The university experiment

Nature - 15 October 2014

What is a university? To Shelby Foote, the US novelist and Civil War historian, it was merely “a group of buildings gathered around a library”. To generations of students, it provided the best times of their lives. To many Nature readers, it is an employer. For Nature itself, many are customers. A university, to linguists, is a derivation of a Latin description of a community of teachers and scholars.
For more than 1,000 years, that crucial sense of community has endured. There is natural synergy between education — the transfer of knowledge — and research — the creation of knowledge. It makes sense for teachers and scholars to sit next to each other; better still, for them to be the same person.
Universities have always changed with the times. But there is a growing sense that the pace of that change is accelerating. More fundamentally, universities are losing control of the process. Change is being forced on them. The community of teachers and scholars will surely endure; it is too powerful to ignore. But the form that that community takes could change profoundly. Whatever a university looks like today, it seems certain that the universities of 2030 will look very different.
This special issue of Nature tackles the matter head-on. And it does so by reporting on several experiments taking place at universities across the world, which are examining new approaches to both teaching and scholarship. This is an international concern, and the model, funding and operation of universities vary considerably from country to country. That makes it difficult to generalize about possible solutions. But, to a greater or lesser extent, all universities are buffeted by external forces from the same three directions. Two of these have been gathering strength for decades, and the other is just getting under way.
First, universities are educating more people. Their original expansion just over a century ago saw them broaden from training the aristocracy in the classics to offering a range of professional schools for law, medicine and science. In recent decades, the expansion has been in the number and type of student. A series of welcome social changes has brought access to a university education to a larger and more diverse spectrum of people. This must all be paid for somehow.
 
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