Does the University Have a Future?

Abstract

Although this article examines the problems facing modern universities such as their loss of independence and shortage of funding, similar problems faced universities throughout the 20th century. The focus is on the post-war generation, the creation of new universities and the political and economic changes that were brought about by Thatcherism. In the growth period between 1945 and the 1970s, many working-class children gained social mobility through the expansion of the university sector. This period also attracted large numbers of exiles from Europe. The contemporary demographic challenge to universities in terms of the shrinkage of the population of eligible students is critical. Universities have responded by recruiting primarily Chinese and Indian students. This challenge joins other modern problems: bureaucracy, managerialism, rising costs, the loss of academic independence, stagnant wages, declining opportunities and the threat of AI. Can we imagine and build the post-university? Is the cafe as a meeting place a possible model of a global online intellectual hub?

Pessimism and Complaining Professors

The problem with ageing is that one often becomes nostalgic for the past and, as a result, after one’s youth is over everything afterwards appears to be down-hill. Consequently, and in retrospect, the modern university can only be seen as a pale reflection of the universities of one’s youth. In this regard it is worth reminding ourselves that professors have, if not always, then for most of the time, been complaining about declining standards and conditions in universities. One very specific criticism of the modern university is that state intervention has undermined the independence and authority of the faculties to manage their own affairs. The problem of the independence of the university is not a recent development. Max Weber complained bitterly about the same issue in the so-called ‘Bernhard Affair’. Friedrich Althoff, head of the department of university affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Education, appointed Ludwig Bernhard to a full professorship in economics without the necessary consultations with the faculty professors. For Weber this event was simply yet another instance of the creeping power of the state over the university (Althoff and Weber, 1973). The influence of the professors was being displaced. But what made it worse for Weber was that there was no protest coming from the professoriate. For Weber, the university, as with other key institutions of German society, was going through a profound process of bureaucratization and rationalization to the detriment of academic independence and authority.

Educational Reforms and the Red Professors

In Britain, the generation that was born after the Second World War enjoyed the significant benefit of the educational reforms that flowed from R.A. Butler’s Education Act of 1944. It was celebrated by T.H. Marshall (Marshall and Bottomore, 1992) as having achieved ‘the elimination of inherited social privilege’. This observation was clearly an exaggeration, but we should not underestimate the move towards a free basic education for all.

However, we can perhaps begin this story of educational reform by looking at the situation after the First World War and the vision of the ‘three red professors’, namely G.D.H. Cole (1889–1960), Harold Laski (1893–1950) and R.H. Tawney (1880–1962), who were associated with socialism and the labour movement. Attempts to reform the education system through the Extension of Education Bill in 1918 had failed. Tawney, writing in 1917 on ‘A National College of All Souls’, complained about ‘the contempt for disinterested intellectual activity’. The ‘fundamental obstacle in the way of Englishmen is to regard as most important that which is commercially profitable’. He concluded that the government was indifferent to promoting access to education, because for the privileged elites ‘it does not really very much matter whether the children of mere common wage-earners are educated or not’ (Tawney and Benn, 1953: 31). A comprehensive educational system was put in place in 1944, after another world war. These reforms greatly expanded what Dahrendorf (1979) has called ‘life chances’ for a whole generation of children born after the conclusion of the war. Where and when you are born probably determines 90% of what happens through one’s life. In other words, sociologists might pay more attention to the role of accidents rather than to our plans.

Although I am allergic to nostalgia, this article concerns the complicated character of academic decline and seriously asks whether the traditional university has a future, or indeed any future. In addition, we are compelled to observe that these problems of decline, irrelevance and bureaucracy are international in their scope. What is happening in the United States and the United Kingdom is replicated in Australia and New Zealand. Although this article is pessimistic as to future developments, I also believe that pessimism is ultimately an incoherent option. Genuine pessimists don’t write books or give lectures – what would be the point? In short, we have a responsibility to offer strategies or at least scenarios that create alternative futures. In this case we need to conclude with a vision of what the post-university might look like.

What Is Wrong with the University?

To take examples from the United States, behind the prestigious Nobel Prizes and substantial research grants and donations, the American university system is in a state of decline and decay. The problem is not just a few issues here and there. Problems are to be expected in any complex and large system. The real problem is that the failures are system-wide and involve numerous elements that are all failing simultaneously. One basic issue is that the cost of education for students and their families continues to rise. To take one example, a year at Cornell University now costs nearly $90,000. Another issue that also appears to be widespread is the sustained growth in administrative positions against a decline in academic employment. One estimate is that at Yale University there is an administrator for every undergraduate student. At the University of California, Los Angeles, faculty members declined by 7% between 1977 and 1987, while the administrative staff increased by 36%. At MIT, faculty members increased by 8% between 1981 and 1989 while administrative personnel increased by 37% (Gornitzka et al., 1998).

