4th Generation University (4GU): from Technical Universities (TU) to Grand Universities (GU)
(migrating content, posted on June 16, 2023)
What happened in the 20th century for Grand R&D Challenges, mobilizing the world with the Manhattan project (the atomic bomb) or the Apollo missions (moon race) has to be repeated now for Grand Governance Challenges (e.g. climate change, the pandemic, war). We need Grand Universities (GU) with an influence and scale never seen before. The student revolt in Paris in May 1968 has been the first weak historical signal that our world needs Grand Universities. Now we need to push on if we want humanity to thrive and not simply survive the upcoming centuries. To understand how to push on let me tell you about the clues to be found in weak signals.
These past days I found myself in workshops and events on the Next Generation University (NGU). Last week two such events took place. On Tuesday at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and one on Friday at the Technical University Eindhoven. Online we had several workshops with RWT Aachen. One thing I noticed is most of these events are focused on education, which is the 1ste pillar of a university and very important. With every NGU a new pillar is added, today we have three: education, research and technology transfer. The other two pillars are also evolving and a fourth pillar is emerging. Understanding how all are changing will show the full potential for the expected Grand Universities.
A bit of history. The 1st generation is as ancient, going back several millennia, they are as old as societies and often have a philosophical, political and spiritual relation. The 2nd generation is the classic university going back to the age of the Scientific Revolution (16th — 17th centuries) adding the pillar of research. In the 19th — 20st centuries, NGU evolved very clearly with an additional 3rd pillar: technology transfer. This is noticed by the emergence of Technical Universities (TU) like French Ecole polytechnique (1794), the Technische Universität in Vienna (1815), the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in Manchester (1824), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy (NY, 1824), and Danmarks Tekniske Hojskole in Lyngby (1829).
The 3rd generation university had a peak of influence with projects like the Manhattan project and the Apollo missions that have mobilized nations and taken up a significant part of national GDP (e.g. 2% for Manhattan project). So how come this has stopped ? In a way, unlocking nuclear power and having boots on the moon are easy projects, with a clear challenge and solution. In contrast, climate change, creating health security, energy security and economic security are complex and ambiguous, which is why they are Grand Governance Challenges. The weak signals of Grand Governance Challenges have existed as social evolution, like implementing Communism, Socialism and developing a government regulated health sector. Such development makes liberal established power very uncomfortable.
I will argue the Grand Governance Challenges are not the problem, but the counter-culture of the 1960s-1970s was. We need a count-me-in-culture for the 2020s-2030s. What happened in the 20st century for Grand R&D Challenges (i.e. technology) has to be repeated now for Grand Governance Challenges (i.e. social) like creating sustainability (i.e. green energy, regenerative food and recyclable products) improving safety (i.e. no more wars), health (e.g. avoiding pandemics) and welfare for all (i.e. not only the 1%). We need Grand Universities (GU) with an influence and scale never seen before.
Weak signals are already decades old, like the student revolts, starting in Paris in May 1968 spread like a wildfire to other universities and mobilized a big part of society at large. Let me quickly quote how this event is described in wikipedia:
The unrest began with a series of far-left student occupation protests against capitalism, consumerism, American imperialism and traditional institutions. Heavy police repression of the protesters led France’s trade union confederations to call for sympathy strikes, which spread far more quickly than expected to involve 11 million workers, more than 22% of France’s population at the time.[2] The movement was characterized by spontaneous and decentralized wildcat disposition; this created contrast and at times even conflict among the trade unions and leftist parties.[2] It was the largest general strike ever attempted in France, and the first nationwide wildcat general strike.[2]
It is very interesting to see how the event mobilized 22% of France’s population, while people in power were not ready and the movement got crushed. We see a lack of political will to move along with such Grand Governance Challenges, with new weak signals like the Arab Spring spreading to events like Occupy Wall Street. Such movements have been crushed and it has created an unhealthy collective psychology on university campuses. Violence and fighting only breeds more division and conflict. A shift is required from counter-culture to count-me-in-culture. Now with climate change and pandemic, we see how the world is demanding humanity to do so (or die trying). This requires people at the bottom and people in power to enter a profound dialogue and the Grand University could become the facilitator of such a shift.
Instead of disrupting existing power, a need exists for Grand Universities to help transition our current systems. Grand Universities will be Grand, not just because they take on the Grand Challenges systematically, but also because they will become humanity’s greatest achievement, more impressive than anything we can imagine and also more inclusive. The earlier R&D Projects will look small compared to what is coming. While events like physically mobilizing 22% of a country are not seen anymore, we see even bigger numbers with online mobilization. For example, ChatGPT has seen 100 million users in only two months. New media technology is capable of mobilizing at a global scale, we simply have not developed the right media to produce the appropriate message. In fact, so far I have not found a lot of peers who research how mobilizing systems work (Heylighen, Kostov, Kiemen 2013).
