The research university is one of the longest-surviving institutions in the modern world, having repeatedly adapted to changing technological, political, and cultural environments. This essay examines the challenges and opportunities that the emerging twenty-first-century communications environment poses for research universities and the institutional responses those conditions may call for. It surveys the fragile equilibrium that universities must maintain among their multiple missions – formal teaching, open-science research, advanced training, independent expertise, and custodianship of scholarly knowledge – as they confront pressures to commercialize intellectual property, to compete for dwindling public resources, and to engage with industrial and governmental partners both domestic and global. Drawing a careful distinction between the logics of ‘open science’ and of proprietary R&D, the essay poses a series of open questions about the future role of universities as nodes in a global research network, the evolving nature of graduate and continuing professional education, the preservation of academic independence, and the stewardship of digital repositories and teaching materials.
David et al. (Wed,) studied this question.