Apart from the elite of senior professors, working conditions for most academics are no longer attractive and many lecturers find themselves on short-term contracts with no promise of long-term security. As in most Western societies, student enrolments have fallen dramatically with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, but with no significant evidence that universities have recovered after the eventual decline of the pandemic. One implication of working at home was that office space for staff could be cut as unnecessary. Academics working from home with large numbers of students found themselves without adequate office or library support.

With radical changes to the economy with many new technologies, business leaders in the United States often complain that graduates no longer have the training and skills that are required in the emerging labour market. Because of these multiple changes to university life, many parents and students now regard a college degree as a dubious investment.

With respect to the future of the university as a research community, the value of a PhD is also being questioned. In the past it was often seen as the main route to a stable and rewarding research career. This trajectory is increasingly expensive with no guarantee of a secure and rewarding role in a research institute. As a result of these many problems, the attempts by President Biden to resolve the issue of student debt was welcome, but his intervention cannot resolve the underlying long-term problem of inflation or the gap between the cost of education and future incomes.

A new development, the consequences of which are merely guess work, is the potential application of AI to both teaching and research. The unresolved issue, which the Luddites discovered, is that, while new technology replaces traditional labour, there is no guarantee that it will create new forms of employment. AI will probably be in demand in the natural sciences and in such areas as economics, accountancy, and engineering where it can handle large data sets. The humanities may be more susceptible to the ‘AI-invasion’ as parents, employers and university administrators see little relevance in modern languages or history programmes in these changing circumstances.

These problems facing the university system are not peculiar to the United States. They appear to be endemic to the modern university. While there is a large literature on the problems facing the university system, what is often missing from these explanations of the crisis of the university system is demography, namely the widespread collapse of the fertility rate and the long-term contraction of the population in the age group between 18 and 30 years, namely the cohort from which undergraduate students would be typically recruited. One solution with an ageing population is simply to recruit from retirees. For these citizens who are well past retirement, is such a degree primarily for personal entertainment? Perhaps the University of the Third Age had already set the context for retired students.

The actual solution which has been universally adopted in the West is to attract large numbers of foreign students, for example, from China and India. These students are often difficult to supervise because, apart from language issues, they typically confront personal problems of adjusting to a foreign and often alien environment.

Furthermore, the modern student must be happy, because the university’s reputation would be damaged by student failures, and one way to achieve this end is to make learning an enjoyable if artificial experience. The use of slides to illustrate lectures is now routine, along with other visual aids. One university in southern England welcomes new students to the university with helium balloons, coloured flags, and music. In this regard, the ‘entertainment university’ has become merely an extension of the entertainment society.

What Is the Good University?

These issues about changes to the university are not confined to the United States and the United Kingdom. There has been much debate in Australia about the decline and indeed corruption of the university. One example is Raewyn Connell’s recent publication, The Good University (Connell, 2019). Connell is famous for her work on masculinities, and she also developed the idea of ‘Southern Theory’, in part to criticize the hegemony exercised by the Global North over the Global South in terms of funding, publications, and opportunities. In her new book, she provides various examples of how universities are failing and changing, with dangerous consequences. Universities have failed to challenge the inequalities in society and within the university itself. These failings are in part a reflection of how the university system has become dominated by the commercial world. In what is known as ‘academic capitalism’, there has been a commodification of knowledge. Through various examples, she argues there is always room for hope. I shall return to this theme of optimism at the end of my argument by asking whether what we may call ‘deep pessimism’ is not a rational response to our problems.

Connell’s book is useful as a criticism of some aspects of the modern university, but I think it is short on history, namely that complaints about the corruption of the university go back, as I have indicated, at least to Weber’s complaints in the ‘Bernhard Affair’ in 1908. The age of the great ‘mandarins’ of German universities was already in decline. We can usefully recall Fritz Ringer’s famous analysis of the decline of the ‘German mandarins’ between 1890 and 1933 (Ringer, 1969).

