Time4Unichange focus on the transformation of Higher Education Institutions is just one of several testbeds for models of universities that actually have an impact on a variety of stakeholders and on the territories they insist on.
INTRO
A vast body of literature documented how universities are called to play a renewed role in injecting novelty in economic and social fabrics. Thomas et al. (in press) state that universities are currently called to be “multidexterous”, that means able to translate research and capabilities in a vast array of fields: entrepreneurship, technology transfer, social engagement, and social transformation and much more.
ARGUMENT
Although technology transfer, contribution to regional growth and civic engagement were treated in literature as separate, the future universities will inhabit, will be one where they should enmesh teaching, third mission, and research to produce impacts on all these dimensions. While simple to formulate as an enunciation, the multidexterous nature of universities is much more difficult to be made concrete and institutionally governed.
Some rigidities affect both the academic and the managerial and administrative dimensions of Higher Education Institutions. First, while several “attempts” to integrate evaluation schemes in tenure decisions have been made, publications remain the fundamental currency in academic careers. Current pieces of news help in making the point; The Spanish press recently covered the issue of the distorted incentives created by the publish or perish culture. Single researchers authoring more than 170 papers per year, often putting their names for negligible contributions to papers outside of their areas of expertise, citation rings and a market for authorship are all worrying signs of the byproducts of a culture based on counting papers rather than on weighing the actual scientific contributions buried in thousands of pages. Administrators and management of HEIs, on their side, often play the role of the executors of national and supranational frameworks of evaluation and often privilege administrative rationality over effectiveness and innovativeness.
Thus, while incentive schemes and strategies to uncage the potential of universities abound, the real challenge to advance towards the multidexterous university will lie in the ability of some individuals in mobilizing stakeholders, both internal and external, within the HEI-related national and international debate. The elaboration of proposals to change how universities work is probably the best-known game in the world after soccer. What still lacks is a social movement made by scholars, university leaders and managers, able to push an agenda and motivate actors in and out universities. The lack of such mobilization might expose HEIs to the threat of being surpassed, in each of their missions, by other institutions, private ones, for instance, whose goals might not be as universalistic in principle as those that animate HEIs actions and ethos.
CONCLUSION
University leaders and managers should be clear in their agendas that the challenges faced by HEIs to adopt a holistic and innovative mindset in their teaching, research, and collaboration activities also represent the elements of a selective pressure. As in nature, the universities that will be able to use this pressure to evolve will also be those that will be able to compete, excel and cooperate with each other in the near future.