The worldwide accumulated knowledge is in great part available online, with few clicks. This deeply changes our scientific environment and the role of universities.

Universities can radically enhance their role in building overall social scientific enrichment, far beyond helping individuals to climb the social ladder through diplomas. We are all trying to adapt and to exploit the potentials of the new technologies, particularly AI, an on-the-job learning task for the very institutions that promote them.

The digital revolution is a revolution in overall knowledge creation and dissemination; it has become much less a business of transmitting content and much more about teaching (and learning) how to navigate in the high seas of instantaneous and global online access. The immaterial world of knowledge has changed, and knowledge is the raw material universities work with. I am 85, over 50 years of teaching experience, and I need help just as much as my students. But mostly, I think that as institutions, we can learn from each other in a collaborative, networked environment. In a way, using the new technologies to creatively learn to use them. We have a common challenge.

The adaptation of the university to the new technological, economic, political, social, and cultural context needs to be dimensioned in a concrete way, in what the changes represent in the various areas we engage in. The world of knowledge has shifted, but we are very much stuck in the routines of the past. Rescuing the broader mission of the university involves concrete changes in the activities of professors, in curricula, in management policies, in the organization of exchanges, in the concept of university libraries, in the organization of publications, and in relations with different communities. This is also a networked society and knowledge can be spread instantly around the world with a click. With knowledge becoming the main factor of production in the economy, reorganizing how we work has become a key systemic challenge. Universities have an even more important role to play, but in a new context.

Knowledge, disponible online, with global connectivity and intelligent access, can become a huge factor of social enrichment. The costs of transmission are extremely low: this is the Zero Marginal Cost Society, as Jeremy Rifkin calls it. I suggest that we, as universities, professors, and researchers, should expand our role as communicators, bringing science to everyone in a much more dynamic way. The technologies are running fast, but our ivory towers stand, powerful and still. Worse: commercial profit-maximizing groups are building a diploma industry, while aristocratic high-class science publishers make fortunes on “double-peer-reviewed” publishing for the happy few. Time to consider how these huge advances in technology can make science affordable with much wider access. How do universities face the digital revolution?

The discussion and research to be developed consist precisely of identifying and communicating the possible lines of change, the most embarrassing delays, and the successes already achieved in different institutions. In a way, it is about the state of the art of the ongoing transformations, obstacles, and opportunities. It is a matter of identifying the most significant transformations while understanding it is a changing environment, not just a new situation. There is little doubt that new technologies, planetary connectivity, and the overall centrality of knowledge open up opportunities that are largely underutilized. The following points, in random order, can help guide discussion and research. Rather than immediate solutions, the areas we could explore.

One is to learn from each other, looking for examples of how different universities, in Brazil and around the world, are adapting to the new challenges: labels such as "hybrid system," which only suggest possible combinations of online and face-to-face activities, are clearly insufficient. Rather, we need to identify experiences that go beyond distance education or e-learning and to generate a typology of the adopted changes. And certainly much beyond the $40,000 a year teacherless AI experiments in Texas. Making a preliminary evaluation of results that meet the relevant social issues will certainly help. This implies an inter-university collaboration network.

We must go beyond the expansion of the mercantile model that transforms knowledge into a commodity, accessible through intermediaries and their tollbooths. In the knowledge area, collaboration is much more productive than competition. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (2006), edited by Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, is a good starting point. Some basic assumptions of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) can be put on the table. In a way, universities must reorient the very research on universities and reconsider the legal bases of knowledge access. The copyright and patent present jungle is a mess, making access more costly and generating rentierism rather than promoting progress and creativity.

In this line, scientific publication and communication have also to be thought over. In research, the universe of indexed publications, in particular the industry of reference journals, today an oligopoly that generates profits of the order of 25 billion dollars annually for groups such as Elsevier, has become a prehistoric oligopoly. How can we better use the ease of access and communication? What can we learn from what is being done by the numerous institutions that promote Open Access, Creative Commons, PlosOne, ArXiv, OCW, China Open Resources for Education and the like? We have to insert ourselves in the research of new directions that are becoming global. For knowledge is global, immaterial, and can be instantaneously accessible. It multiplies by open collaboration.

