As history shows, universities must adapt to a changing world – or die

Universities around the world have never been more powerful. They are richer, more influential, more deeply embedded in national economies than ever. Yet they sometimes resemble besieged citadels.

Attacks arrive from multiple directions simultaneously: from populist politicians who dismiss academia as hopelessly elitist, from sceptical students who wonder whether their investment of time and money will pay off, and from artificial intelligence, which threatens to upend the transmission of knowledge. And universities are struggling to respond, due to a structural inertia similar to that which led to the demise of another group of institutions of learning half a millennium ago.

The scale of higher education’s growth over the past half-century is extraordinary. Global student numbers have surged from approximately 13 million in 1960 to more than 260 million today. Where once perhaps a thousand universities existed worldwide, there are now over 50,000. Total global university annual turnover approaches a trillion dollars.

Institutions that were once cloistered retreats from the world now reshape whole cities and anchor regional economies. In countries such as Australia and the UK, they rank among the largest sources of export earnings. Some have swelled to astonishing size: the Indira Gandhi National Open University serves some 7 million students, Anadolu University in Turkey around 2 million. Yet it is precisely this success that has created new vulnerabilities.

Five hundred years ago, monasteries dominated European life as centres of learning, wealth and prestige. They appeared permanent, with extraordinary status and confidence. But within two centuries, they had largely collapsed. In England, Henry VIII dissolved them with breathtaking speed, stripping their treasures and leaving their structures in ruin. As Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, warned as early as a decade ago, their fate serves as a warning to universities. “Dissolution may not be imminent, but the warnings abide in the failure of an earlier class of contemplative institution.”

Even when they were spared dissolution, monasteries elsewhere in Europe fell into inexorable decline as a result of failing to grasp the profound transformation in systems of knowledge unfolding around them – the printing press, the Renaissance, religious reformation, a new spirit of empirical inquiry. Now, perhaps, the universities that replaced them as societies’ centres of learning are failing to grasp exactly what’s happening around them. History, as the saying goes, does not repeat, but it rhymes.

Peter Drucker’s 1997 prediction that university campuses would become “relics” within 30 years because of digital technology proved spectacularly wrong. Physical universities may offer tacit learning and social connection that technology cannot replicate. But on the formal transmission of knowledge and the mechanics of research, disruption now seems inevitable, thanks to new options for teaching, learning and AI-driven scientific discovery.

Politics is a second challenge. Donald Trump’s assault on American universities, branding them as woke, elitist and administratively bloated, finds echoes in many other democracies, where there’s a widening gulf between knowledge workers and other citizens. In response, much of the commentary from within the academy can seem tone deaf, with eloquent complaints that universities are not funded or loved enough, or are not given enough freedom.

There’s also a deeper problem. Institutions that pride themselves on the rigorous application of experiment, evidence and inquiry to every field of human endeavour invest almost nothing in applying those same principles to themselves. Indeed, instead of using the methods of R&D, “isomorphism” is the norm, as universities everywhere converge on the same formats for courses, lectures, PhDs and academic roles, regardless of context.

Innovation happens at the edges. Different models of teaching are being experimented with by new institutions, such as the London Interdisciplinary School, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (NMITE) in Hereford and Krea University in India. So too are the many online providers, from Coursera to FutureLearn, and some well-funded new models of research are also emerging, such as Focused Research Organisations in the US. But where are the laboratories systematically testing these innovations in higher education? Where are the accelerators, the evidence synthesisers? Instead of rigorous innovation, there is a defensive crouch.

Universities do respond to financial pressure, but their instinct is to commission consultants – who return with recommendations for mergers and centralisation, along with new layers of bureaucracy, despite very flimsy evidence that these will deliver better outcomes. Monastic leaders in the 14th and 15th centuries did the same, swallowing smaller institutions and centralising power in “congregations”: a managerial rather than a strategic response.

At minimum, the current moment demands fundamentally rethinking the social contract between universities and the societies that fund them, asking hard questions about what universities do in exchange for their privileged position. Should research be radically de-bureaucratised and decoupled from teaching? Should AI-assisted teaching refocus attention on the metacognitive skills students actually need, rather than preparing them, as most current courses implicitly do, to become academics within existing disciplines?

There are many different answers, some oriented to a future where lifelong learning will become ever more of a priority, others to taking seriously the push to more challenge-based models of education and research. There are also many alternative organisational models that could be used: trusts, cooperatives, partnerships, purpose-driven corporations or even the “stacks” and “meshes” of the world of communications and computing: systems of separately run “layers” of functionality, allowing for mutual coordination in flexible ways. But little work is being done to explore these systematically, again because of the absence of an R&D function directed to universities themselves.

Universities have existed for millennia, so they should know better than anyone that institutions decay when they assume that their current form is permanent. The monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose discuss the threats posed by the new universities rising in medieval cities. Now the universities need their own version of those conversations.

The lesson of the monasteries is not that dissolution is inevitable. It is that no institution has a divine right to exist.

Geoff Mulgan is professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at UCL. For a longer version of this article, see his Substack.