 Hi, I'm Charlie Nessen. I am tremendously pleased to be able to introduce Juan Carlos to Martin to you. My acquaintance with Juan Carlos goes back to a meeting in Torino. How many years ago now? 12. 12 years ago now, when Terry Fisher led a group of us to Torino to do a conference, an internet and society conference. And the result of that adventure was not only the bonding of a friendship with Juan Carlos, which has resonated steadily through, but the founding of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino by Juan Carlos. And a connection between the two of us focused on the future of university. Now, we're here today because Juan Carlos has brought that interest to fruition in the form of the publication of this beautiful book in Italian. And we look forward to the opportunity for hearing from him in the future about the future of university in English. I'm hopeful that many of you brought laptops today. Are there many who have not got any connection to the net? Who has not gotten that connection? Not too many. All right, great. Well, when Juan Carlos is finished with his presentation to you, I'm looking forward to engaging with you on the net, as well as here, face to face. So without further ado, may I introduce to you Juan Carlos DeMartin, a student, a scholar, a creator of future university. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. It's a pleasure to be back at the Beckman Client Center at Harvard University. And even though Charlie Nessen already kindly reminded all of us about our connection, let me do a very short preamble to my presentation. The preamble is why I'm here today talking about the future of university. And the credits mostly go to Charlie Nessen and to the Beckman Client Center. And let me remind you the first time where I met an initiative which was specifically focused on the role of university in the internet age, which is this university that Charlie, I'm sure, remembers very well. And many people in the audience maybe remember as well, which is university knowledge beyond authority in 2007. That was maybe the starting point exactly 10 years ago, thinking about the role of university in this age. And then we went on with the Beckman Center, organizing a three-day conference in Turin in 2010. Again, thinking about the role of university in this age, those two days were truly memorable because we brought together librarians, philosophers, engineers, entrepreneurs, all of them with their specific and singular point of view about the future of university. So it's after this conference, organized with the Beckman Center that Charlie and I, and maybe other people too after that conference, thought that it would have been a wonderful idea to try to collect this stimuli and try to organize them, give them some order. It was exciting, but there were so many different points of view, it was difficult to come up with an actual plan. And in 2011 together, just me and you, exactly at lunch and talk like this one, we tried to start this trajectory, thinking about the role of university. That was the very beginning. Everything was still very fresh. And now after six years, we are here. So let me thank Charlie for setting me on this course. Thank you so much. It was life changing and it's not an exaggeration. And let me thank also Urs Gasser that for one year together with other people at the Beckman Center, just let me mention Amar, I saw him, but also many other people was a wonderful experience organizing for one year the conference in Turino. It was an amazing experience. So thank you so much to the Beckman Center leading me to this first maybe product which is this book in Italian. And I will tell you later why it's in Italian. So thank you, Beckman Center. Thank you so much for this experience. Now the preamble is over and let's focus on the main question that I wanted to address, which is the role of university in society in the internet age. Which also means in the 21st century because the 21st century will be many things, is already many things, but one of the things that the 21st century is, is the internet age. Digital technology born in the 20th century is only becoming pervasive and profoundly influential in our society in the 21st century. Now, rather than addressing this issue theoretically from an abstract point of view, I wanted, maybe because I'm an engineer, I wanted to start from the context. So in which context are we placing our thinking about university? Now when I mean context, I mean the global context. And a quotation by the Guillem Rouen, the French philosopher, reminds us of how ambitious and difficult it is to think about the context. It's very difficult to ask what times do we have in front of us? What are the challenges? What is likely to happen? Nonetheless, we must try like our ancestors did before us. So it's difficult, it's prone to errors, but yet we have to try and that's what I try to do. And so the first chapter of the book and the first part of this presentation is about trying to identify five global challenges that characterize our times and most likely the next 10, maybe 20 years. We can discuss, and maybe we'll do it in the question and answer session, why five, why not seven or three or 12? Why are these specific fives and then completely open to the objection that it is arbitrary? Sure, it's my own subjective way of trying to conceptualize the current time. So please accept it as it is. It's my subjective proposal. And I use the word challenges rather than crisis. Not because crisis would be wrong, but I do want to belong to the apocalyptic literature. I want to make it somewhat less dramatic by calling them challenges, even though they might as well be called crisis. So very briefly, because as you can easily understand each one of these challenges in itself, it's a potentially huge topic. So you're just going to be extremely fast. For me, the first challenge is a democratic challenge. And by democracy, democracy people have defined it as a kind of a regime which is always in crisis. But I think it's fair to say that nowadays in many countries, it's severely under pressure. It's even more in crisis than it normally is. And so we have to think carefully about how to make democracy substantial. Actually have a democracy which is not voting every certain number of years, but something closer to the ideal. Huge topic, if you won't discuss it later, but for me it's a major crisis. Second one is the environment. We have been using the planet for now centuries as if it had infinite capacity to accept our refuge, our garbage, and also to mine for resources. Of course, that's not the case. We always knew it was not the case. And now we're seeing major development. Let me mention just one, which is global warming. You know everything about that. But global warming, it's interesting in thinking about the role of university because according to several scholars, global warming could lead us to change in the planet equilibrium, which is hard to