This is the fourth and final installment of Ben Reinhardt’s monograph on Unbundling the University. For the first three parts, see here, here, and here. For more of Ben’s work, check out the Speculative Technologies site.

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3. Universities need to be unbundled

It’s clear that universities have multiple conflicting missions. It’s fairly uncontroversial to suggest that universities are no longer balancing these missions well. The more contentious question is “how do we fix the university?”

Some people (who care primarily about its cultural role) say “decolonize it” others (who also care about that same cultural role) say “eliminate DEI.” People who care about the role as job training say “eliminate useless majors” or “focus on marketable skills.” Those who care about discovering the secrets of the universe say “more replication,” “change how we do grants,”“reform journals,” or “increase rigor.” For technology: “fund more applied work” “increase industry partnerships” “reform tech transfer offices.” The list goes on: “Pay student athletes better” “unionize grad students” “change admissions criteria” “tax the endowments.” Suggestions on the more intense end of the spectrum include “reduce the number of scientists” or “fewer people should go to college, period.”

“The situation with universities” resembles the theory of epicycles. When planetary motion was locked to a theory that planets needed to move along perfect circles, natural philosophers needed to create more and more complicated solutions to new observations of planetary movements. The solution wasn’t adding more circles to address the observations, it was Newton popping up one level to propose a new paradigm of physics where planetary motion is driven by gravity. We need to do the same thing here: popping up one level to propose a new paradigm where universities don’t have all of these societal roles.

The meta-solution to “the situation with universities” is to unbundle the university.

“Unbundling” is a concept from the Tech world around the phenomenon of businesses offering individual services eating the market share of businesses that once offered all of those services together. The classic example is the transition from cable to streaming services, unbundling the different channels, or the observation that almost every software-as-a-service business is just a specialized excel spreadsheet.

In our case, unbundling means peeling societal roles away from the university and creating new institutions (and revitalizing old ones) to take them on. It’s pruning back a giant tree so that a thousand