Keeping Higher Education Relevant Through Transitioning to the 21st Century

The beginning of a new academic year is a good vantage point to ponder current challenges and possible future remedies for our beleaguered higher education sector. While some of the remarks that follow are generically indicative of the sector outside Lebanon as well, my main focus is our home front in light of the worsening crisis. We need to leapfrog our path to progress and here is a roadmap. 

Two decades into the 21st century and the third millennium, higher education can no longer avoid a moment of truth that poses one key question: Can universities today forge and effectively implement a strategy for continued future relevance with a structure and an organizational paradigm that belong to the 19th century?

The way universities are organized today, as well as the way they actually operate, suffers from three major paradoxes:

• Paradox 1– They move forward very slowly and incrementally mostly by muddling through. This is becoming increasingly counter-intuitive in a fast-moving world that requires comprehensive, strategy-driven solutions. 

• Paradox 2– Academically, universities by and large tend to be encapsulated in disciplinary silos whereas most serious problem-solving today requires pan-disciplinary, multiple-expertise solutions.

• Paradox 3– Again, at most universities, the predominant concept of research today is almost exclusively limited to basic research driven by faculty promotion needs, university pursuit of better ranking, and academics opting to operate within their traditional comfort zone. Applied, industry-related, and translational research continue to be marginalized with considerable loss of impact on the part of the university. 

The combined effect of these paradoxes with respect to a number of universities is a “relevance deficit” that takes specific forms, namely:

1. Pursuit of contrived, often rarified academic goals with little impact and an in-bound focus. The price is insularity and the all-too-familiar ivory tower syndrome.

2. A culture of atomism and territoriality not conducive to joint action, concerted effort and group achievements. 

3. Consequent diminishing of the role of the university as a hub for innovation and R&D breakthroughs. Academia has been losing ground on this account to think tanks, commercial entities, tech companies, and specialized centers. Our lead position in innovation is giving way to other knowledge clusters in an ominous sign that all is not well with the way we do things.

At the heart of all three paradoxes and their combined effect is a deeply rooted culture of departmental structural islands grouped together in schools or faculties. Departments jealously guard their autonomy which they see as essential for the integrity of the disciplines they represent and the academic freedom they so deeply cherish. Academic freedom of course is the cornerstone and throbbing heart of the academy. It has played a pivotal role in the evolution of our modern universities and acted as a powerful precondition for free enquiry, creativity and intellectual inquisitiveness. LAU, for example, belongs to a tradition that holds academic freedom sacred and this has been enshrined in our mission, bylaws, policies, and practices. 

The fact that academic freedom is held sacrosanct, however, does not justify the disciplinary fragmentation we suffer in this day and age. Inter-disciplinary confluence and efforts for pan-disciplinary integration can now go hand in hand with academic freedom, the pursuit of free inquiry, and the needed structural autonomy of academic units. The one key difference is that we need to start thinking of inter-disciplinary clusters where expertise can be merged for teaching purposes, research purposes, and most of all real-world problem-solving. The result is a different level of engagement internally and externally.

Implications and a Leap Forward at LAU

The shift in thinking from disciplinary silos to interdisciplinary clusters, and from an inside-out to an outside-in approach to academic work, will result in concrete benefits.

Rethinking the traditional departmental unit focusing on one discipline, to teaching and research units that require knowledge tracks from a variety of discipline. By way of example, instead of talking about physics, chemistry, biology or business separately we talk of environmental studies, energy, food technology, etc., and instead of the disciplinary confines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, law, economics, political science, we can also pursue gender studies, conflict resolution, social change, political dynamics, etc.

By the same token, we can think of teaching and research clusters involving policy analysis, women’s health, geriatrics, and pharmacology.

The difference is primarily in terms of improved problem-solving, impactful practice and research, enhanced external engagement, and sustainable strategic partnerships with industry.

What is being proposed here is a paradigm shift to help academic leap into the 21st century, and maintain its relevance to a rapidly changing world and a future about which we know very little.

LAU is very serious about such a leap and has already taken steps towards practicing what it preaches. Examples include several interdisciplinary teaching, research, and R&D clusters spanning social sciences, natural sciences, gender studies, immigration studies, conflict resolution and others. Our recently established Makhzoumi Innovation Center, and the Industrial Hub on the Byblos campus are equally compelling examples.

Our future plans include a broad range of such clusters and a steady shift to impactful configurations pursued in close partnership with industry in joint pursuit of a knowledge economy.  

Accepting the premise that we cannot meet future challenges with past tools, LAU is busy reinventing itself and in the process changing us all.