We should also rethink the universe of what we now call students. The ease of online access today allows us to have students from anywhere in Brazil and the world, but also, with the current pace of technological, economic, and social transformations, we can see the student as a permanent collaborator, with successive returns in various professional moments: this orientation goes beyond the "alumni" and aims to identify spaces in "lifelong education," both in terms of potential demand and internal forms of organization.

We should research the innovative projects that are already being developed by groups or individuals who search for diversified, freer and more autonomous professional ties. Beyond commemoration parties with ex-students, we must consider the potential of networking with them, since they are working in very diverse institutions and can bring views, for example, on the distance between what they studied and what they met in their professional life. University as a learning organization on its own.

Shouldn’t we rethink the way we organize ourselves as teachers? Numerous universities teach the ergonomics of intellectual work, ways of organizing accumulated knowledge, and generating and making available a body of knowledge that allows overcoming the prehistoric use of photocopies of chapters. The universe of the university professor is changing, but the inherited culture is rigid. How is support for the necessary transformations being organized? In my university we have technical discussions on how we manage AI and, in fact, the more general changes in the way we deal with a deluge of information. The interesting environment is that we are all learning, in this area, professors and students alike. We are still putting the lights on, in a way. Technology evolves much faster than institutional change.

The technological support centers in the universities have come to play a major role. Our working material is information, and this is precisely where the new technologies are changing more deeply. The support technicians we hire frequently come from commercial areas with a view to automatization, simplification, and robotization, while what we need in universities is different. Technology must contribute to enriching our choices, not to simplifying reality. The very technology support teams in our universities need retraining. Innovations in this area should be shared among universities, simply because it is systemically more productive. A new digital culture needs to be appropriated by the university, simplifying and facilitating instead of bureaucratizing. How are universities in Brazil and around the world facing this transition?

How to rethink the concept of university library? Libraries around the world are moving gigantic collections to digital format, notably the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It is a free public service, which simply works better. What we face is not a rigid alternative between traditional books I can read on paper and the online versions. I publish my books in traditional format but also put them online in the Creative Commons free access format on my website. They are complementary: researchers have to scroll through innumerous publications online, confronting so many views on different subjects; they will do it online, not buy every book or paper. We need much more free roaming in knowledge for top science. Each one of us builds ideas on the ideas of others; collaboration is central. The networking potential is ample and underutilized. Tollbooth systems on knowledge generate fortunes, not progress.

A professor will not realistically recommend that students buy the books he comments on in his classes. High school teachers face similar challenges. My books are free online, but the printed versions keep selling: they are complementary uses and formats. How a university library works is part of this planetary transformation, but it also should help organize the different subsystems of access and the way the professors work with their students, which would allow it to keep up with emerging innovations and research in the world.

Lawrence Lessig, in his The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2004), is still very helpful, but the AI has brought a new revolution. Recent studies like Tim Berners-Lee’s This is for Everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web (2025) are particularly rich in showing how the struggle for free information flow is evolving, while Mustafa Suleyman, in The Coming Wave: AI power and our future (2025), shows the depths of the technological and cultural transformations. It is this deep shift in the world of knowledge that leads us to rethink the role of universities in a wilder sense. The very concept of knowledge accessibility must be reconsidered.

In this line, I would suggest we, as universities, generate a discussion environment on the key issues, among which:

  • Rethink the concept of extension, insofar as the availability of knowledge online can be generalized, involving training, but also scientific support around local problems. Social poorer peripheries hardly reach the university, but with online systems it is feasible to conceive ways for the university to reach communities in a much broader way and with an interactive vision. We can radically democratize access to knowledge. The science we build can generate important multiplying effects for society as a whole, rather than commercial appropriation by high-tech corporations.

