Two university systems, and what it's all for - or better: who.
08 September 2026
Where you stand changes what this argument is. Two universities mark the poles. Humboldt, in Berlin, is public and state-funded. It charges no tuition, to anyone, and treats education as Bildung — a public good, the forming of a person. Humboldt is no accident here — the history kept pointing back to him, and, by chance, I studied there myself. The University of Melbourne, founded on the British model, is also public. But Australian higher education has been rebuilt since the late 1980s around a market: free tuition ended, fees came back as deferred loans, and the country’s universities became one of its largest export industries. So the same argument is two different acts. In Berlin, to argue for formation is to remind an institution of what it already is. In Melbourne, it cuts against a live commercial logic.[^1]
Under both sits a question I cannot answer: does the world want independent, resilient, questioning people? Employers say so. Saying and rewarding are different things. Most organisations are built for standardisation and efficiency, and those are not always conditions in which an independent mind is welcome.
This meets a thread from the presentation I give my students as an introduction — the clash of worlds. The chief executive predicting what his workforce will need is, in good faith, doing what an educator does: preparing people for the world he knows, not the one arriving. And he will not be the one deciding when the graduates turn up. By then someone else is in the chair, formed by a different moment. The line I put to students — that their educators were not trained for the future coming at them — turns out to be about the CEO too. The trap is not the university’s. It belongs to every institution that moves fast, employers included.
So I do not know whether the world will value these people. But I have stopped thinking that is the question. Whether or not the market rewards it, the person is served by being independent, resilient, able to decide for themselves. That ground is firmer than any forecast, because it does not depend on the forecast being right. The aim of an education was never employability. It was the fate of the student — the capacity to meet, and if it comes to it survive, a future no one can predict.
That is why I keep saying I care about the future of life, not the future of work. Reduce education to jobs, and you make it hostage to a market that may not want what it should. Tie it to the student, and it answers to something that does not move.
That, in the end, is what a university is for.
Next: None of this is new
This post is part of The Third Nexus Series — What a university is for when the content is free.
[^1]: One case sits outside this: the regulated professions — law, medicine, and the like — where a local degree is legally required. There the credential is protected by regulation, not by any scarcity of content, so the free-content argument works differently, and the guild-like moat is real. A separate question, left for another day.