grasp and hard to understand. So we will probably need lots of knowledge quickly to understand developments which are not easy to extrapolate from the recent past. Third challenge is technology. I'm a computer scientist. Technology has been with humanity from the beginning, but of course in the last couple of hundred years has played a larger role and in the last few years has played maybe an even larger role with incredible developments in many different kinds of disciplines that hold promise and we usually focus on the promise, but they also pose challenges. And these challenges are rarely easy. Intellectually they are complex, they are difficult. We can balance the benefits with the potential side effects. So you can again make your arbitrary subjective list of what are the main technologies and I just put up four, like biotech, artificial intelligence and robots, so computer science at the frontier, nanotechnologies, neurocognitive and all of these are moving very fast, much faster than society can handle it. The ordinary citizen or the legal system, so it's moving very fast, typically pushed because they hold the promise of great economic and civic benefits and yet posing enormous questions that are at all level of society. Fourth challenge is the economy. What do we mean by this? Well, if you, we take a broader look, let's say in the last 80 years after the Second World War, we see a phase in the 50s and 60s where we registered and the data is clear, the fastest and largest growth of economic well-being, both in developed countries and in emerging countries. Then there was a transitional phase in the 70s and now a second phase started and we are still living in it, I think. And in the second phase from the 80s to todays, the numbers are pretty clear. Growth has been slower. Surprisingly, trade has been slower, especially in the last 10 years. And so the question, which is an economic question, but also regards each of us as citizens, is going back to the basic question how to ensure a decent livelihood to all. How to ensure a decent livelihood without extremes in inequality, et cetera, et cetera. So this is, it's also an intellectual question because we've seen in economics development in the last, let's say, 30 years, which have reduced the thinking in economics to a very narrow field. And therefore, it's also an intellectual endeavor to try to understand how to answer this question. Fifth and last, geopolitics. And geopolitics, I mean that, I think it's, we have been talking about changes in the world order for at least the last 40 years again. So the role of the US and the world, what is a new, is a new world order emerging or not? Huge questions. For me, the main point is how to observe and study what's going on. And in order to do everything we can in order to preserve peace, because history tell us that when world orders readjust, typically at least in the last 200 years and also before, we had war. So can we escape this fate? Can we handle this transition, whatever it is, whichever direction we go, preserving peace? Now, if we allow me to draw some observations based on these five challenges, is that we are most likely going, and maybe we already are, in uncharted waters. There are high risk, so connected to technology, connected to the environment, connected to everything, to democracy. There is the risk that we could face pretty large dangers. Again, I don't want to sound apocalyptic. I'm not apocalyptic, but we have to assess the risk and some risk could be large. But what's really puzzling is that it could be that some of the things that will happen will be unpredictable in the sense that we cannot model it. It's not as simple. We cannot just simply rely on extrapolation of what happened in the last 10 years or 100 years. There are signs in several fields where there could be a discontinuity. It could be an environment. If in the worst scenarios for global warming, we scientists simply don't know exactly what will happen to the world system, but also in other fields. Now, if we accept this, then, I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say we will need knowledge. Of course, humanity always needed knowledge, but we will need lots of it, both old and new, more than ever before. It could be, we will need somebody in real time trying to make sense of what's going on and find ways to prevent the worst, to mitigate side effects, to capture the best. Second, of course, we will need people capable of interpreting, using, producing such knowledge more than ever before. So, educating people with these capabilities. Third, in democracies, humanity will need that the knowledge gets to as many people as possible, and that as many people as possible are critical thinkers. Why did I include this third point? Is that, as we all know, in the US, as in England, as in Italy, in many countries, there is a clear rejection of experts and expertise, which, as being in universities, we have to be seriously concerned with that, and therefore we have to address this issue and try to bridge this gap, which is potentially destructive for society. So, what did we do wrong to lose the trust of people? Can we do something to reduce the gap and to go back to providing maybe new ways knowledge to citizens? So, again, based on these three observations, it's clear that the university, at least in principle, will have a very strong role also in the future, maybe even more so than in the past. And these three points are also potentially have implicit a blueprint for the university 21st century, as we will see in a second. But before going to the blueprint, let's very briefly assess the current state of university. By university, of course, I don't mean Harvard or university, I mean in a very broad sense, an average of what the direction of which university walked for the last 40 years. So, in which direction the university has been going for the last 40 years, very broadly speaking, on average. In a nutshell, my, but also there are many, many, many analysis going in the same direction, the society and university has always been extremely sensitive to the pressure of society and to the spirit of the time. So, university in these last 40 years have been trying to pursue knowledge as much as possible, immediately useful for the economy, broadly speaking. Not that it stopped doing everything else, just there was a clear preference. If you do that, society, meaning politics, meaning economic power, et cetera, appreciates you. Second, in the field of education, there has been a strong shift of focus towards training workers. So, preparing people for getting a job, which is absolutely fine, it's absolutely understandable, but less attention on the side of education of human beings and citizens, which has been, is traditionally in the roots of university, but has received less attention. Again, think broadly in not only in this specific place where I speak. Third, and is that university, and if you look at the sociology of