UNIVERSITY. EFFICIENCY IS NO LONGER ENOUGH

 We need 

to integrate teaching, 

research 

and 

civic engagement”

The university as an institution is in serious crisis and if we want to save it we need to rethink it. The current model based on efficiency must be overcome

Alexandra Luna Navarro

 Modern science has often had to grow amidst patronage, public office, and limited autonomy. But the university as we know it today – secular, public, oriented toward the production and transmission of knowledge – was born in the Middle Ages as universitas magistrorum et scholarium , an autonomous corporation of teachers and students.

The first studia generalia , such as Bologna and Paris, were cosmopolitan centers of learning, open to students of all origins, where law, medicine, philosophy and theology were taught. With the Humboldtian model of the 19th century, especially in Germany, the university emancipated itself from teaching alone and took on research as its founding mission, in the name of academic freedom and the unity of knowledge.

In the post-war period, European universities became public infrastructures at the service of democracy, social equity and development. Today, unfortunately, this model is faltering.

In the Netherlands, the government announced cuts to research and higher education of more than €1.2 billion. In the United Kingdom, academia is facing the combined consequences of Brexit and inflation. In Brussels, the European Commission has cut the budget of Horizon Europe by €2.1 billion, reallocating €1.5 billion to defense research.

This leads to increasingly crowded research calls, with success rates sometimes around 2%. In the United States, unfortunately, the situation is even worse. The new Trump presidency is reducing funding and, even worse, imposing control on the topics covered by researchers.

But the issue is not only quantitative. It is epistemological . Today, to obtain funding, you have to demonstrate that you already have preliminary results, a consolidated network and verifiable impacts . In other words: you have to already know what you intend to discover. A paradox that penalizes the riskiest ideas, often the most promising.

For example, David Baker, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on the computational design of proteins, says that he would never have been able to come up with the idea of predicting the structure of proteins with artificial intelligence, if he had not received a “non-repayable” funding through a personal fellowship to explore a risky and unconventional idea.

This is not an isolated case. A study published in Nature in 2023 shows that disruptiveness – the ability of articles and patents to radically change existing knowledge – has been in decline for decades. Research proceeds by accumulation, rarely by deviation. Evaluation systems incentivize productivity, not surprise. Hyper-specialization reduces interdisciplinarity. Bibliometric metrics risk compressing imagination.

Already in 2011, Harvard Magazine warned that universities were in danger of becoming knowledge companies, attentive to short-term results, measured by quantifiable performance, and disconnected from the great questions of our time. A risk that is now evident also in Europe.

Yet, something is moving. The DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) framework , adopted by hundreds of academic institutions around the world, proposes to overcome the impact factor as a central indicator to instead evaluate the methodological quality, the openness of data, the variety of results and the social impact of research.

But it is not enough to rethink evaluation. We need to redefine the very role of universities. In Creating the University of the Future (Springer, 2024), the German researcher Wolfgang Stark proposes the concept of universities as spaces of resonance: places where transformations are activated, where knowledge is built in the relationship with society. It is the “third mission” understood not as transfer, but as co-production together with local authorities, schools, social enterprises and active citizenship.

Community Service Learning experiences , described by Stark, show how teaching, research and civic engagement can be integrated. Students do not only learn content, but the ability to act responsibly in complex contexts. The university then becomes not only a center of excellence, but a civic hub , a laboratory of the future, a lens for imagining what is not yet there.

The future of the university cannot be reduced to a question of management or efficiency. It is a political and cultural issue. It means deciding whether we want universities reduced to patent incubators, or places where we think critically , make legitimate mistakes, and take collective risks. As Galileo, Newton, and Marie Curie did yesterday, and as Giorgio Parisi, David Baker and many others have done in more recent times.

Defending the university today means defending the very possibility of imagining a shared, just and creative future. It means creating conditions in which knowledge can continue to ask unexpected questions. Even when the answers are not yet within reach.

Il Sussidiario