Dr. Mark Naufel

Mark Naufel came to these pages by way of practice. Much of what they argue he first saw done by others, and the rest he has tried to do himself.

He was educated at Arizona State University in the years it was remaking itself under a charter that measures a university “not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” He served as its student body president. Arizona’s Governor then appointed him student regent on the Arizona Board of Regents, which governs the state’s three public universities. He left that table convinced that students can share in the government of their schools, and govern well.

At ASU he founded the Luminosity Lab on a single premise: that students of any academic year can lead serious research and invention, not merely assist it. The students were the principal investigators, inventors, and authors of the work, and the international prizes their teams won were their own. Out of the lab came Axio, an early venture in personalized, lifelong learning, built to give each learner what had once been reserved for a few: rigorous, one-to-one instruction. He is an inventor in his own right, and holds patents for his work.

He is by temperament a builder. He made his first website in the third grade, for his teacher, and has not stopped making things since. He holds a doctorate in human systems engineering and degrees in systems engineering, analytics, and finance. Much of the rest, from software to history, he taught himself, and he counts himself a student still.

At thirty-three he became President of the University of Silicon Valley. Henry D. Cogswell founded the school in San Francisco in 1887, and it became one of the first technical colleges in the West. It followed the technology industry south to San Jose, where it now teaches art, technology, and enterprise. He chose it knowing how far it stands from what these pages ask, and for that reason. A small school with the will to change is the place to find out whether these principles can be kept, and the work there has only begun.

The Unfinished Inheritance is his own work. It is not an official policy of the University of Silicon Valley, and it speaks for no institution.

First published in November 2026. Those who endorse it do so as individuals, unless an institution has endorsed it separately.