Somewhere in the past decade or so, the conversation about universities shifted. The question used to be what they were producing — researchers, professionals, ideas, a broadly educated citizenry. Now the question is whether they’re worth it at all. Whether the whole enterprise has drifted so far from its original purpose that what remains is barely recognizable.
It’s a reasonable question. Less reasonable is the answer that usually follows, which tends to place the blame on universities themselves — on academic insularity, on administrative bloat, on an institution that has somehow forgotten what it’s for.
Spend time looking at what’s actually happening inside these places and a different picture emerges.
Humanities departments closing. Research centres wound down mid-project, sometimes with grants already spent and findings half-written. A lecturer in Manchester or Johannesburg or Vancouver hired on a rolling contract that expires in June, teaching four courses to a room of eighty students, with no particular reason to believe July will look any different. None of this happened because university leadership stopped caring about education. The money ran out, or got redirected, and someone had to make the numbers work by the end of the financial year.
The irony is sharp. Universities are being asked to operate like corporations — competing for students, chasing income streams, justifying every course against an employment metric — while simultaneously being criticized for behaving too much like corporations. The criticism lands. The structural conditions producing the behavior go largely unexamined.
Universities have existed in roughly recognizable form since the twelfth century. Governments changed, empires fell, the entire social order got rearranged several times over. The basic arrangement — scholars and students gathering to think together, to push knowledge somewhere it hasn’t been before — survived most of it. That staying power suggests something more than institutional inertia. It suggests the arrangement is doing something that societies keep finding they need.
What’s newer and considerably more fragile is the funding model underpinning today’s version of all that. Public investment once treated as straightforwardly justified now has to be argued for against competing priorities, measured through metrics designed for industries with different purposes entirely, and defended against a political rhetoric that has found real traction in treating universities as suspect institutions producing uncertain returns.
A climate researcher in Addis Ababa working on drought prediction doesn’t think of herself as generating a return on investment. Her work is slow and cumulative. It might matter enormously in fifteen years and be impossible to price today. That’s not a weakness in the model. That’s what the model is for.
The executives making cuts aren’t the villains here, or not straightforwardly. They’re managing constraints set elsewhere — by governments that reduce funding and then express disappointment at the results, by systems demanding efficiency from institutions whose value has always depended on resisting exactly that pressure. The bureaucracy multiplies, the workloads grow, the researchers get more disillusioned, and the cycle tightens.
What universities are genuinely struggling with is not a crisis of purpose. Most of the people inside them know exactly what they’re there to do. The struggle is making that case loudly enough, to the right people, before another department gets quietly discontinued and another decade of accumulated knowledge disperses.
Whether that argument can still be won is genuinely unclear.