organizations, is has always been widely recognized as a normative organization. Normative is an organization based on values and symbols, where power is exercised through values and symbols rather than a utilitarian organization. And the most important one are companies, okay? Now, if we look at overall the policy around universities in many countries, we could conceptualize as a push trying to change the nature of university from normative, like churches, non-for-profits, et cetera, to something more close to a utilitarian organization. Of course, the pure models never exist in nature. Even churches or non-for-profits might have some parts of utilitarian organizations, but universities were pretty clearly normative and has become, over time, more utilitarian because of pressure from the outside world. And just a few examples, the intense use of metrics in evaluating researchers and getting tenure and promotion, which reaches absurd levels in my own country. Insane emphasis on in publishing for publishing sake, so it doesn't really matter what you publish. You just have to be productive, which means produce a lot of publications. And connected to the second point, the third point is that disciplines have become more and more narrow. You want, because it's easier to publish if you are in the center of your discipline, if you're not wandering around the boundaries of your discipline. In other words, we could summarize, and there is a huge literature on this, the historically multi-dimensional mission of university has been flattened, looking at the more useful economic products and the spirit of the institution altered from normative to utilitarian. However, I come from Italy and the book is in Italian, and it's in Italian because when we were working and thinking and discussing with Professor Nesson, my country was entering the huge crisis after 2008. And the fate of my country is pretty similar to the rest of Southern Europe, so Portugal, Spain, and Greece, being Greece the worst case, of course. And in the case of Italy in the last seven years, university, which is already one of the smallest university in OECD countries, we have the lowest level of graduates, even among young people of OECD countries, rather than doing something to overcome this historical gap, university in Italy was contracted by 20%. So the funding, the number of professors and the number of students was reduced by 20% in the last seven years, okay? So that's why I say, first of all, I need to write it into Italian and try to do something about that. All these represents a problem if we want university to help societies to face the challenges that we described before. If you have such a strict focus on the short-term benefits, if you have such a focus on preparing workers, actually that's not what you should be doing if you want to help society facing these huge problems that I mentioned at the beginning. We need, in fact, a university free to focus on problems affecting society, not those immediately relevant to the market, okay? We need all kinds of knowledge, not only the knowledge that looks useful right now, and we need it, we can also take the, I can accept the utilitarian approach, okay? Let's accept it, even from a utilitarian point of view, knowledge that now looks not useful could be useful in three years, in five years, in 10 years. And actually there are plenty of examples of knowledge that was deemed unuseful and turned out to be extremely useful just a little down the road. So we need to keep diversity. And you can argue it from different point of view, but we can also argue it from a utilitarian point of view. We need a sort of ecological diversity of knowledge. We need interdisciplinarity because many challenges of society are intrinsically interdisciplinary, okay? All the challenges that I mentioned are interdisciplinary. And, but with the current focus on disciplinarity, this is difficult to do. The incentives for researchers, and I'm sure many people will resonate, the incentives are not in that direction. And we need effective interaction, not just communication with the general public, okay? I want to underline, it's not a matter of better communicating, okay? Let's communicate as effectively as possible, but it's not a matter just of giving them our truth. It's also a matter of interacting with them. And that's another story. So, and we need a university who speaks truth, meaning university who speaks what thinks it's true, even if it's inconvenient. So, how do we get this? My proposal, which I articulate in the book as also in this talk is by rediscovering the roots of university because in the roots of university, so in the way university was conceived by our grandfathers and going down to at least the beginning of the 19th century, there is a solution for this kind of problems, okay? But it's not a mere reinstatement of the good old times. It's not simply let's take the university as it was in the 30s or in Berlin at Humboldt's time, no. We have to also update these roots. We also have to deal with specific problems. So, the roots belong, what belongs to the roots of university? Definitely the fact that education is a relationship among human beings. So, if we lose this at all levels of education, then we are losing something extremely important about education. Education is not mere information transfer. And so, in the education side, we have to preserve it. Innovating, experimenting, like we always did because if you look at the history of education, there have been proposals of innovating this personal relationship in many different ways, but we have to keep the personal relationship. And also, education of human beings and citizens, not just workers. This is in the roots of university. Look back to the 18th century. It's already there. So, nothing new here. We have to just rediscover it. Critical thinkers, everybody is in favor of critical thinking. Everybody talks about critical thinking, but it's another matter to actually, it's an open question. It's also an open research question how to actually improve critical thinking in people and students. So, even though everybody talks about it, it's still an open problem to actually realize it. And it's in the roots of university. The head well done, as Montaigne used to say. And we want critical thinkers because I'm afraid that we will deal my generation and the millennials unexpected situations in different fields. And we need somebody who'll be able to think on their feet, use critical tools, use knowledge, produce knowledge and deal with the unexpected. And as an institution, and we are still part of the roots of the university, taking the long view, thinking, okay, let's think about the next generation, let's think about the next 20 years. Capable of slowness in a world which is extremely fast, but it's very myopic, being able to go slow of silence, of concentration. This is all part of the description of university for maybe a thousand years. However, with respect to the