Short for "universal public," upublic was formed at Columbia University by graduate students in education, technology, business, medicine, law and architecture. They organized themselves around a commonly held perception that a critical mass of self-serving, socially negligent leadership was driving the spiraling decline of quality education at all levels. The group saw this ailing education system as the core contributing factor to the growing number of complex challenges that were piling up on the social landscape, and felt an urgent responsibility to revitalize it through interdisciplinary teamwork and a holistic approach to problem solving.

Since their first project in 2005, the founders of upublic have remained acutely aware of systemic limitations that prevent public and private education from evolving into something more meaningful, and they refuse to let it undermine the potential of yet another generation of learners. In this, they continue to draw on their formative observations:

Whether affluent or impoverished, urban or rural, private or public, a poor education deprives an individual of his or her humanity. Most children and adults the world over receive a critically poor education. The public rightly deserves better.

The prevailing symptomatic approach to addressing fundamental problems in education has retarded real progress in education for over 100 years. Historically, reform initiatives amount to little more than what is fashionable, expedient, and marketable, at the expense of what is necessary and right. No amount of such band-aid reforms will produce leaders who can lead, teachers who can teach, provide equitable and accessible learning resources, or create a culture in which the best interests of children and families are taken to heart.

Decades of aversion to accountability and change have calcified into an epidemic of institutional inertia that stifles innovation in our schools, paralyzing educators from adopting policies, creating curricula, and educating students to be effective and prosperous in the twenty-first century.