Tag Archives: university

Noteworthy, Philosophy

Evolving minds: The university through time

There are several interesting papers on this topic during the last few weeks. The most interesting one was “How universities came to be – and why they’re in trouble now” by Philip G. Altbach. Higher education worldwide is under strain, facing deep financial and political challenges. In the U.S., universities are dealing with major federal funding cuts and political pressure on teaching and research. In the U.K. money troubles are pushing some institutions toward collapse. Global enrolment has exploded from 6 million in 1950 to 264 million in 2023, and by 2024 most countries—except in sub-Saharan Africa—were sending over half of school-leavers to higher education.  So we don’t have anymore an elite university but education for the masses.

As higher education became accessible to the masses across the world, research-intensive universities based on the original Humboldtian model have come to represent just a small proportion of all higher education institutions.[…] the rise of populist politics has compounded some of these pressures. Populism has many causes —Rejection of experts, science and evidence-based policy is part of many populist movements.

Therefore we have now less highly qualified scientists at universities who will even move to the private sector.  Clara Collier at  her blog analyses the historical development.

…  something happened to German universities at the turn of the 19th century — they developed a new system that combined teaching with research. Within a few decades, everyone in Europe was trying to copy their model. German scientists dominated chemistry and revolutionized modern physics. They came up with cell theory, bacteriology, the whole laboratory-based model of scientific medicine

The historical origins illuminate why modern universities may be in trouble: if the delicate balance between funding, mission, autonomy, teaching, and research shifts too far, the institution risks losing its raison d’être. All the financial and structural pressures that force now institutions to prioritise revenue, prestige, cost-cutting and global competition rather than education. In addition we have a legitimacy crisis, where universities are no longer seen as the unique centres of knowledge creation and public good – they compete instead with other knowledge platforms and feel more like businesses.

While the above analysis suggested that universities will decline when they lose their grounding in mission, and unity of purpose, a NYT article two months ago suggested that  decline already happens by finances and market pressures that force institutions to compromise on programmes, services, and expectations undermining their offer to students that doesn’t stress anymore “ideas” as much as “money & market”.

– Rising administrative and support costs, which have soared in recent decades, even as state legislatures have tightened public spigots.
– Higher tuition prices, among other considerations, which have turned off students, who are routinely paying more and oftentimes getting less.
– Some academic programs that draw few students.

In the same vein is another Atlantic article on the disruption of the federal research-funding ecosystem (especially via the NIH) which ties into the broader theme of financial/mission distress.

Now many university professors and researchers believe that this special fusion of research and teaching is at risk. “I feel lost,” a research scientist at a top-five university who works on climate and data science told me.

It complements the notion that universities are vulnerable not only to enrolment/tuition pressures and mission drift, but also to external shocks in the research funding system. Many research universities have built major commitments around securing federal research grants and the indirect cost (“overhead”) payments from them. The Atlantic piece argues that when those are threatened, the whole institution becomes fragile.

That ties back to the origin‐story of the modern research university (the teaching + research model) — if the “research” side now collapses, the model itself is under threat. This injects more urgency: it’s not only decades of mission drift and funding pressure, but also sudden regulatory/policy upheavals.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Philosophy

The slow abandonment of the academic mindset

Mittelman  on the  “The World-Class University and Repurposing Higher Education” 2018:

… the central academic purposes of the university are imperiled. While not universally adopted, they began to take root in the nineteenth century, developed gradually in the nineteenth and twentieth, and encounter novel tensions in the twenty-first. In this century, the triad of core educational missions in nonauthoritarian societies—cultivating democratic citizenship, fostering critical thinking, and protecting academic freedom — is losing footing. A new form of utilitarianism is gaining ground. It prioritizes useful knowledge and problem-solving skills at the expense of basic inquiry…

A few pages later Mittelman notices that universities

… have become preoccupied with strategic planning, benchmarking, branding, visibility, rankings, productivity indices, quality assurance systems, students as customers, and measurable outcomes. Before the 1980s, members of the higher education community rarely expressed themselves in these terms.

And it is true – we have been struggling even after 1980 with the mysteries of nature, by designing experiments and studies, trying to make new discoveries and teaching them to our students.

Fast rewind to the “idea of  a university” and the “cultivated intellect” by John Henry Newman (p15) and the usefulness of useless knowledge  of Abraham Flexner. In the last century clearly a need for unanticipated outcome was felt while today basically every research program starts with  a lengthy introduction that this is the most important research because disease D is so frequent or technology T is so important for the environment. Mittelman quotes Daniel Zajfman, 10th president of Israel’s Weizmann Institute, when talking about university rankings

When we look at the values of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, we realise 100 years later what we can do with this. If you look at the history of science, you will find that most of the discoveries were never made by trying to solve a problem, rather by trying to understand how nature works, so our focus is on understanding.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025
Philosophy, Video

Rejection hurts. Why everybody needs somebody

515 citations of an article in 5 years – it is timely to revisit “Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion” by Eisenberger in Science magazine. I was refered to that study by “Lob der Schule” (an excellent book).

Participants were scanned while playing a virtual ball-tossing game in which they were ultimately excluded. Paralleling results from physical pain studies, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was more active during exclusion.

These are bad news for all victims of workplace bullying or university harassment – their brains will react like under stimulation of physical harm leading to aggression as found in many studies

A wide variety of studies with animal as well as human subjects demonstrate that pain often gives rise to an inclination to hurt an available target, and also, at the human level, that people in pain are apt to be angry.

So, the final aggression of the victim is used to further isolate it – a vicious circle.

Rolling Stones

Blues Brothers

10.1.2019 revisited

The facts seem to be now largely accepted, see an article in Psychology Today: Is Social Pain Real Pain? and the 2012 review by Eisenberger. More recently some authors even think that “The salience of self, not social pain, is encoded by dorsal anterior cingulate and insula“.

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 10.11.2025