past university, I want and I propose and I envision a university much more capable of the several things. Keeping the limits of disciplinarity under control to be able to address relevant problems. There is an important problem which doesn't fit in a certain discipline. Therefore, nobody is actually studying it. We have to overcome that and we do that not by abolishing disciplines. I'm not an abolitionist. Disciplines play an important role in society, in the scientific society, but if left to lose or even if given incentives to become even more disciplinary, they create walls. We don't want walls between disciplines. Maybe a little short fence and we need people being able to cross the fence to establish bridges. Disciplines fine, but kept under control. And it's not really happening apart from certain specific places. Strongly encourage heterodox thinking. Now, in principle, everybody is invited to think outside the box and to be innovative, but actually it's pretty clear that at least in certain disciplines and economics, I think is a very strong case in point, universities become a conformist. So there is one mainstream accepted way of looking at problems and everything else has to be ostracized and this is bad. It's bad intellectually, it's bad also. Again, from a utilitarian point of view, we need real new heterodox thinking exactly like it always happened. University has produced lots and lots of heterodox thinking that eventually changed society. Now, more theoretically, but still very important, university conceiving itself as being a trustee for the unborn, for the generation to come. Now, this has been typically at least in Europe, maybe the US is different, but in Europe, this has been a role of the state to take care of future generations. Now, the states, certainly Southern Europe, but maybe more generally in Europe, do this less and less, that become short term is the states as well. But university has always had the role of bridging the dead with the unborn and therefore should conceive itself more clearly as trustee of the unborn. And then we can discuss how, but still this concept for me, I think it's important. And the side effect of this is conscience and critical society. Not for criticism per se, but university that says what it thinks it should be said, also thinking of future generations. What about them? Okay. Let me mention President Faust. At this moment in our history, university might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling question necessary to any society. She wrote this in the New York Times 2009 right after the financial crisis and it's still relevant today. Fourth, engaging with the public and as I mentioned before, engaging with the public means not only communicating to them, which often becomes preaching to them, but listening to them. Okay, listening to their concerns, which well doesn't mean pandering to them, but it means listening to their priorities, to their concerns and have a dialogue, which also the researchers in science communication says is the only thing that possibly work. Simply saying, no, you're wrong. This is what science says. If you don't believe it, you're a moron. That doesn't work. The only thing that possibly work is actually dialogue, even though it's difficult and time consuming. And fifth and lastly, active employing the internet to achieve these general objectives. Now that's where we started, also with Charlene Esson thinking about the internet and then the university. And over the course of these years, I kind of reversed my perspective saying, okay, let's think about society and broader context and then technology becomes an instrument to reach the objectives. And I'm sure all of you understand or at least can envision how to use the internet for all the previous points, interacting with the public, preserving knowledge for the future generation, et cetera, et cetera. So the internet has a means to an end. So let me conclude so that we have enough time for the conversation. The global context is to put it mildly in flux. And more than in the recent past, we will need new ideas, critical thinking and character. By character I mean the moral quality of individuals because in trying times, not only knowledge, not only rationality will be important, but also the character of individuals. So these are clear responsibilities for university. And the university, and that's my proposal, can move in this direction in the direction demanded by the 21st century by rediscovering its roots because in the roots, so it's not a total reinvention. I know we can rediscover the roots because we already find there in our history, in our roots, many things that are useful, looking forward, but also with some critical adaptation to the present time. So not merely a reinstatement of what was in the past. And again, let me finish with a quotation. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding, and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to. Again, first and foremost. Thank you. Excellent, excellent. Now if you would, I'd like you to open your laptops. I'd like you to go to cyber.harvard.edu slash questions slash futura you. You will arrive at something called the live question tool. I want you to do nothing else for the moment. Just get there. What I'd like you to do now is to give thought to the one question that you would like to see. Answered by Juan Carlos. And enter it in the box there. Don't hit the send button yet. Just enter it in the box. Or we have connection questions. Sorry? Here. Cyber, C-Y-B-E-R, yes please. Cyber.harvard.edu slash questions slash futura you. I just put it up. Sometimes it's slow, actually, listing in this list. So if you just go up to the URL, yes you did. Can you get there? If you can get there, I hope you can get there. If you can't, we'll figure out another way around. I want you to formulate your question in the box that's provided where it says post a question. Click post a question. It will open a post a question box. And it will give you something like a Twitter length opportunity, a little bit longer, to state a question. Please all do. And within a minute, I will ask you to hit the button but don't hit it until I tell you. Don't hit submit. And please maintain it anonymous. Okay, hit the button. And once you've hit it, close your laptops. Make sure it goes through. Don't close before you just hang on until some of this. This is homegrown software, you understand, written by Jonathan Zittron many years ago. When we started the Berkman Center, our thought was exactly the idea of bringing together the diversity of a classroom and the idea of using the digital environment that we were exploring as a way of actually enhancing the engagement within a classroom seemed like a logical strategy. And I'm actually curious to open up with that as a question to you, Juan Carlos. Do you see when you speak about the strategies for university, they're grand and are we able to do them ourselves or are we just