  • Articulate the concept of scientific areas and disciplines for the generation of integrated interdisciplinary research on key problems, which require systemic understanding, regarding the main challenges. Urban organization, social and environmental challenges, inequality, issues of social economy, the future of work and many other issues can constitute research lines capable of generating richer knowledge and also greater synergy between the various areas. I am an economist, which means I have to understand so many issues beyond the economy.

  • Rethink the articulation between professors, students and university management, to the extent that the monitoring of online activities can either take place through more intelligent and unbureaucratic ways, or it can tie the various agents of the university universe in a sterilizing administrative rigidity. The very concept of monitoring productivity and results needs to be rethought in the context of new technologies and new forms of work. Democratizing university management can generate rich and healthily chaotic interactions.

  • We should study the potentials that the universe of shared knowledge opens up for the collaboration and support of universities to the universe of lower levels of education, like high schools. Partnerships and network organization can ensure a scientific enrichment of the territory as a whole, generating a collaborative environment for all teaching, research, and extension professionals. In this digital revolution environment, with the ease of connectivity and networking, the education universe can become much more interactive.

  • Define priority lines for inter-university cooperation, for example with neighboring countries, which often face similar challenges, or with Portuguese-speaking countries (PALOP), in particular Angola and Mozambique, seeking reciprocal enrichment, ensuring the capillarity of inter-institutional agreements so that they become concrete joint projects of teachers and faculties. Latin America is a privileged universe of collaborative networking. With online connectivity, the international dimension of teaching and research can be greatly expanded, where the creation of transnational curricula promoted between Latin American universities can be an inspiration. With present instantaneous translation capacities, even the issue of language differences has become easier to overcome.

  • We must amplify research on how the salary policy and the forms of hiring in university institutions in Brazil and in the world are evolving. Today, the use of recorded classes disseminated online in many school units, in the context of the accelerated privatization of the educational system, centered on financial results, is changing labor relations, weakening them in the sector as a whole. Teachers’ associations' networking on the subject is needed.

  • We must study the impacts of the internationalization of the educational system, in particular at the university level, with large companies listed on the stock exchange and standardization of programs: in the age of knowledge, controlling the system of its production and dissemination represents a big business, ranging from the indebtedness of students to the business of academic publications, the provision of shared administration services and a standardization that seeks economies of scale. Such studies have the perspective of realigning the universities with their original “universal” mission. The corporate global profit-maximizing structure, with absurd copyright control and absentee owners pressing for more dividends, is in deep contradiction with our mission. How is this developing? Education control can become a major corporate goldmine.

  • The vision of public, free, and universal education represents an ideal that needs to be not only defended but also studied in depth, ensuring the comparative study of the forms of organization in Finland, China, Canada, and other countries that have assumed that education in the broad sense constitutes a fundamental investment in the age of knowledge and not an "expense" to be controlled, and much less a privilege that reproduces elites and inequality. This is an area where we need UNESCO's contribution, for the changes and threats are global.

The vision supporting these suggestions consists in particular in organizing information on how institutions are innovating in Brazil and in the world, how innovative technologies are being harnessed, and what the impact of the centrality of knowledge is on economic and social progress, as well as the immense potential of connectivity and universal open access. It is about enriching the discussion on the transformations of our institutions in the changing scientific universe that we face. Thinking about our future as a university must be part of our work as educators, and the results may radiate to a set of institutions that seek new directions. There will not be a new "situation," but a process of change that we must build upon.

In addition to the necessary reorganization of the meaning of knowledge and of its production and dissemination in the domain of universities, we should also highlight the critical challenges society faces in the economic, technological, and political dimensions. The convergence of the social, environmental, and political crises demands an intensification of global issues discussion, not only in the universities, but also because they can bring serious scientific information to a larger public.

We cannot ignore the enormous manipulation of information on the world scale, and we do have, as universities, both the responsibility and the possibility to go beyond our walls, using all the communication capacities the technologies offer. But most of all, we need research on the very role of universities in this new and changing environment. Knowledge is our domain, and knowledge has become the key factor of social overall transformation.