A few weeks ago, Nature published a special report that struck a chord with anyone paying attention to the landscape of higher education. The report surveyed the major university systems of the world—the US, UK, Canada, Australia—and found them all navigating deep tensions that test not only their sustainability but their very reason for being. While the specific problems always adopt a local shape, appearing as budget cuts in one place or political interference in another, they are almost always reflections of global currents.
Yet, it was the report’s subtitle that lingered in my mind long after I finished reading: They made the modern world. Now they must survive it.
It is a stark reminder of the paradox we face. The institutions that engineered the intellectual and technical foundations of our society are now struggling to find their footing within it. This sentiment pairs interestingly with recent work from the Centre for Higher Education (CHE), a think tank linked to the German Rectors’ Conference. Their authors argue that in this turbulent environment, the single most decisive quality for an institution is authenticity.
They define authenticity not as a stubborn refusal to change, but as the capacity to remain faithful to an essential identity while coherently adapting to the world. It isn’t about freezing in time; it is about mastering the art of evolution without losing your sense of purpose. In their view, only those universities that act authentically will retain social legitimacy, remaining recognizable and trustworthy in an era of fragmentation.
The mask and the face
I want to believe the German authors are right because I share that yearning for coherence. However, looking at the current landscape, it is difficult to shake the feeling that nobody truly knows where we are heading. As the old song goes, we seem to be going nowhere fast.
If authenticity is the goal, we must also look at its opposite: the rise of what I call the «Zelig university.» We see more of them every day. These are institutions that mimic whatever trend happens to be passing by, shifting their discourse, their strategy, and even their stated purpose to please every possible audience.
They remind me of the performers in the Sichuan opera. If you have ever been to Chengdu, you know the art of bian lian, or face-changing. The actors switch masks with a movement so fast it is almost imperceptible. It is as fascinating as it is unsettling. You watch one face replace another in the blink of an eye, again and again, until you realize that behind the endless succession of painted masks, the original face has vanished. Only the masks remain. When a university tries to be everything to everyone, it risks suffering the same fate—becoming a hollow vessel where the original identity fades into oblivion.
Strategy in the shifting sand
There is a second challenge to the German ideal of authenticity: the sheer difficulty of formulating strategy in an environment of radical uncertainty. Today, strategic plans are conceived on shaking ground. We are subjected to violent swings. Politics can alter funding criteria in a matter of days, upending years of planning. Artificial intelligence is disrupting the fundamental ways we teach, investigate, and evaluate. Demographic shifts and migration policies are reconfiguring the demand for education at a speed that leaves universities scrambling to react.
In this context, detailed planning often feels like drawing on the sand at the water’s edge. You can sketch the most intricate design, but the next wave will inevitably wash it away.
When everything changes this quickly, it is true that the only reliable compass is knowing who we are. Yet, from inside the academy, we often speak about the transformation of higher education as if it were the result of a carefully choreographed strategic process. My experience suggests otherwise. The true changes in the university are rarely planned; they are reactive. They surge as immediate responses to crises—a sudden scarcity of resources, a change in the law, a technological shock. They are born of urgency, not design.
The permanent scars of temporary measures
We often accept these reactive changes because they arrive with the promise of being temporary. But history shows us they leave durable footprints.
Take the financial crisis of 2010 as a prime example. To survive, many universities adopted «provisional» measures: deep cuts in funding, tuition hikes, a heavy reliance on international student fees, the casualization of labor, and an obsession with productivity indicators and global rankings. More than a decade later, those emergency decisions have calcified into the status quo. We barely remember what we looked like before 2010.
Something similar happened with COVID-19. We reacted, we adapted, and we kept moving. But when institutions only react, they lose depth. A reactive university does not transform; it merely adapts. It becomes a mirror of the chaos around it rather than a beacon through it.
We cannot avoid the speed of change or the inevitability of crises; they are the sign of our times. However, a great university today requires structures that allow it to think fast without losing its soul. We need permanent crisis cabinets capable of uniting memory and purpose. We need «sandboxes» that allow us to test structural solutions without fear. We need rapid ways to activate our collective intelligence so that we are not just changing masks, but evolving our character.
Crisis as a curriculum
There is something else about crises that has stayed with me: every crisis has its own syllabus. A crisis is never just an emergency; it contains profound lessons. The pandemic taught us about fragility. Wars teach us about horror. Financial collapses teach us about austerity. The climate collapse is teaching us about the limits of growth.
I suspect the next great crisis will speak to us of sovereignty—of the desperate need to protect what truly matters. And this leads me to a fundamental question: Should our university system be protected in the same way we protect energy or transport?
This week, I was conversing with several African partners to prepare a capacity-building project. They reminded me of something that we in the Global North tend to forget: public universities are critical infrastructures for development. They are essential pieces of a society’s sovereignty. Anchored to the territory and the people, they guarantee the intellectual and technical independence that makes true sovereignty possible.
In the West, we too often view the public university through the prism of the service sector. We see it as a provider of training that competes in an open market with other actors. But if we forget its structural role, we risk leaving it stripped of the mechanisms of resilience, funding, and governance it needs to sustain its mission when the next wave hits.
Do we recognize higher education as a critical infrastructure of our society? And if so, does anyone truly believe that this role can be fulfilled by any actor in the system other than the public university?