I do not necessarily disagree with Connell’s analysis. I would, however, put more emphasis on how universities have adopted corporate models and strategies, especially to direct young academics in teaching and research. While a corporate model might suit an engineering department, it is not obviously relevant to cultural studies, or the creative arts or indeed to sociology. Academics have been confronted by a whole new language of ‘industry partnerships’, ‘outreach’, ‘national relevance’ and ‘training’ that do not fully match the actual work done in universities. Indeed, the academic prescriptions that are imposed on young academics are often either irrelevant or unrealistic. The management of Australian universities typically requires young academics to aim to publish in the top-ranked journals and only with university publishers such as Oxford University Press or Princeton University Press. These targets are well out of the actual capability of young academics. By contrast, a publisher like Springer is not on the preferred list of publishers from a management perspective, but it can offer an effective route to a large audience.

There is also pressure on young academics to publish in Q1 journals which, again, often involves overcoming what are insurmountable hurdles. From my own experience, a joint article that was submitted to the British Journal of Sociology required some three revisions and resubmissions over a two-year period before the article finally appeared. It had only three citations in the first five years.

The goals set by the university management for academics at the beginning of their careers are thus unrealistic and demonstrate an ignorance of what is actually possible when laying the foundations of a successful career. Young academics are often told by the head of their department what they will research and where they will publish. In the past, junior academics rarely required permission to work on a favoured topic. They were regarded as independent scholars and responsible for developing their own careers. They did not have to conform to some central research plan that had been handed down by the administration of the faculty. Research did not have to conform to some ‘national interest’, or to match the strategy of an ‘industry partner’. Research was often ‘curiosity driven’ – a category of research much frowned upon in contemporary university research plans. Often ‘curiosity’ research proved to be of major national and strategic importance.

Before 9/11, little support was given to faculty who wanted, for example, to do research on Islam, the Arabic language, or the history of the Middle East. Suddenly the political elite wanted to know who or what an ‘Ayatollah’ was. With ‘the war on terror’, their special expertise was suddenly in demand. These lacunae in public understandings of Islam suddenly brought the work of outsiders from the so-called ‘Hull Group’, such as Talal Asad and Roger Owen, into prominence.

In a modern university department, a junior member of staff would typically be told what research they would undertake or write about by their head of department, or even by management outside the department or faculty. This is the case because the modern university functions like any other state or commercial bureaucracy. Each staff member is merely a cog in the greater university machine. Weber’s anxieties about the state interfering directly in the work of the universities were well founded.

What Are Universities For?

If we now ask: ‘what are universities for?’, one cynical answer would be that they exist to train the elite to continue with their cultural and political domination. However, if that is all we have to say, we are missing something very important. A more idealistic view is that the university exists to produce an educated and concerned citizenry as a generation committed to the defence of democracy and its values, and who can protect and promote the collective wellbeing. A university education may also engage in and promote a cosmopolitan culture.

Unfortunately, the decline of the university has probably been matched by the decline of civility, citizenship and community as the basis of an inclusive and successful society. Many feel they are merely denizens with the loss of community, rather than citizens with full entitlements and corresponding commitments. Has there also been an erosion of the national culture and civility? I am here appealing to the tradition of Edward Shils, who promoted a sociological understanding of civility and civil society (Grosby, 1997).

These changes in society have also had consequences for sociology. The sociology departments of the 1960s in the new departments of Warwick, Lancaster and Essex had radical traditions of student activism and had undergraduate courses in which the curriculum contained a large measure of neo-Marxism, ‘conflict theory’, the sociology of race that was associated with the work of John Rex who, as a South African exile, introduced race and British colonialism into the sociology curriculum. Contemporary American conservatives in the Republican Party are agitated by what they call ‘critical race theory’. Hasn’t it always been critical?

In that period, academics were busy creating rather than inheriting a sociological canon. In the 1970s and 1980s, students were probably being introduced to the functionalism of Talcott Parsons while studying the New Left Review and the work of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. My generation were avidly trying to understand Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Marx’s Das Capital, and eventually we caught what E.P. Thompson called ‘the French flu’ in reading Michel Foucault. Because in Britain there was no established canon, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, alongside T.S. Eliot, provided dominant texts which eventually became part of the emergence of cultural studies. I still believe that a university education should include The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957) if students are to recognize that they are living in what Hoggart called ‘a candy-floss world’.