The Grand University will have a strong relation to the Internet and what we call the Global Brain (GB) in our research domain. My first vision of NGU was based on GB research, investigating the emerging development of software platforms, so we called the NGU: Interversity. Int-erversity has replaced the prefix of uni-versity to emphasis how knowledge has changed in this digital age (Kiemen 2015):
A university was about “the whole” (from the Latin “universitas”), indicating that universities were the place for universal knowledge. At this stage of our current social fabric, the concept of universal knowledge is becoming an illusion. Even the large universities do not contain all knowledge. Interversity draws the attention to “what is between us” (from the Latin Inter, as used for internet, interacting, interchange, interdependent, interbreed, etc.). It lets go of the idea of containing universal knowledge in favor of spinning off innovative ecosystems (for impact)
Over the years it became clear how much background knowledge Interversity requires and so we moved to the concept of 4th generation university (Steinbuch 2016), giving a historical view. In this historical view, the 3rd generation had to create a pillar because science was so deep it required such mobilization for Grand R&D Challenges. Today Grand Governance Challenges are so complex and so big it will also require a pillar to help universities create impact. Grand Universities will change every pillar to become open ended and truly mobilize nations by a count-me-in-culture. This is not an aspiration, but active research. How the NGU education changes has been investigated and ongoing research is exploring how the research pillar becomes open-ended. Smaller experiments have been done to find a good entrance to the pillar of technology transfer, so already a rich understanding exists.
The Grand Universities would become an actual instrument for governance and society. This brings me back to the NGU events. Most are about education and they do see an open ended education that is challenge based and lifelong involvement for everyone. The campus may transform to a meeting point for a region and it is happening slowly from the bottom up. This is different to the transition of the 2nd and 3rd pillar. The 2nd pillar is driven by public-private relationships and has a globalized and industrial focus on transition. To give some examples of one sector, consider how the mobility industry shifts to EV, how to shift stable centralized energy production (e.g. coal, gas, nuclear) to unstable distributed energy production (wind and solar). How to store energy for a different time as it is harvested (i.e. seasonal storage).
The focus of the 2nd pillar is on crossover-research and software is increasingly being used as a virtual lab before going to a physical lab. To move from this counter-culture to a count-me-in-culture, we will also need to include all, not just those who want the new future but even those who make it their life mission to work against it. Indeed even the oil industry and the pharma industry. Not just talented minds capable of creating a PhD, but every living person. It may seem impossible until we take you to the weak signals.
Grand Universities build instruments allowing everyone to do research and not just the small scientific staff. Software is building the interfaces. As a metaphor, think about 3D printing, where you can download designs and print the artifact. Creating the artifact used to be a craftsmanship, similar science is now a craftsmanship, but interfaces are being built that can make science much more accessible to all. We could have used another metaphor on how a few decades ago only few people were producers of mass media and how it shifted to many influencers on social media. This trend of shifting from “few in the center” to the masses is a consistent trend, going back from the day we shifted from mainframes to personal computing.
In a first phase we expect the gamma sciences (social sciences) to interface with the beta sciences (natural and applied sciences) and their work will uplift more of society to become included. For example, take energy justice. With the beta sciences building digital twins to simulate how their tech would work in existing neighborhoods, the social scientist and legal scientist can play with the simulation to find out how this relates to their values. Economists may find a way to simulate how degrowth could be measured in a simple way. The simulations have the potential to make their work more tangible.
Today it is hard to imagine. Like with ChatGDP, only some months ago few could imagine it, but now millions are using it. The complexity of the instrument being built may imply it takes many years before we reach the tipping point, but once we do, similar adoption can be expected. As we are building such instruments in research projects like NEON, we see how the first users are adopting, how complementary projects are interlocking and investors are onboarding with this trend. To put it simply, science is getting accessible to all as software is building the right interface. Nothing will change and everything will change. Like how horses got replaced by cars. It did not change the driver, but it did change the driving.
We can generalize the transformation for both the pillar on education and on research as: “becoming challenge based”. It is a more active and dynamic upgrade of how education and research happens now. The NGU transformation of the 3rd pillar is also an upgrade. The current technology transfer is about valorisation: making scientific insights available and useful to industry and or society. It is relatively passive and reactive. A shift is seen to integral transfer being more impact driven, proactive and resilient as it moves to innovative ecosystems. For example, current technology transfer also undergoes Life Cycle Analysis to investigate what happens if the technology is used at scale. This is a logical next step to existing valorisation and it is demonstrating the move to more proactive transfer.
As all existing pillars are making what they regulate more “alive”, we can understand how a 4th pillar makes sure this life energy is focused on the Grand Governance Challenges. The 4th pillar is expressed simply as a Grand Challenge integrator. For transfer, the university collaborated more intensely with entrepreneurs. For integration, universities will need to collaborate more intensely with policy makers. Grand Universities will be much more an instrument for policy makers to shape the social fabric. As education and research gets democratized, transfer gets enriched and governance gets integrated.
Today in the NEON project policymakers are involved to interact with the virtual lab. The 4th pillar starts from this and assists in the transition from virtual lab to field experiments (i.e. living labs) to eventually result in full scale transformations.
The 4th pillar is a kind of meta-system method assisting with the convergence of all distributed development and scale it in a synchronized way (i.e. keeping the complexity and the richness allowing for a resilient transformation). The method has been described a bit in an earlier blog on smoothing the transition paths. Interestingly the theory on it (Kiemen 2015) has been remarkably accurate so far. The thing we had not seen is the depth of complexity and colossal scale this is happening, which explains why it appears to go slower than anticipated.
So we move to a 4th generation university with 4 pillars: education, research, transfer and integration. This is actually turning universities in a cybernetic loop, creating a meta-system driven by collective intelligence in service of society. In a way, the solution is found at the scale of the problem. In the 19th -20th century the NGU led to new Technical Universities, we can wonder if a similar trend will happen with Grand Universities. As policymakers start understanding the leverage a 4th pillar gives them, it seems more a question about “when” and “who” will be the first movers ? Less a question about “if” it will happen, some evolutionary forces cannot be stopped.