The 90% University

A helpful starting point for me when considering universities after the pandemic is the cover story of The Economist, from two weeks ago, The 90% Economy. They were reflecting on the world economy will change in the coming years, suggesting three key characteristics.

 1. the economy will be more fragile 
 2. there will be less innovation 
 3. there will be even greater inequality 

The reason that it is called the 90% economy is because in the next few years rather than growing a few percent each year it will decrease in size by about 10%. 
Now on one level that doesn't sound too bad, but the problem is that it is not a uniform decrease across every sector, company, and individual. The changes will be quite heterogeneous. Rather, there will be significant gaps, that because of the interconnectedness of everything there will be problems. 

Just like the economy going back to ``normal'' universities will continue to have students, continue to do teaching, continue to graduate people but things, won't be quite the same, in some quite significant ways. It is not just a matter of possible 10-20 percent budget cuts.

1. Universities will be more fragile

Less stability and predictability is particularly bad for universities. Key ingredients for universities to achieve their real purpose are time and stability. Significant research, teaching, and learning all require time to build up knowledge, explore different possibilities, make mistakes, and not be distracted by crises, whether personal, institutional, or societal. Economic uncertainty is just one of many dimensions to the forthcoming fragility.

2. There will be less innovation in universities

Research is all about innovation, discovering new things, and exploring new ideas.  Drawing on The Economist article. More virtual meetings, less international travel, and fewer face-to-face meetings mean less brainstorming. Less random meetings and informal interactions will mean fewer new ideas. There will also be less money available for discretionary funding for new initiatives and fewer startup funds for new faculty, even if hiring freezes end.
After any crisis, people are more cautious and more risk-averse. A problem before the pandemic was that science was increasingly being done in a very risk-averse manner. People, particularly those without tenure, focus on low-lying fruit, working on problems that they are pretty sure they can solve in a year or less. Even senior people can only get funding if they have a ``track record'' in an area. This means they will just keep doing the same thing and not move into new areas. 
In reviewing his scientific life, Tony Leggett recently made the following comments.

Indeed, when I look back on ... a 60-year career in physics, I think I have been fortunate in many ways. I have had a marvelous constellation of graduate students and postdocs, from all corners of the globe... But if I had to pick out one thing that made all the difference, particularly in the early stages, it would be the tolerant and relaxed environment that I experienced at Sussex when starting there in the late 1960s. When I recall this and then look around at the current environment for people at the postgraduate, postdoc or junior faculty level, I feel quite concerned ... I get the impression that many of them feel that there will be no hope of obtaining the kind of postdoctoral/faculty/tenured position .. unless they have not only published three or four papers but published them in high-impact journals... I fear that one almost ineluctable outcome is that there is a strong temptation to focus all one’s energy on problems that can be reasonably guaranteed to yield results within the relevant time frame, typically two or three years. And almost by definition, these are not the really worthwhile problems! ...  the best advice I can give to any younger colleagues who seek my opinion is deliberately to put aside some fraction (30%, 25%, even 20%) of their research time for problems that they not only are not sure they can solve within the two- or three-year deadline but are not even sure that they (or anyone) can solve at all.

A similar conclusion can be drawn from a brilliant podcast, The Obscure Virus Club, by Malcolm Gladwell.

3. There will be more inequality, both within universities and between universities

This is part of the social tragedy that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, particularly during and after a crisis, such as a pandemic. The poor do not have the resources to adapt and survive. If you live in a slum you can't practice social distancing. If you don't have access to clean running water or disinfectant it is hard to practice personal hygiene.  If you lose your job you can't use your savings to go and get training for a new job. In contrast, if you are wealthy and have significant cash reserves you can wait things out, see your competitors fail, and snap up cheap investments. Similarly, with universities, it's hard for me to believe that institutions such as Harvard with massive endowments won't come out of the pandemic relatively stronger. Weak institutions will fold. Others will really struggle to survive and go through periods of stagnation.

There will also be inequality within institutions related to access, gender, and seniority. Because of the background of an economic downturn it will be harder for students from poorer backgrounds to afford tuition or access scholarships. Furthermore, poor job prospects will make the financial cost and risks of student loans not seem worthwhile. There will also be a push within universities to increase the number of adjunct faculty (i.e. people on short-term teaching contracts with no benefits). People with tenure who are well established will do fine because they also have a good strong social and professional networks. In a more online environment, it's harder to build those professional networks and so disparities may increase. The Economist article mentions a study that found the productivity of female economics faculty, as measured by the production of research papers, fell relatively to male ones, since the pandemic. That's arguably because women are more likely to have to take care of homeschooling and entertainment of bored children during the lockdown.

All this is a bit depressing. However, with a crisis, there are always opportunities. There will be plenty of opportunism (where people exploit a situation without regard to moral considerations and the impact on others). But, there will also be opportunities for the wealthy, powerful, and privileged to do good and facilitate much-needed changes in universities. For example, large philanthropies and wealthy universities can make long-term investments that others won't or can't. Well-established faculty can provide support/cover to junior faculty, students, and postdocs. In the longer term of decades, these will likely be the institutions and individuals at the forefront of what universities really should be about: thinking, writing, teaching, and learning, at the deepest level.