able to opinionate about them? But when it comes down to can we manage our classroom in a way that makes university come alive in a way that might take advantage of the incredible diversity that we're now able to assemble and somehow move past the solidified forms of university knowledge transfer, even the ideal of knowledge transfer. It seems like the place for growth of university is right here, right here. Actually when, and I'm looking also the first question about, which already changed, but about how to facilitate change. When I wrote this book, I was not thinking very much about administrators, at least not the Italian ones. I was not thinking of politicians, at least not the Italian ones. And I was thinking of students, students, their families, ordinary citizens because I do believe that even though it might take a long time, only talking about these issues with the students and their families and their friends, we can achieve change. So I don't believe much sort of a top down, even if it happens, it's welcome, but I don't really trust that it would easily happen top down. So let me just follow along if I may. If change is gonna come and we need all this knowledge in order to be the masters of this new space, the idea of it coming from students sounds a little crazy. That's the students don't have the knowledge. They come to university to get knowledge. But you know, they should know what is a student. And actually that's an interesting point. What is a student? What is a student? Well, maybe that's exactly where we should start with students, trying to explore with them what is a student. What is the student trying to do? What's the difference between an intellectual learner, for instance? Who is the university student? I think you find building blocks for your answer, looking at history, but even just looking at the present time, the university student is a specific kind of learner. There is a specificity. May I call David Weinberger? I think everybody's gonna have, it's a wonderful question and the question and I think the answer is too obvious to require a cold call. I would seem that a student, a learner is anybody who wants to engage and learn, if I may, and a student seems to need to be in a more structured environment, maybe getting tried or something. But learn about what, David? Everything, anything. Doesn't make any difference. Yeah, I don't think it does. And there's so much out there to learn. And now that we've got our little digital thing, we have it all right there. And so we don't need all of that. Oh, I wouldn't go that far. But I was with you 100% until you got to it. We don't need all the rest. Because most people in this room have benefited from exactly from all that rest and varying degrees of commitment to it. So I think the question is, assume that everybody has one of these, which is not a true assumption, but within large swaths of the world it is. What is it that the university can bring to them that they don't get on their own? Or why is it that a student, being a student would bring to them that being a learner wouldn't? Yes, thank you. Please. Hi, my name is Nebrupe. And I graduated from University of Turin and we had these discussions there. So there's a tacit component to knowledge. And that is what differentiates a student who's physically here versus somebody who's taking MOOCs, for example. I think the answer is embedded in the very definition of knowledge compared to information. Knowledge of what? Knowledge of anything, but there's a critical human component to it compared to information which can be structured and can be transmitted without loss compared to knowledge, where you need to be physically here, me talking and you guys talking about something and the learning is different. That's what I feel about it. That's what I learned. Thank you. Oh yes, you're good. But maybe to be cynical for a moment, I mean, ideals aside, students are also students as opposed to learners because they're postulence to systems that grant access to power and authority in different kinds of ways, that grant professional privileges or knowledge that's instrumental in different kinds of ways. And indeed, these institutions, in part, animated by the ideals that you've enumerated really richly are also implicated in those systems of power. And so I think that's a dimension of the university's role in society that we need to pay attention to as well. Absolutely, I agree. Well, I'd press my question knowledge of what. I've been very impressed with the position I have heard articulated by Peter Gallison, History of Science, articulating the idea that the opposition that we should be concerned with is the opposition between the internet expansiveness on the one hand and the diminution of self on the other. That is the idea that we are finding ourselves diluted as we more and more live through the screen. And we are finding ourselves more questioning the edifice of knowledge that's been built through the centuries by universities, now crumbling into its problematic hearsay quality with fake news and lack of border. And so ultimately the question of knowledge of what would seem to turn to knowledge of ourselves and questions of who and what we can trust and how we can use our engagement with each other in university to resist the dilution that the openness of the net presents to the problem of self. Just a thought. Now, am I right that we end at one o'clock? Is that right, Dan? It's a 1.15. Oh, 1.15, excellent, excellent. Oh, excellent, Dan. So floor is open. Shall we open our laptops again and vote up the questions and see what comes up to the top? Can we take a few minutes and see how we, which questions? Yeah? That's fine. Oh, good. Okay, so in terms of the knowledge being produced now that there are lots of young researchers in the systems, lots of PhDs being produced and not enough jobs for them, there's that pressure to publish a lot of papers. And Peter Higgs, a physicist who got the Nobel Prize, he's now about 87 years old. He says that when he was, in today's academic, if the academic environment had been the way it is today, he wouldn't have gotten a job. And there's no room to do thoughtful research when you have so much pressure to produce numbers. And it's also very tough on young researchers in terms of many people who are very smart, hardworking, but there aren't enough. So what's your thought on how to incentivize good research in a way that doesn't just produce numbers when there's a disproportionate number of PhDs being produced compared to the jobs? Is there a broader solution? Right. To a large extent is the academic community itself which has accepted this focus on publishing a lot. So it's been only partly pushed from the outside. It's mostly us that in the last 40 years thought it would be a good strategic move to send a message of the outside world that we are, quote unquote, productive. And therefore it's to a large extent self-inflicted. Now how do you stop that? Well, I