Rethinking the Future University

The rETHinking Universities exhibit runs until 2 March. Join the closing session by registering here.

ETH Zurich’s Strategic Foresight Hub recently mounted a public exhibition rETHinking Universities of the Future, dedicated to exploring pertinent issues and global trends driving change in higher education within the next decade. For the opening session, Chris Luebkeman, Head of the Strategic Foresight Hub, engaged in conversation with ETH Zurich’s Rector, Günther Dissertori, and Cynthia Hansen, Head of the Innovation Foundation.

We did a follow up discussion with Hansen, whose resume includes the London School of Economics, the World Affairs Council, and the World Economic Forum. She describes herself as a collaborator, connector and innovator, and leads the Innovation Foundation, a social innovation lab empowered by Addecco Group. In our exchange, she looks at education from the vantage point of shifting needs in the global workforce.


Education goals and aims, it seems, would vary from region to region — for example, what's needed in West Africa, or Sri Lanka is different in Luxembourg or Switzerland. However, there's been all these socio-economic factors and demographic shifts. Do you see a set of challenges that actually unifies global institutions of higher learning in their aims?

Great question. I think one of the kind of challenges that all higher education is looking at worldwide now is how much is practical, and how much is theoretical learning. And then the bit that I was talking about in the discussion was about how much is the nexus between.

The stereotypical model of higher education was for a very, very small number of people. It was around “learning for learning’s sake”. There was a time at which you could, as a as an intellectual, know most of what was in the known world (that’s sort of a Western view).

And over time, universities started to become more like research institutions, and there started to be ties to industry and the world of business. So there was this blurring, and almost as a sense of, should actually universities just be in service of business? And now there’s kind of a swing back. It's always that struggle to walk that line between how much value is there in just intellectual thought for the sake of that—which is fantastic. That’s where philosophy, and ethics, and all kinds of valuable human contributions come from. But then there's also this idea that it needs to somehow be rooted in the real world. So regardless of where you are, I think there's always that delicate dance.

We’re experiencing intense interconnectivity right now, and it is paving this path towards decentralisation. We had a global pandemic that kept everyone at home but intensely connected with increased information flows. Now we have these hybrid workspaces which ten years ago would not have existed. In the midst of all this, what does a hybrid university look like in the future? Because we're moving towards this — maybe my question is more like: how does the University of future not get swept up in this Internet of Things? How does it remain distinct as an entity?

It's a bit parallel to what companies are trying to do in terms of hybrid workspace, and I think in a perfect world there's this whole narrative around “come together when you want to do things that really mean that you have to be together, or that are better when you're there physically, and then think about the things that you can do better on your own”. So if I need to think, if I need to write, if I need to read things, I'm much better at home. If I want to run an interactive workshop or a brainstorming session or a needs-finding session — those have to be in person. There's thinking to be done on the university side as well about for what purpose do you bring students together? And then not only bring them together, but how do you craft that interaction? You have to create the right space, you just don't throw people into a boardroom and hope they have a good brainstorming. So there's a lot of thinking and crafting to be done about when people come together and when they do things separately.

There’s always been remote learning, in the past there were mail-in colleges to get a diploma. Are we seeing more of this: someone in South Africa getting their degree in Harvard, but never stepping foot in the place? I noticed during the pandemic a lot of colleges and universities were doing online talks, lectures, seminars—all open to the public. It made me wonder, if you can access Cambridge and ETH online through these public learning experiences, then why would you pay?

You can't know what you're missing until you experience it, so I would hope that that hybrid proxy doesn't become the only thing that people, especially young people, experience. It's great that you can access Harvard from wherever, but you don't have that experience of walking across the campus or living in a dorm or, you know, going to crazy parties at night…

Maybe it's just an evolution into a new version of what university will be, but I think that human interactions are something that you need. So if you're no longer going to get it from university because you access Harvard online, you need to build something else where young people can have that same kind of experience.

Speaking of interconnectivity, we can't avoid the dramatic ways in which AI has changed things in a very short time. It’s everywhere, sometimes problematic, but it is the wave of the future and you can't stop people from using it, so it has to be integrated. You’ve brought up something very interesting about education culture, the embodiment aspect, being on the campus, being part of the group. This makes me wonder, how do we embody knowledge? ChatGPT, for example, is an incredible research tool, but also gives rise to plagiarism. So we might have to do away with essays, but then there’s more people defending their thesis vocally — as in performing the knowledge? A lot of pluses and minuses, what are your thoughts on AI?

So I'm not an AI expert, but I've been thinking about this and talking about it with people a lot, and I think the biggest danger is somehow that AI supplants human thinking. If AI is always a tool in service of human thought and human need, then it can be used like any other research tool. And then the layer on top is the human judgment, the human thinking, the digesting the information and coming up with something new and relevant.