Exiles and Other Intruders

The post-war population explosion brought a cohort of students to university education whose parents had no experience of higher education, but it also included a generation of academics who were in many cases themselves from the working class or were political exiles, typically Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

Their success in the post-war university system is perhaps an important indication of the relative freedom to experiment with the social science curriculum in that post-war environment. By a strange stroke of fate, as a schoolboy I was taught by a teacher who was also a Jewish exile, whom we knew simply as ‘Dr. Sohn’. Under his guidance we learnt much more about fascism than we did about French grammar. During a school holiday in Amsterdam, he showed me the railway platform from which thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths. He also took me on a tour through the brothel district. Lessons such as we received from Alfred Sohn-Rethel on the history of fascism and the degradation of women in the sex industry are no longer possible in English schools which are now controlled by the same managerialism that has infected the university system. The clever and cosmopolitan ‘Dr. Sohn’ would in a modern school be dismissed and possibly taken to court for exposing young boys to the Dutch sex industry. The tabloids would have been full of ‘Jewish teacher takes the classroom to the brothel’.

The control of the teaching staff in secondary schools through the continuous measurement of children’s performance has undermined their independence. I dwell on this perhaps obscure example to suggest that the contemporary managerial control of both school and university environments has crushed all forms of creative eccentricity.

These years of growth and experiment in the post-war universities often depended on outsiders and exiles. Many in this period came from the working class as outsiders. Contemporary examples from America include the political theorist William Connolly and the sociologist Stephen Turner – two post-war baby boomers from families without any history of academic training. Connolly’s autobiography was called Resounding Events (Connolly, 2022). Stephen Turner’s Mad Hazard (Turner, 2022) describes how he grew up in a black suburb of Chicago. My other example is the English Canadian sociologist John O’Neill, who also came from a northern, working-class Catholic family.

Reading these biographies and thinking about their journey from the working class to professorships at prestigious universities confirms my view that life is just a series of accidents. What unlikely concatenation of events brought John O’Neill (1982) to write such wonderful books as Essaying Montaigne? However, the main point of these reflections is that as young academics in the 1960s we were relatively free to create our own curriculum rather than being forced through the set pathway of a pre-determined curriculum under the oversight of a university stratum of managers.

Exiles, especially Jewish exiles, played an important role in the creation of sociology, especially in Britain and in the United States. There are too many exiles from this period to describe in any detail, but one study that covers much of the relevant terrain was by David Kettler (2011) in The Liquidation of Exile: Studies in the Intellectual Emigration of the 1930s. In Australia there was also a group of Hungarians, escaping alongside many other intellectuals from various East European authoritarian states, who shaped the sociology departments of La Trobe and Flinders University. This particular cohort came to be known as the ‘Budapest School’ (Terezakis, 2009).

In the British case, one might also think of black scholars who thought of themselves as both exiles and outsiders. Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy were prominent examples. Hall, with Richard Hoggart, became famous as a founder of the Birmingham Centre of Cultural Studies. Hall also played a critical role in the emergence in more general terms of cultural studies, the Open University, The New Left Review and in the politics of race in public life. As an exile he existed between the Commonwealth, the Caribbean, the black community, and academia (Farred, 1996). Hoggart had grown up in a working-class slum in Leeds and became famous both for his publications and for his public role in defending the BBC and its cultural role.

This was also the period when the journal Theory, Culture & Society was first published, in 1982. The whole editorial board had either working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. For the contemporary generation, the expense of contemporary university education and the managerial oversight of universities indicate that the opportunities for working-class social mobility are severely limited.

We have also to keep in mind that, by the end of the century, British universities were seriously underfunded. Funding became tied to ‘impact’ and ‘excellence’ resulting in international recognition. This situation often produced risky, perhaps even foolish behaviour, as university academics scrambled for often irregular sources of funding. The ‘cause celebre’ was the donation of £1.5 million from General Gaddafi, alleged to be in connection with the admittance of his son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, into a PhD programme at the LSE. In the resulting global outcry, the Director of the School resigned and Lord Woolf was charged to examine and report on the affair. It subsequently appeared that 112 or more British universities had or had contemplated a connection with Libya to secure external funding (Martins, 2011).

In retrospect from the contemporary perspective of top-down managerial control, this highly creative period in the second half of the last century will look like institutional anarchy. We need also to keep in mind that the growth of managerial control over academics was well underway in the 1990s and was already understood to be an erosion of academic freedom (Gornitzka et al., 1998).

