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
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
