Horizon 2031. The University of Granada in Light of its V Centenary. “Reflections on the Future of the University”
The past twenty years have been exceptional in the history of the world: For the first time ever, population growth has kept pace with economic growth – not just in the Western world, but everywhere. In the past twenty years, one billion people have risen the poverty line of 1.25 dollars a day, threequarters of them in China. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. There is no country in the world where earnings have not increased. Many farmers who used to be self-subsistent are now players in the global market. The population of the world has doubled in fifty years and the number of calories consumed per person has risen by more than a quarter.
All this is largely attributable to leaps in knowledge we have made as a result of scientific research at our universities. Ironically, the generations that have benefited most from the scientific progress and economic growth are also the most pessimistic and cynical. Distrust of science and progress is setting Europe apart from the rest of the world, where people are relying on that selfsame science and progress to move forward. This distrust is less innocuous than it first appears. It leads to caricatures, to simplistic juxtapositions of good and evil, global and local, ‘natural’ and artificial. As if every human intervention, especially now, did not automatically involve some form of damage. There is no point in rejecting or romanticising human interventions; what we need to do is to minimise the effects by, for example, closing the loop.
This is a hard fact that universities of the future needs to take on board. We can no longer afford to shut ourselves off in ivory laboratories, surrounded by the best brains and state-of-the-art equipment. We need to throw open the doors and windows and engage with society. And this society can – again thanks to the technological and scientific revolution –access knowledge and information anywhere in the world at any time. It can communicate continuously with anyone and everyone and share ideas and opinions with thousands and thousands of people. Strangely enough, this practice is not generating a deeper knowledge and understanding of science or the mission of universities. Countless false assurances and unsubstantiated ‘facts’ are being cherished and may well be responsible for propagating irrational fears of radiation supposedly emanated by mobile phones and totally unfounded conspiracy theories about vaccinations and health recommendations And these are just a few examples. This is the world in which the modern university must carve a place for itself. This is the debate, the discussion, the dialogue that it must take on. Needless to say, demands will be made on the organisation, the study programmes and the academics themselves. The universities will have to venture more into the arena of public dialogue, engage in the debate and accept that knowledge is no longer the exclusive preserve of academics and scientific institutes. Knowledge has been democratised, but that does not necessarily go hand in hand with deeper insight into complex questions. It is as if Ockham’s razor is being indiscriminately wielded and oversimplified explanations are being hungrily snatched up. Here, too, the universities will have to assume their responsibility and separate the spurious from the scientific.