The end of the European university?

The past half-century has been perhaps the European university's greatest age, even compared with the earlier flourishing in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and during the industrial revolution of the 19th century. More universities have been founded; student numbers have increased at an unprecedented rate; and the scholarly and scientific productivity of the universities has been unparalleled. But the university has become for the first time a truly global institution, cut off from its roots in Europe and Europe's colonial empires and open to other, non-European and non-élite, knowledge traditions. At the same time the tight relationship between the university and modernity, or ‘movement’, has been increasingly questioned. For more than a century that relationship has been axiomatic, relegating the university's other role as an agent of continuity and tradition into second place. But the dynamism of socio-economic and technological change in the so-called ‘Knowledge Society’ is now so great that the university's role as a force for stabilization may become more important. As a result the centrality of the university in the European experience could be diminished.