believe in trying to provoke a debate and to question that. And I'm far from being alone in the sense that now there are dozens and dozens of paper published in Nature, in Science, in the Economist precisely denouncing the negative side effects of this extreme focus on publishing. So it's becoming totally mainstream and I'm afraid it will take time in order for this criticism to actually change practices because in the meantime, the all academic infrastructure has adjusted this change and so has adjusted to this requirement of publishing a lot. So I don't have any clear and fast solutions rather than keep discussing and keep saying it, hoping that at some point it will become widespread. Would you like to use this question tool? Now we've come up with some very good ones here. I think you may have just addressed the first one and take a look at it and see if you think you have and if not, move on to the second, are you a Juventus fan? I don't care much about soccer, sorry. I know, I know. What are some specific ways you think we can make these changes happen? But let me go back to the first question. I mean, with independent job conscious time, what arguments might resonate with a skeptical public? Well, let's go back to the question of who's a student. Now a student is somebody who is in principle voluntarily seeking an experience of a few years of his or her time because it's passionate about knowledge. This in principle, the root of the words today in Latin for which student comes means passion, okay? So that's the principle. And so I invite students in my book but more generally saying you're investing something valuable a few years of your life in the US also a huge financial commitment and extract the best out of that because those years will not come back. And you have an extraordinary opportunity to deal with different kinds of knowledge and fields of knowledge and exploited as much as possible because afterwards it will be difficult for you to do the same. So try to do that as much as possible because it's a unique opportunity. And this is so in the mind of people is not only nobody's forcing us to be job conscious and utilitarian is also in the mind of people. So that's why I was asking who's a student trying to remind students what they are ideally in principle supposed to be. I know it sounds very normative and idealistic. I know there's nothing I can do about it. Well, I mean the underlying worry is that this is all very wonderful but we live in a practical world that's driving universities more and more to follow the dollar. And do we have anything? What have we got to play with? What are our chips in the game? We're getting hurt. Yes, universities are very precarious, are very extremely sensitive to the standard world. Incidentally, that's why we always keep about talking about academic freedom. We talk so much about academic freedom exactly because we are so weak, broadly speaking. Again, I'm not talking specifically about Harvard. So we are very sensitive to the outside world. Yet, everybody recognizes that universities have a certain degree of autonomy. Without autonomy, you don't have universities. They become something else. So what I'm suggesting is that let's explore in different countries you will do different things. Explore the degree of autonomy you have and I suspect that you have more autonomy and more leeway to do things that I advocate more than we think, more than we, the administrators think. Somehow we are too shy and too constrained. We are self constrained. So you could frame it as I do often in the book is also in this talk saying, we don't want to talk about high principle. Okay, let's be utilitarian. And actually you can, in several cases, prove that what I advocate is more useful. Maybe not next month, but in a little longer time. So that's for instance something that a position you could take. It's also a position on Nobel Prize in Economics like Phelps who explicitly says it's good for the economy to educate in a liberal sense citizens and workers. So I think there is a space to exploit our autonomy to go somewhat more in this direction. It is not a huge breeding space because we are constrained by the outside world, but we could do more. What do you see as the difference with American universities? Well, I mean in the US the cost of education is something that distorts our whole thinking. I mean the cost of education, which in Europe in many countries is zero. And in some countries, let's forget about UK which is already a questionably part of Europe. But in other countries, it's zero. Like in Germany it's essentially zero. In many countries it's zero. So when instead like in the US you have to make such a huge investment and take loans and debts, then the thinking about university changes radically. Because if you're investing so much money, it's almost impossible not to think of university as an investment. And then if it's an investment then I become a customer. But if I'm a customer then university is a service provider, et cetera, et cetera. Several things that happen in Cascade when there is so much money involved. I think that's for me is the main difference. So you see a radical difference. Let me say this Charlie, when I came through customs on Friday and the young agent at the customs say, where are you coming here? I'm talking about a book about university. What kind of university, what do you say in the book? Do you talk about student loans? That's what he asked me. That's a huge problem. You should talk about that. Well yes, I think you should. In the American version of the book, we do. But if that's the fundamental difference between American universities and Italian universities. No, not the only one. It's not the only one, of course. It's not the only one. And actually, people reading my book in Italy are clearly seeing that what I'm proposing for Italian university is to move in certain fields towards the American model. And the American model, it's interesting. If you trace the history of liberal arts education, it's interesting because it starts in Italy. At the end of the 14th century and the 15th century, there is a sort of educational revolution happening in Italy at the time. And then it essentially stops with a counter-reformation and moves back to northern Europe. And through northern Europe goes up to the Scottish universities of the Enlightenment, which have a fundamental role in influencing the developmental universities in the US. And so liberal arts education born in Italy ends up being represented and championed mostly by the US. But the roots, the original roots are Italian. And so I'm advocating to Italy saying, let's rediscover our own roots and let's adopt the model that you see at least for certain areas of education in the US. Do you see Italian universities as in worst shape in American universities or vice versa? Oh, it's almost impossible to make a comparison in the sense that in Italy, we have an actual system of 66 universities funded by the state. So it's very top-down governed by a ministry. And in the US, it's not even a system. You have 4,400 different kinds of higher education institutions, extremely heterogeneous. So it's really impossible to make a comparison. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have dominated the questions. May I please invite others to contribute? Perhaps. Thank you. You just mentioned that even from a European perspective, maybe the learning abroad scope of knowledge may be useful, maybe not in one year, but in five years or 10 years in the future. But I think as to, at least according to my observation, maybe your workshop in Italy is not very extreme. The more extreme one is that the only, the other, actually, the majority of the students who go to universities find job of graduation immediately. So even if I have the possibility that what I might learn may be useful in the next five years, but if it cannot help me to find a job, then I have no opportunity to use this kind of skills without the job. So under this pressure, the students, maybe even if the professors have noticed that we should not focus too much on employment or something like that, then to learn more about the border liberty and not. Maybe a student of mine will think, oh, that's not useful for my job seeking. I don't want these, I want to learn such so-called hard skills, something like that, and hard to address these issues. Okay. The point is that what is useful? There are, in cases where the answer is obvious, okay, you learn to program a computer. Fine, that's a very clear skill and it's going to be useful in many lines of work. But there are other topics which is not clear at all what does it mean to be useful, okay? And therefore, students, which of course are influenced by the time in which they leave, they are maybe too fast in thinking, okay, this is not going to be useful because there is not a clear connection with a potential job. Because you actually don't know what kind of job you will be doing in five, 10, 20, 30 years. There is even companies, very often, they say we don't want to really prescribe something because our field, our market is changing so rapidly that we want somebody actually in the US that's pretty clear also in the business literature. We want somebody flexible. We want somebody with the capability of learning new things. And if you put together actually the World Economic Forum, the Future of Jobs, if you look at the 10 main skills required by employers, prospective employers, they're very rarely specific skills like learning to program a computer. They're very much more softer skills, like being flexible, being adaptable, being able to interact with people, being able to learn new things. And therefore, again, let's go back to the UT Italian point of view. I think that maybe learning something of ancient literature of a dead language maybe is not directly relevant right away for a job, but it could be useful to create a person flexible and productive, okay? So it's a matter of being a little more open-minded thinking about what is useful. Hi, so I hear about, and you yourself said that you recognize some idealism in your proposal. And I think that, I actually think that if you are gonna be idealistic, why do you put so much hope in the university instead of actually individuals, individuals who will get as technology becomes more available, the access to information that they need? And then forums are just gonna be, I mean, I believe that universities, and I think you addressed the point of the diminishing self, actually people have found forums that they couldn't find because it's hard to identify people's interests. They have found them through the internet. They have forums about very specific things that attract very specific interest and people find those ways. So if you were really idealistic, you would believe that people who have the interest to learn will find that information, and then universities will become really, I believe the only need for a forum of discussion would also be replaced by the internet. I mean, as I am sitting down here, I believe that, and I hope that my kids don't have to pay $80,000 a year for being sitting in a classroom, but that sometimes they don't find it, of things they don't find interest in when they can just go in the internet and find that information. Okay, institutions are important. And since I belong to this institution, I spent a few, sometimes some years thinking about my institution. Institutions have a long inertia. Well, the A university has been the longest living institution because now it's almost 1,000 years. And so it's as a presence in society, as a role in society. And I think it's important to think how to maximize the positive role of this institution. And which is not saying that what you described is not important. Sure, let's have individuals get together, use the internet and focus on whatever they think it's important. So it's not mutually exclusive. And having an institution which has the persistent power of being here also in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years, and having a community of people inside the professors and the researchers, who in principle have the time to think about problems and produce new knowledge and propose solutions, I think it's invaluable. Because if we leave it only to the individuals in, let's say, ordinary life, what we've seen in also in the movements of the last several years is that you don't have the power of persistency. You are active for some time, you devote your interest, your energies for a certain objective, and then you move on because you need a job or because you have a family, et cetera. So the power of institutions is that they are there, they will stay. And this provides something that the single individual cannot provide. Yes? Hi, my name is Anshamine. I'm a research fellow with the Berkman Klein Center. I guess I have a practical question as well. I'm wondering if they're, thinking about the Berkman Klein Center, for instance, I'm a research fellow, but I'm not a traditional academic. I'm not a professor, I'm not getting a PhD. But I have a contribution to make, I hope, to the center. And I'm thinking about continuing education programs, remote learning programs. What do you think about how we can rethink some of the structures and institutions of universities around this question around engaging the public? And how do we rethink publics and rethink who can participate in the university? What do you think of the current models here and are there other models that you can think about that universities might want to consider moving forward? Well, what I try to envision in this book is a university that has an academic community in the narrow sense, the students, the professors, the staff, et cetera, but also is more aware of academic community, a wider academic community. And this wider academic community, you can see it also almost as concentric circles, where you