One of the dangers is that AI replicates the biases in in human behaviour and human thought (there’s a lot of information out there about this). When you look at AI being used to screen CVs, why is it not screening out people in the same way — and even in greater volume that that a single recruiter might not? Not because of bad will, rather, because of the inherent biases (embedded). I think that's a huge issue.

I do think a lot about how you how you digest information and come up with unique insights, so we've been working on this at the Innovation Foundation. The first step is really taking in a whole bunch of data feeds: public data, proprietary data (from within the company), social listening (which is social media data scraping); and lots of consultation — phone calls, focus groups, and interviews. All of that could conceivably be done by a chatbot or you know, an AI. There's actually interesting research about people being more honest with a chatbot than they would be with a with a real person. So you could have all that done, but I think where the secret sauce is the human judgment that takes all that information and makes sense of it — and makes sense of it in a human context, not just what's interesting or what are the trends, but looking at the trends and what's interesting — and then figure out what it means for people. And it's that leap to “what does it mean for people”? Or "what could be different if we thought about through a different lens”? I don't think AI does this yet, but maybe it will. And then that again will change everything.

This is a salient point about bias: on the one hand this interconnectivity, this access to information is creating the kind of equity. It means that people across the board can access information, but then again this information is marked by bias. You touched on this in the conversation with Chris and Günther, could you talk about equity, whether it’s gender-based or economic — how does the university of the future surmount these obstacles? What are the strategies?

One of the key things that's linked to bias, that actually we've been working a lot with my team about, is choice and agency. You can't have real choice and real agency unless you have not only information and knowledge, but also the tools to unpack it, and know what it means for you. I think that's a key role that universities can play: I was talking about on Monday about “learning to learn” which is learning to think critically, learning to engage information, learning to filter out what's useful, not useful, this I think is really important.

When we were looking at things like blue collar women coming back in to work, if you just looked at the data, the common narrative it was pointing to was “shift work is bad” but actually shift work isn't bad. The inflexibility and the unpredictability of shift work is what makes it bad — or not appropriate or attractive to women in that demographic, or really to anybody.

So the ability to control your schedule, or at least make your needs known, and then to choose when you work, and when you don't work, makes a huge difference. If I have more control, and I can arrange my childcare, I can arrange my transportation, and I have the ability to choose, then I have agency. And so that idea of having the right information, having the tools to think about it, and then to make a choice and be heard when you've made your choice is huge.

If universities could equip people with the ability to take in the information, filter, digest and synthesise and then determine what it means for them, and then be able to exercise that agency better — it would make a difference. It also plays into this whole question of what's real choice. We looked a lot at that as well: you might think “it's my choice to leave the workforce because I can't get a job that pays more than my childcare,” but is that a real choice or is that kind of a fake choice that's just imposed on me?

We talked about the old idea of “learning for the sake of learning”, and now it's more about the contours of the learning: how do you process the information? How do you digest it? It's not so much the content of what you're learning, but maybe it's the context? Speaking of context, there’s a shift into “lifelong learning” — and this is seems to be aimed at engaging the workforce, becoming specialists, fast becoming its own entity. Could you talk about this?

There's a huge amount of lifelong learning, I'm a fan of lifelong learning. I also acknowledge there are so many different interpretations of that — I like it as a concept, but there has to be a systemic approach to it. So just saying, lifelong learning is great, and you should continue to take courses your whole life. That's not enough. What do you what do you want to accomplish? What do you want to achieve in your life? Therefore, what kinds of skills, competencies, tools do you need? And what would keep you engaged? What would keep you happy? There's also this element of what feeds your soul, not just “I can get a dozen more micro credentials and make a little more money”. I also think lifelong learning has been for too long framed in the employment arena.

A systemic approach, I think is really good: Singapore really pioneered it with these lifelong learning accounts. They're individual accounts that you as an individual pay into and your employer pays and the government pays in, and then it's portable. And so you can move and continue to add these credentials and continue to use that money throughout your life. This is good, but still tied to employment. And so it's only part of the solution. France experimented with that as well. There are other countries and looking at that, that kind of personalised account and that goes back to this issue of agency. So if I feel that I can use that money for the things that benefit me, and help me to then make a contribution to society or to make a company, then I will be more motivated to use it, than if it's just money that's there — and I've got a list of five choices, maybe I use it. Maybe I don't. And so lifelong learning is great, but only if there's this enabling environment around it.

One last question. How does a university like ETH Zurich, for example, stay relevant in global competition? What’s going to make ETH more distinct than, say, MIT or Harvard? What are the strategies? What do they have to aim for?

I think they are all doing a lot of similar research, but I think if ETH could really crack that nexus between technology and human-centred design — nobody has done that really effectively, and MIT is certainly working on it— and a lot and others, but I think that's the missing piece.