Universities in the 21st Century: A Changing Global Landscape

Universities go through a tough time. They are criticised on all sides. On the one hand, they are systematically berated and defunded by populist leaders who accuse them of social elitism, theoretical abstraction, political radicalism and cosmopolitan aloofness. On the other hand, nostalgics of a romanticised era of higher public funding consider them to be bureaucratic neoliberal monsters whose intellectual agenda has fallen prey to global corporate interests. Coming from left and right, these criticisms suggest that universities are no longer able to satisfy the main social demands placed upon their shoulders, as they would fail to prepare young generations to become informed and active citizens; develop solutions to the socio-technological problems of the future; and invent new forms of working and living together based on core values of respectful exchange, disinterested scholarship and meritocratic advancement in the scientific career – what the sociologist Robert Merton believed were the key characteristics of scientific learning.

Although the criticism may appear exaggerated, it is true that universities have undergone major transformations in the last fifty years since the creation of mass universities in the wake of the postwar Western recovery and the need to adapt the skill sets of new generations to an increasingly deindustrialised labour market. The era of democratisation of higher education that occurred in the 1960s in the West preceded the advent of globalisation and the ensuing expansion and democratisation of universities worldwide, especially in Asia, where China has now become a major academic power house. This issue of Global Challenges thus seeks to harness how universities have changed in response to globalisation in the last decades. It also highlights the role of other factors, such as the digitalisation of learning, which was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, or the changing demands of students who revert to rankings and other reputational tools to navigate an increasingly complex higher education landscape.

The articles point to the importance of the 1980s as a key turning point in the global transformation of higher education, marked by the “financialisation” of Western economies in general, and of universities in particular. Such financialisation has at least four components. First, there emerged strong pressures to cut public investments in the field of higher education. Second, the missions of public universities were redefined, as public spending needed to be rationalised as an “investment” capable of yielding financial returns and could no longer be justified solely on behalf of ideologies promoting social equality, democratisation of knowledge or solidarity. Third, important changes in university boards occurred with the hiring of financial markets specialists who replaced visionary academic peers. This led to a prioritisation of responsibly managing financial endowments (especially in private universities) and generating profits over producing qualitative academic outputs and innovative frontier research. Fourth, and relatedly, new public management models spread in much of the Anglo-European universities at a time when US institutions became leaders in a field of globally ranked universities marked by fierce competition for talented students. With this financialised post-1980s university model, academics started to witness (and criticise the spread of) new techniques to manage academic staff that were associated with the increasing use of metrics, audits and quantitative assessments rather than qualitative traditional peer review. These new tools justified budgetary cuts on “non-profitable” disciplines such as the humanities and funding was increased in emergent interdisciplinary fields that extolled the values of corporate concerns and their interest in sponsoring practical, applied and technical knowledge and solutions rather than long-term fundamental research and societal critical questioning.

Even though these trends continue to play a key transformative role in present-day academia – in particular, in post-Brexit British higher education –, other processes have started to transform universities since the 2000s. First, the 2008 economic crisis depleted Anglo-American universities of their precious financial resources, while Europe continued to witness the continuing defunding of public universities and Asian countries began to invest in universities, predominantly in the scientific and technological fields – all leading to a certain levelling of the playing field. Second, this came at a time of deepened anxiety over the place of traditional Eurocentric epistemologies and conceptions of knowledge, when a new generation of students with new expectations, faced with an increasingly complex labour market, demanded more accountability from Anglo-American university “shareholders” for the investment they made in their very expensive education. Their critique largely orginates in endogeneous processes associated with a broader historical reevaluation of universities’ past links to corporate and colonial interests, which lead university directors to set up commissions of inquiry with reparative objectives. While sometimes risking to generate new forms of epistemic closure, students’ legitimate quests for historical truth and reparative justice have been wrongly portrayed and instrumentalised by nationalist and populist leaders pushing their conservative agendas. This third aspect of the post-2008 reaction – populist hostility to new academic knowledge – affected universities not only in authoritarian contexts, like in Russia, Hungary or Turkey, but also in the US and in Europe. It was mostly staged in the media, which propagated political controversies about the alleged radicalisation of academia. This new context created what university backers considered to be an environment filled with “reputational risks”, which further weakened universities that feared loosing the financial support of donors and private funders of research. In the meantime, faculty bodies, attached to their tradition of free and respectful exchange of a diversity of ideas, have felt a loss of power and an increased sense of insecurity, as witnessed by the multiplications of threats to academic freedom in the last few years. Remarkably, although all these processes have had different origins, they have sometimes combined to accelerate previous neoliberal transformations.

Not everything is bleak, however. Universities may have produced more knowledge in the last 50 years than they did in the rest of human history. Universities have to solve an existential crisis by redefining their main mission – as the language of sustainability and diversity alone will not suffice. Academic freedom remains a core value in many universities that uphold the traditional Humboldtian values of research, innovation and humanism, while mixing it with a concern for the democratisation of knowledge that was largely absent from nineteentnh-century German universities. Similarly, in line with rising living standards in emerging countries, the number of international students continues to grow. In many places, education is still perceived as a “common good” and not a “for profit” knowledge that can be commodified. Greater inter-university cooperation has taken place within higher education networks, including both student exchanges (as Europe’s Erasmus programme) and research cooperation across regions and countries (as Europe’s funding schemes, from which Switzerland has unfortunately been cut in the last few years). Universities also stand at the beginning of a new era of learning as a digital revolution brings AI-led transformations to all aspects of research, with as yet unknown consequences for the democratisation of knowledge or the bureaucratic burdens placed on university professors. Digitalisation can democratise access to knowledge, but only to the extent that the unequal access to digital resources worldwide – the digital divide and “silicon ceiling” denounced by some of our contributors – is addressed. It will therefore be useful only if it is accompanied by stronger international collaboration among universities and supported by critical assessments of its technologies, in all their aspects, from data ownership to the governance of digital assets.

As a result of all these trends, universities today are facing crucial challenges which need to be addressed. They have to solve an existential crisis by redefining their main mission – as the language of sustainability and diversity alone will not suffice.

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First, they have to address the issue of financing as public funding continuously decreases and the need to develop sustainable strategies without placing the burdens on new generations by increasing tuition costs. Universities need to remain affordable and accessible to continue to promote social mobility and train citizens to think critically, which is essential to well-functioning democracies. Public financing will remain key, as universities are more than spaces furthering the employability of younger generations: they must also provide opportunities for life-long learning beyond their core focus on training future generations and giving them the skills to think critically. Second, they have to reimagine forms of inter-university cooperation in an ever more competitive global field where new actors like vocational schools emerge. A key concern is to defend values of internationalism and cosmopolitanism: universities have to fend off political pressures and interferences with academic freedom at the same time as they need to answer demands for historical and present accountability, including about past university entanglements with exploitative logics with respect to what is called today the Global South. A true internationalism based on equality and symmetry is yet to be constructed. Third, and last, universities have to address the multiple demands placed on researchers and professors, who are increasingly asked to become fundraisers, managers and communicators experts on top of being supervisors, researchers and teachers, leading to the multiplication of burn-outs and other work-related forms of suffering. Overall, the ivory tower has been torn down, but that does not mean that universities should become yet another business pursuing profit maximisation and overlook its broader missions. Universities provide the time, space and resources to reflect on these issues in depth and in the longue durée: they need to remain spaces where one can think freely and critically without moral bans and censorship.