The Future of the University: A Proposal for a ‘Digital Research University’

Shifting forces in the UK Higher Education sector call for a new distinctive role for a university to enhance its prestige and intellectual endeavours. This new role should help to sustain and augment the existing institutional character of the university but also provide new orientations and give an impetus to a set of new long-range commitments for the university. This post argues for the need to create a special role for a university in relation to its environment, cultural milieu and to provide for a distinctive university in relation to others in the sector. This would have institutional implications in terms of the shape or pattern of the university. This proposal advocates the development of the idea of a digital-intensive mission as a digital research university. 

Introduction

One of the major changes for the universities was the shift to the modern research university in the 1800s. This grew out of the notion that research, as an experimental procedure conducted in a spirit of discovery, could form the basis of a mission for the university. This emerged in German universities in the nineteenth century and became known as the Humboldtian university. The German universities developed the notion that integrating teaching and research within the same institution could be intensified to improve both teaching and the research process. Professors increasingly began to teach methodological skills, greater analytical and theoretical knowledge and tools as part of their courses. This included a growing reliance on field-work, maps and graphs, catalogues, and lists of specialised data to explain to students’ recent scientific advances and ongoing research work. However, it was the American universities that would take these ideas and develop them by creating an ideal of combining and integrating teaching and research which resulted in the modern research university. These new universities (John Hopkins, Chicago) had a strong commitment to basic research, to contextualized and applied research and to training researchers. These pioneering universities had a great influence on others, such as Harvard, which soon embraced this new idea of a university. This created a distinctive American institutional structure for a research university which was extremely successful during the twentieth century. 

This modern research university subsequently became the reference standard for the idea of a university and there can be little doubt that American universities are in a class of their own in terms of their ability to produce world-class research. By continuing to undertake teaching, these universities have been able to develop an important role in contribute new knowledge to the economy and to various organizations and firms in the industrial sector. This also created an expectation that teaching would be up-to-date and incorporate new knowledge. The institutional structures of the modern research university gave it the capacity to institutionalize and organize the proliferation of specialized knowledge into departments which were successful in undertaking high quality fundamental knowledge and practical research discoveries.  

Today we are on the verge of a new challenge for the university under the conditions of a society that is based increasingly upon digital knowledge and its economic valorisation. These post-industrial societies are structured around using knowledge and new knowledge production through computational technologies. But although these societies have produced unprecedented prosperity for certain parts of society, these rewards have not been equally distributed. At even the most basic level, inequality of access to the benefits of computation are still unequal, and social, cultural and political disruptions persist. Additionally, science and technology policy lacks even a rudimentary capacity to confront the complex implications of a computational society. The acquisition of new digital skills and these new knowledges are now fundamental drivers of innovation in and around an economy based on data, information and digital techniques. 

As such the university has an important role to play in the undertaking basic research, a highly concentrated output of academia, but also in encouraging its use and innovation. The key research challenges in the 21st century lie at the integration of sub-disciplines and disciplines, often by bringing together knowledge from multiple levels of knowledge communities, into an organizational structure that can confront and understand the digital. 

There are two essential platforms for the university in this new economic environment, (1) the creation of new knowledge, and (2) the capacity for the transformation of knowledge into new forms of invention and innovation. A university’s growth, and even its survival, will increasingly depend of its ability to integrate and transform new knowledge, compelling it to equip itself with new structures for research and teaching. This new formal structural capacity is fundamentally reliant on digital processes of the creation, collection, experimentation and analysis in research through digital tools, methods, and techniques, combined with a critical capacity to assess theoretical and methodological foundations for such knowledge claims. As such these structures enable a digital research university to flexibly adapt to the kinds of shifts in the core income streams necessary for university sustainability and growth.

I want to suggest that under these conditions, a new orientation for a university might be as the ‘Digital Research University’. This would mean that a university is not only a research-intensive university but also a digital-intensive one. The digital opens up new ways of seeing and enables new methods for undertaking research. As such, a digital-intensive university supports efforts to ensure the spirit of discovery and the promotion of research and thereby transform the culture of departments in a university. This could be carefully articulated as a new mission for the university:

• By positioning itself as a digital-intensive university it harnesses its strategy towards its own growing research capacity and also to the digital skills of its students and thereby questions of future employment and skills. This could be in relation to a notion of "industrial strategy" (ideas, people, infrastructure, business environment, and places) through “digital thinking” about these problems. I aruge that this could include creating a “digital college” open to extramural learners in the local community (see below). 

• A new research agenda that by adopting a digital-first strategy, works to create a new culture of research around the transforming potential of digital approaches across the disciplines. This includes new research into and investment in digital infrastructure (cyberinfrastructure) to support the digital transformation of research activities and to create a culture of digital-intensive research. This would include the creation of an Institute of Advanced Digital Studies which is distinctively oriented to the edge of research questions made possible in and through digital transformations in knowledge. 

• By connecting to and transforming the idea of “redrawing the map of learning” (an idea that Asa Briggs introduced in the 1960s) through digital approaches for teaching and research we can rethink the notion of interdisciplinarity. That is, to move from a spatial metaphor (“maps of learning”) to a temporal and dynamic one (“trajectories of learning”). This might be effected by developing a digital-intensive teaching environment which forms the base of the diversified pyramid of teaching programmes in the university from undergraduate to those at graduate level. This would facilitate active learning, that is using information rather than passively receiving it via lectures, etc. 

• A crucial contribution that a “digital college” could also provide is to create a notion of service for a public university (e.g. creating the conditions for a new kind of “data citizen” educated critically about the digital in relation to civil society and democracy). 

• It could also connect to and support notions of creativity and cultural production, and to knowledge (supporting and developing new forms of digital culture). 