Demography and the Crisis of Recruitment

I place an emphasis on demography in my analysis of the baby boomers and the growth of sociology departments, because in my view one of the most basic problems facing the modern university is demographic. In all modern Western democracies, the fertility rate is well below what is required for ‘replacement’, namely a 2.1 TFR per woman. The TFR is the number of live births a woman might hypothetically expect to have if she completes her reproductive period before the age of 49 years. This rate has collapsed for a variety of reasons. Some of the most critical examples are from Asia, namely Japan and South Korea, where their populations are in steep decline.

Women have entered the formal labour market in increasing numbers, and obviously many women do not want to disrupt or end their careers to have children. Equally important is the fact that, in a modern economy, most families need two incomes to survive. Late marriage or no marriage are now common. What are called ‘child-free marriages’ are also celebrated. In addition, freely available contraception means that a couple can control their fertility effectively. Childlessness is no longer seen as a tragedy or a stigma.

But there is another fact which is more sinister, and which hardly gets into the media debate about the family. Over the last 50 years the male sperm count has been steadily declining, along with the female egg count. By 2050, it has been estimated that the majority of men will have no sperm. This is alleged to be largely a consequence of environmental pollution, along with the widespread domestic use of plastics (Swan and Colino, 2021).

The result is that there are simply not enough young people in the age range 18 to 25 to sustain the universities we have. Most governments are in fact reluctant to close universities, partly because universities provide employment – not just for the academics but for the support staff who are needed to run universities. As a result, Western universities depend increasingly on the recruitment of foreign students. More and more Indian and Chinese students are recruited to help these universities survive in societies with low fertility rates. The universities of Melbourne in Australia are now recruiting around 47% of their student intake from overseas. Most of the universities in English-speaking countries are now fully dependent on such overseas recruitment, especially from Asia, simply in order to survive.

To attract these students, it is important that the failure rate is close to zero, because students pay high tuition rates and hence cannot be allowed to fail at the end of their courses. The failure of any student is now seen as a reflection of poor teaching and inadequate supervision. One might argue that these universities are providing a useful service for developing societies which, in the long run, will probably replace them. But is the role of the university simply to make money through increasing the flow of foreign students, regardless of the consequences for the university and the impact on the student body?

These problems are not confined to Britain and Europe. The USA also has also seen a fall in university enrolments. This decline is in part related to the expense of getting a college degree and the problem that a degree does not automatically guarantee employment. Seth Bodnar (2023), the President of the University of Montana, reported in the Opinion section of The Washington Post on 15 May 2023 that some 2.5 million fewer Americans enrolled in college in 2022 than in 2011. The college-going rate of high school graduates has declined from 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who are famous for their research on mortality and morbidity in the US, found that mortality and morbidity among white non-Hispanic Americans in midlife since the turn of the century continued to climb through 2015 and onwards. Their findings were summarized in their recent book – Lives of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Case and Deaton, 2020). However, they also found that a 25-year-old American with a college degree could expect to live for 48.2 years out of their remaining allotted 50 years, while Americans without a college degree would live for 45.1 years. In other words, a college degree appears to add an extra three years to their life expectancy. Cynically, perhaps the principal reason for doing a university course is not that you are more employable but that you can expect to live longer.

Again, many of these problems are hardly new. Thorstein Veblen published his book on what he called ‘the higher learning in America’ in 1918. The sub-title was hardly flattering – ‘A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men’ (Veblen, 1918). Teaching now comes in standardized packages which can be promoted and bought as basic commodities. Again, like Weber in 1908, Veblen blamed the professoriate for being complicit in these developments (Mestrovic, 2017). The audit culture and the bureaucratization of the universities are now universal.

A Theory of Catastrophe (Turner, 2024) describes the various strands that are relevant to this article, including the question of optimism versus pessimism. Many critics of modernization have been struck by its irrationality rather than its rationality. Our contemporary doubts about modernity and our apprehension about the future contrast sharply with the optimism of the Enlightenment. Are there rational reasons for believing that modern societies can overcome their problems by the continuous and systematic applications of science to their problems? Confronted by falling sperm and egg counts, one possibility is the reproduction of humans by artificial means. In 2023 the University of Cambridge and a technology institute in California produced a synthetic embryo without any use of human sperm or eggs. In a future world, one can imagine various forms of existence that are not human, but nevertheless humans will have to invent ways of working with such beings and incorporating them into human groups. It is obvious that AI will or is already transforming university learning and teaching. It is too early to tell whether these developments will have predominantly negative or positive outcomes inside the university system. Outside the university, will AI undermine many of the occupations (for example in banking and insurance) that in the past have attracted university graduates?

