The Research Revolution and its Impact on the European University

Abstract

There are two accounts of the research revolution—or, more accurately, the knowledge revolution—which is transforming the role of the modern university, in Europe and elsewhere. The first account emphasizes the need to concentrate on establishing centers-of-excellence, building strong and (logistically) viable research teams, backing winners—and its model is inevitably the American research university The second emphasizes the need to adopt a holistic view of the entire research-technology-innovation process, to create a more distributed research system and to emphasize the (scientific) interdependencies of the various elements with this system—and its model is …? Here there is an immediate difficulty. The “flagship” institutions within a distributed research (or knowledge) system cannot be based on the American research university poised at the pinnacle of a mass higher education system, which is (over?) determined by legal, political and bureaucratic processes. But nor perhaps can it be the traditional European university—multi-Faculty and multifunction—within higher education systems that are either unified in structure or based on a simple (and anachronistic?) dichotomy between classical universities and higher professional or technical education institutes.