Another futuring method involves reaching back in time, using historical examples as analogies for the present.

A visitation.

For example, Walter Russell Mead thinks of an early modern antecedent for state-university relations in a stressed economy:

Our universities today look a lot like the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII: vulnerable targets for a hungry state.

Nice sentence.  It would make a fine discussion prompt, all by itself.

Mead explains it thusly:

State legislators are going to be wrestling with questions like whether to cut the pensions of retired state workers, cut services for voters, or raise taxes.  In this atmosphere, the research university model (in the humanities and, economics and management accepted, the social sciences) may not long survive, at least in the public sector.  (Highly endowed private universities may keep the old model alive.)

Note how that discussion takes pains to unfold higher education in some diversity: private vs public institutions, humanities vs STEM.

Interestingly, Mead’s starting point is that Bauerline article we noted.

There are other historically-grounded futures practices, which we’ll get to. I’m starting to read a recent book on the subject, History and future : using historical thinking to imagine the future (David J. Staley, Lexington Books, 2007).

(image from Wikipedia)