can have the people come into a meeting like this, because it's public, they could come to the meeting, they can, it's easier in Italy, we can use the library, you can actually, the classes are public in Italy, so anybody can enter a class and listen, even a whole course, it's completely public. And therefore, I invite universities to conceptualize this extended academic community more clearly and to engage them more explicitly. And of course, the internet is a great way of doing that. The very fact that this talk is being webcast is an example of reaching to a wider academic community. So. Could I use Mike Runner around her privilege to ask a question? So I'm looking at the question tool and there are two questions that are getting a lot of engagement. The first one that says, what is the role of university with respect to society's most marginalized and underrepresented people? How can this community meaningfully engage marginalized populations? And also, how do we get gender and racial equality in the senior ranks of universities? Do you mind touching on that topic, please? Sure, let's start with the first one. How? Well, it's, you can do several things to, regarding the most marginalized and underrepresented people. Again, the American system where you have a selection of students or so, there is a, you create the class in selective universities is different from the case in many universities in Europe where essentially you take all the students. So in that case, there is not a filter of any sort. Anybody who has the willingness and the practical possibility of going to university actually can, at least in principle. So again, the two systems are different in this regard and also therefore the actions are different. What I can say that maybe are in common is that the internet, without idealizing the internet, but again is a tool that potentially could be helpful in reaching to most marginalized population and people. But it is very partial answer because it really depends on the context. One thing is Harvard, one thing is public university, one thing is in Italy. And the second question was, sorry, or gender in the senior ranks. Well, there is again an inertia, meaning that it takes time in order to certain projects or initiatives like having a more balanced gender representation to actually show in the statistics. So regarding the senior staff, it takes, but again, we end up in the more technical discussion of how do you hire professors? And again, that's extremely different in the two systems. Thank you. I actually want to follow up on the previous question that the gentleman here asked. Just a quick clarification. You mentioned how the World Economic Forum lists these skills which are all soft skills and not hard skills. So as an economist by training, if you're looking at jobs at an entry level, they all required programming skills, working with statistical softwares. So I use suggesting that the universities focus on the soft skills and the student just acquires hard skills somewhere else. And one quick point I want to make here is which I think we skipped is that academia has been following the trend of the industry through the Industrial Revolution and farther down, the academia has been producing these folks who can then work there if you think in terms of the kind of skills be it like assembly line workers or now. Again, so I feel like university, I mean, we as academics like to think of ourselves as independent and I think there are these constraints there. These skills, again, are required by the job places and now suddenly there is this understanding that the liberal arts education is more important. So these trends clearly follow the industry pattern. So what do you think about that? No, absolutely, in the sense that for decades, both in the US or Japan or Europe, there was an understanding in industry that you should do your undergraduate studies in the case of the US on the liberal arts model. Then when you get a job, you get the proper training for that specific job. Now, what the trend we've seen, I don't speak for the US, but certainly the trend in parts of Europe is that the companies don't want to take the burden anymore. So rather than saying, okay, you got a general education that's going to help you to be flexible, to be able to write, to make an argument, to debate, then when you come in our big corporation, you'll get the training to do the specific job. They kind of shift the burden to the university, saying, no, no, you should do the training, the professional training. And university, in most cases says, okay, whatever, we do whatever you want, which is, in some cases, maybe inevitable, but in others, we should have resisted more because in the end, this approach of industry is actually reducing productivity and usefulness. So again, let's take a utilitarian approach to be everybody on the same page. Again, it's not productive to do that. May I bring this to a close in the following way? First, let us say thank you to Juan Carlos, please. Second, the basic problem, I think, that we're looking at is internet is something that the university has invented, really, but then we've pretty much backed out of it. We allowed it to be taken over by the commercial forces and the university hasn't really reasserted itself in a way that would balance the tremendous power of that commercial development. So I'm myself skeptical of thoughts that somehow we're gonna control that development. That's not the way we're gonna win. We're gonna win by actually asserting the new dimension that university actually offers. I believe by the ability. I mean, look how old and stiff the process of educating and expanding the self is. To me, university is the place where you come to grow up and the idea of growing up in a more powerful and straighter way that's more full of character and all of these things that you list, that does seem definitely to be challenged. Now, finally, would you open your laptops one last time and do what I believe is a step in the direction of learning how to use classrooms better? I'd like to ask you all to write me an email. To Nessan at Gmail. It's called a feedback memo and here's the idea. Three paragraphs don't have to be long. The first one, what's the best insight? What's the best spark that came out of this event? What might have lit your mind up, if anything, out of this event, insight? Second paragraph, concern. What's your worry? What's your biggest concern somehow stimulated out of this? Now with each of those two, what I'm proposing to do is to take all of your paragraphs, aggregate them, anonymize them, and send them back out to you so that we all see what we collectively took as insight out of this and concern. Third paragraph, speak directly to me, to Juan Carlos. I'd give you his address, but it's a big long one. Mine's easy, Nessan at Gmail. Not to be distributed. N-E-S-S-O-N. N-E-S-S-O-N at Gmail.com. And please, do it before you leave. Hit the button before you leave.