”