A Digital Research University 

I see this notion of the “Digital Research University” as helping shape and develop a university research capacity. Especially through the development of working on these “trajectory streams” which are future-oriented “digital problems” (for example, social and culture challenges of a digital world, new technical and engineering technologies, economic challenges, global or postcolonial questions, understanding big problems such as climate change through digital techniques and living labs, shifting questions over identity and representation in a digital age, Europe, digital literatures, philosophical and ethical questions about the digital, legal issues, critical data studies, politics in a digital age, artificial intelligence, and problems of “digital poverty”, automation and deskilling – especially relevant to the local economy). In this formulation intensity of research is not just about inputs of grants and outputs of publications, it also includes the capacity to create and maintain the digital-intensive environment of a digital research infrastructure (sometimes called a cyberinfrastructure) that facilitates and supports the cutting edge of research across the disciplines in a university. 

This orientation would include exploring problems of a digital society more generally, and help concentrate the university’s limited resources in an area rather than trying to be all things to all people. This proposal is not calling for a specific programme as such, rather it is a theme, in terms of an idea or philosophy, to help direct the university and set the tone of the university more generally. Most notably this is not a proposal that teaching should become “virtual” or “digital”, rather that these new methods of teaching can flow out of the research agenda of the wider university towards a postdigital strategy for teaching. 

To move forward under the terms of this proposal, the following tentative goals are suggested:

1. Concentrate on attracting students to the university as a distinctive digital identity, and with a particular institutional character – a university that understands and seeks to shape the digital future but not one that is merely using online learning. The digital-intensive university. 

2. Use this to create more opportunities for interdisciplinary work across cognate disciplines, each organised as departments (giving a vertical institutional structure based on discipline) with a manageable faculty size (perhaps within Colleges to share common administrative tasks). Through the use of digital methods a university could seek to create new horizontal “Schools” of knowledge (giving a horizontal institutional structure based on research theme or area) that can act as “pop-up fields” enrolling staff across the university in new experimental research areas, e.g. digital studies, biosemiotics, computational thinking, artificial intelligence (LLMs, etc.), critical data studies, automation technologies, creative generative practices, etc. These “Digital Schools” could be reminiscent of the original “Schools of Study” in the founding structures of the University of Sussex, for example, which likewise were horizontal fields of knowledge that extended beyond subject areas.

3. The “Digital Research University” theme is adopted as a new institutional character for a university. 

4. Upgrading the quality of programmes and to ensure they all provide the groundworks for a “digital” education and preparation for thinking and working in a digital age. Situate expertise jointly in a “digital college” to share ideas and practices (this could lead to a potential for validating outside courses). 

5. Increase and concentrate a significant proportion of the university energies towards graduate and advanced professional training, particularly in relation to the challenge that digital ways-of-doing will have within these professional spheres. 

6. With faculty recruitment concentrate on obtaining more staff with some element of advanced training in relation to digital, whether that be methodological, data scientific, critical, or creative. 

7. Structure organized research units (ORUs), such as institutes, centres and groups of teams and laboratories, as horizontal research strata outside of traditional academic structures of departments and faculties. Create sunset clauses in their constitutions to prevent them outliving their function, perhaps with a “living will” to allow them to be easily closed, but also ensure rotation of posts every three years to prevent the emergence of fiefdoms and empire-building. 

Initial Concrete Proposals

A digital-intensive research university needs a “centre” to the university. The chapel or the library no longer provide that function, instead it is suggested that a site/building that houses both a digital college and an institute of advanced study would replace them. 

a. Create a “Digital College” which is a ‘virtual’ undergraduate teaching college in the university and to which certain modules are associated. These modules which are in effect “digital electives” which can be added to the student’s underlying degree programme so that they graduate in their subject area but with “Honours from the Digital College” or “With Digital Honours”. Some thought might have to made as to how much credit would be required, perhaps another 20 or 30 credits, but this could be through an additional 15 credits at level 5, and again at level 6. One of these modules could be delivered completely digitally. It would be expected that the more ambitious and hard-working students would be interested in taking this additional work, and I am thinking about the way in which the American honors programmes work as a model. The digital college could experiment with new forms of preceptorial teaching, using digital methods to augment the independent reading, discussion in small groups, and individual meetings with the lecturer. Some examples that could be incorporated include collaborative or contributory digital annotation, data sprints, collaborative video essays (sometimes known as film essays), living labs, co-pilot creativity and student hackathons. By a digital college I expressly do not intend to mean the use of distance-learning or the various poor quality e-Learning systems currently in use across a number of universities. Rather digital-intensive teaching means that a postdigital learning environment is encouraged whereby the digital and the physical are mutually constitutive of an experience of learning that is digital-first across digital schools of study. This is a strategy that values being-together as a learning community on campus even in the use of digital methods. 

b. Create an “Institute of Advanced Digital Studies” which is directed to address the problems of advanced study using digital methods across the sciences, humanities and social sciences, but also the study of the digital itself through a set of research question. This would itself be very distinctive at the level of IADS’s, and would provide a university with a high-prestige world-class institute from which to articulate and develop research agendas for the university more generally. The actual constitution and location of the IADS for a university is a subject for a later paper, but this could be framed in structure in a similar way to other IADS’s such as Durham IAS, Cambridge CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), or School of Advanced Study (University of London), offering a space for advanced work through residential fellowships for both internal and external academics. The IADS would be an incubator for ideas within the theme of the digital research university, and to provide leadership in terms of the intellectual agenda, state-of-the-art and collaborative potentials of working within this theme. 

Prof. David M. Berry

Originally written as part of the outcomes of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship 2017 on Reassembling the University in a Digital Age.