Reinventing the University Model

What will it take for universities to remain relevant in a world where knowledge now doubles every 12 hours? WVU President Emeritus E. Gordon Gee calls for a bold reimagining of the academic model, one that values speed, clarity, and collaboration over hierarchy and bureaucracy. He champions the idea of flexible, institute-based structures that transcend traditional departments, allowing higher education to respond to rapid change.

We’ve made everything too complex. I think that we need models that are absolutely committed to the process, that life and work and, and knowledge is changing every day. So they need to be very forward leaning. I think that we need to have models that are very transparent.

I think we need to have models that are very fact driven, and we need to have models that have a lot of speed. You and I've talked about this before. I'm a great believer in speed. There's a natural conflict in the universities, where people want to talk about everything.

But think about this, I was just reading an article — when Christopher Columbus landed on our shores till the year 1900, knowledge doubled once. It's an amazing [thing], you think about their knowledge is [being] doubled once. You know, right now, they estimate the knowledge is doubling every 12 hours. So what does that mean for universities? That means that we have no time to be totally reflective. We have time. We only have time to act and to move. And but we have to do it based upon facts and based upon what we're doing.

So, it is that kind of model. I think that, you know, if you think about universities, I love what Michael [Crow] has done at Arizona State because he is taking the traditional structures and reinventing them in many ways. But I do believe that the future of higher education, in terms of just the way that structure is going to be based upon institutes or working groups.

There's the, you know, there's the tyranny of the department and of the college. I think that they will disappear and will become a much more fluid type of institution in which both internal and external and, and forward leaning will all be part of the same construct.

I think it also takes a lot of humility. You know, and I use that word precisely that way because I think that we have to rejoin the human race by asking the questions of why we have these problems and what good things we're doing.

But, right now, the American university feels besieged. There is so much resistance to change. Obviously, we are in this Trumpian moment where there's a lot of resistance just based upon the politics that we have. But all of that is not about, it's not about change. It's about protection. It's about how we established universities at Bologna and 1200 and by damn, we're going to keep that same model no matter what people say. And we're going to keep that same, that same way that we think about, how we operate as institutions.

First of all, AI itself is going to change a lot. And we all know that. And that's a given. But I also think that what we're saying that we're seeing, we're seeing the American public has finally decided to tell us what we should be doing on their behalf rather than telling them what they should think.

And I think that that note of cultural or coastal elitism is as, is going to be really, a defining way for institutions to, to move in other directions away from that. And you see it, boards of governors taking a much more active role. You see, state legislatures, if you're in a public institution, state legislatures saying, we expect you to do this, we expect you to produce this.

We expect you to become engaged in that. All of those things which are, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, none of that, that we kind of had this comfortable life. We were here. We were, you know, between the hedges. And that's the way that life was, but not now. And those are the kinds of external forces.

And you're going to force internal forces to change, and it's going to be hand-to-hand combat. I use that word, not lightly, because so many people want things to be the way that they were. And the forces of where we are right now say we can no longer sustain that. And who's caught in the middle? The president, the leaders of institutions. And if the truth of the matter is university presidents heads are first of all, they're on a swivel. And secondly, of all, they're very lightly on their head, right, and, on their shoulders right now. And a lot of it is due to the fact that you have this, these titanic struggles that are going on.

That reason, for example, at UDI, I think it's so important because what it does, it gives a pathway to think about doing something without having to also engage in immediate combat to get to where you want to go. And that is that kind of forward, really forward thinking, looking around the corners, which we can't see and looking over the horizon, that's the kind of result thinking that I think will help higher education tremendously.

The other thing you and I have talked about is we need to train leaders. We need to get leaders, real training about what it's like to be in, in this kind of a role and how they can have courage, without stupidity. And that that is a learning lesson that we're all trying to struggle with right now.