Artificial Intelligence and Social Acceleration

The idea of the increasing speed and threats of social change is hardly a new idea but has become a major issue in modern sociology, especially in Germany with the publications of Hartmut Rosa (2015) on social acceleration. In the gathering of academics and students at the TCS conference at Klagenfort in 2023, artificial intelligence was not at the top of the agenda of subjects that required our attention. Any conference in 2024 will, in all likelihood, be dominated by discussion of and concerns for the impact of AI on student learning, plagiarism, course cancellations, the future demands of the labour market, and the hiring and firing of academics. One can refer to many examples, but I simply take two that have been in the news. Towards the end of 2023, the University of Aberdeen announced that in the face of falling student numbers and financial insolvency, it was intending to cancel all modern language programmes, including Gaelic, with resulting staff redundancies. The intention was to focus on computing and science. With the threat of strikes and national protests regarding the fate of Gaelic, the university backed down, but the re-think does not solve the problem of student numbers. Even more dramatic was the announcement at Goldsmiths, University of London, of the need to sack 130 staff in the arts, cultural studies, and sociology programmes, again in response to a budget crisis and falling student numbers. Goldsmiths, from the time of Hoggart, has played a major role in the promotion of cultural studies, cultural sociology, and indeed in the development of the journal Theory, Culture & Society.

Perhaps these threats and developments are not entirely new. One can think here of Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report on knowledge and published in French in 1979 for the University of Quebec as a study of technology in the exact sciences and translated into English in 1984. But the problems facing modern societies have become more extensive and intensive in recent years.

Does the University Have a Future?

In late medieval Europe, student associations flourished outside the control of universities or churches. Intellectual networks of scholars and students existed across Europe before and after the eventual creation of the universities in Paris in 1167 and in Oxford at the end of the 12th century. In other words, it is useful to think of associations of academic scholars and students as international networks developing before and after the final rise of the modern university. At a later stage, cafes probably offered opportunities as meeting places for scholarly discussion. In Utrecht, there is a wonderful restaurant called ‘Polman’s Huis’ – ‘-op de hoek van de Keistraat en de Jansdam’, to provide its exact location. The cafe – rather than the modern-day restaurant – has been there since the 17th century. In 1811 it became the location of a so-called ‘Friendship Society’. One could sit there all day with newspapers, books, and a cup of coffee. It was a centre of both communal and intellectual activity, providing a space for debate and the exchange of ideas.

Perhaps we can develop a new type of Polman’s House because of the avenues opened up by AI? Because we live in a so-called network society, I see no difficulty in principle for research groups, student networks and academic associations to flourish outside the university. Perhaps the unintended benefit of Covid-19 was that we all started working online from home without physically attending the university. In addition, while working outside the university, academics and their students no longer need go to libraries as physical locations. One can download or buy materials that are required for research.

Another significant change has been the closure of many library schools because they are expensive, and they do not contribute to the principal goals of a modern university, such as research income and international status (Stieg, 1991). Retrenchments across the university sector in response to financial constraints gathered pace in the 1970s and closing library schools offered significant savings. The library school of the University of Oregon closed in 1978, but of greater significance have been the closure of prestigious library schools at the universities of Chicago and Columbia. Another response has been to redefine library work as involving ‘information science’. As a general rule, libraries will no longer require large prestigious buildings or library schools, and staff retrenchments will continue as AI replaces routine library activities.

Not every scholar has to be an academic professor working in a university. We have examples from the past, such as David Ricardo (1772–1823), who is often seen as both the founder of modern economics and the inspiration behind Marx’s theory of social classes. Ricardo was a successful stockbroker. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), who is credited with the theory of elites, was a civil engineer who worked as the manager of an Italian iron works before becoming a professor in 1893. In modern day sociology, Alfred Schutz (1899–1959), who published The Phenomenology of the Social World in 1932, was a banker from 1927 to 1956. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) completed the Tractaus (1922) while an Italian prisoner of war in 1918–19, and worked for some time as a schoolteacher in Austria, eventually becoming a professor at Cambridge (1939–47).

There are already examples of research networks operating outside the university system. Substack, for example, started in 2017 as a newsletter platform. Many academics now use it to build their profile and create networks of intellectuals. In more general terms, the unintended consequence of Covid-19 was that academics could work successfully outside the confines of the university. The growth of these experiments with online teaching and research perhaps indicates optimistically that the age of the post-university has already arrived. In building this project, we might work towards the creation of a global public sphere through a network of academic cafes.