In 1997, Peter Drucker made a remark that felt provocative at the time but increasingly sounds like an observation rather than a prediction: “Universities won’t survive…the future is outside the traditional campus.”
What he was pointing to was not the end of learning, but the slow unravelling of a model that had become overly tied to place, structure, and habit.
Around the same time, Bill Readings, in The University in Ruins, argued that universities were losing their cultural and philosophical centre, held together instead by systems, procedures, and an unexamined pursuit of “excellence.”
Ronald Barnett later offered a more measured warning: universities may not disappear, but without serious reimagining, they risk becoming increasingly irrelevant to the world they claim to serve.
These were not attacks on universities. They were acts of care.
Today, particularly in the UK, higher education finds itself under extraordinary pressure, financially, politically, and socially. Universities are expected to educate, to lead learning, to drive innovation, to support local economies, and to prepare graduates for an uncertain future. And yet, many institutions appear to struggle with learning about themselves.
I write this not as an external critic, but as someone who has been part of the system for most of his life – as a student, researcher, academic, external examiner, and senior executive, across 11 universities. What continues to strike me is not a lack of intelligence or commitment, but a shared institutional stiffness. There is an unspoken consensus across the sector: bureaucracy has become heavy, and change has become difficult.
As a quality and organisational learning professional, I fully appreciate the importance of governance, academic integrity, and reputational protection. These matter. But when governance becomes primarily about avoiding risk rather than enabling learning, something vital is lost.
Universities begin to operate on autopilot, efficient perhaps, but no longer reflective.
The customer is sometimes right
One example illustrates this tension clearly.
Many senior leaders resist referring to students as “customers,” fearing a slide into crude marketisation. The concern is understandable. But denying the term does not remove the reality that students invest significant time, money, and trust in their institutions. The real question is not whether students are customers, but whether universities are genuinely listening to them.
Similarly, management tools such as balanced scorecards or international standards are often dismissed as “commercial” and therefore unsuitable for academia. But universities are organisations operating in a competitive environment. The issue is not the tools themselves, it’s how thoughtfully they are used.
When designed around purpose rather than control, such tools can support learning rather than undermine it. The current financial crisis facing UK universities has further exposed a deeper mindset issue. Faced with pressure, many institutions have turned first to cost-cutting and sometimes in ways that feel symbolically small but culturally significant.
Reducing student support or staff wellbeing may balance a spreadsheet, but it rarely builds trust or long-term resilience. Growth, diversification, and innovation are harder conversations, but they are ultimately the more responsible ones.
If universities are serious about learning, then their governance systems must also learn. That means listening to feedback, benchmarking beyond the sector, and ensuring that leadership accountability is about capability and contribution, not tenure.
It also means moving beyond ceremonial governance, where decisions are routinely approved but rarely challenged.
Constructive foot forward
So what might a constructive way forward look like?
It begins by recognising that the current crisis is not simply a funding problem, but a learning problem.
Many universities are struggling not because they lack expertise, but because their systems are poorly designed to learn, adapt, and reconfigure themselves in response to change.
This is where the concept of the Learning‑Driven Organisation (LDO), developed by Garad and Gold, becomes particularly relevant. The LDO reframes learning not as a support activity or cultural aspiration, but as the primary strategic engine through which organisations achieve innovation, foresight, and sustainable excellence.
In this view, learning is not something universities do, it’s how they survive.
UK universities already excel at disciplinary and individual learning. What they often lack, however, is enterprise-level organisational learning – the capacity to understand themselves as complex systems.
Becoming truly learning-driven requires institutions to embed learning explicitly within strategy, governance, and performance management, rather than assuming it will emerge organically from academic activity.
This involves articulating a shared institutional learning vision, aligned with public purpose, financial sustainability, and societal impact. It also requires governing bodies and executive teams to treat learning as a board-level responsibility, supported by structured reflection, feedback loops, and evidence-based decision-making.
Building a learning ecosystem
In times of crisis, universities often respond with isolated measures: restructures, new programmes, or efficiency drives.
By contrast, learning-focused institutions take a broader approach. They cultivate coherent learning ecosystems where people, processes, technology, and partnerships continuously reinforce one another, creating sustainable and mutually supportive growth.
The Organisational Learning Standard (OLS), which builds on the LDO model, provides a practical framework for doing this. It integrates culture, policies, infrastructure, innovation, people, measurement, and future readiness into a single learning system.
For universities, this means aligning academic development, professional services learning, student feedback, digital capability, and external partnerships into a shared architecture, rather than treating them as separate domains.
The financial pressures facing UK universities have pushed many institutions toward short-term cost-cutting that risks undermining long‑term capability. A learning‑driven approach reframes productivity not as “doing more with less,” but as learning how to create more value with what already exists.
This includes redesigning academic work to focus on learning impact rather than volume, using digital and AI-enabled tools to enhance feedback and assessment, and enabling cross-functional collaboration that reduces duplication and institutional silos.
Productivity, in this sense, becomes an outcome of better learning design, not austerity.
Embedding crystal ball thinking
One of the most damaging aspects of the current crisis is how many universities were surprised by it.
Learning‑driven institutions institutionalise foresight – the structured exploration of future scenarios – as a normal part of strategic learning.
Horizon scanning, scenario planning, and futures literacy enable universities to anticipate shifts in demographics, regulation, technology, and labour markets, and to adapt their learning portfolios and business models before crises emerge. Foresight, in the LDO and OLS frameworks, is not an add-on but a natural extension of learning maturity.
Let’s get (un)comfortable
Finally, universities must overcome their discomfort with measurement.
Avoiding metrics does not protect academic values, it obscures learning. Learning‑driven institutions measure not only financial results, but learning performance, innovation outcomes, staff engagement, student experience, and societal contribution.
Crucially, measurement should serve learning, not control. Balanced scorecards, learning indicators, and feedback systems become tools for reflection and improvement – helping universities understand what is working, what is not, and why.
Universities still matter deeply. But caring about their future requires honesty about their present. The choice is not between tradition and change, it’s between reflection and drift.
In an era of profound uncertainty, the most sustainable university will not be the largest or the most prestigious, but the one that learns fastest and most honestly. And universities, of all institutions, should understand the value of learning.
“Many senior leaders resist referring to students as “customers,” fearing a slide into crude marketisation. The concern is understandable. But denying the term does not remove the reality that students invest significant time, money, and trust in their institutions. The real question is not whether students are customers, but whether universities are genuinely listening to them.”
Well, in England, they are legally consumers, so it’s always been baffling to deal with academics and leaders who prefer to construct an alternative reality where this is not the case.
Another management prescription to solve the problems created by managerialism! If universities cease to be seats of learning and just turn in to self-replicating bureaucracies then that is the problem! To which more management is not the solution!!
Students can never be customers. Customers purchase a product or a service. Unless we move to selling degrees (which some may argue is close to what is happening in some places with standards dropping and push for Institutions to meet criteria for passing) they are students who need to put in an effort to learn and should have the intellectual ability to do so. Raise standards by reducing the number of Universities, by reverting some back to Polytechnics or Further Education establishments, by applying strict criteria for entry based purely on intellectual ability and decrease the emphasis on student/customer satisfaction. The student is there to learn, not to tell the lecturer what or how they should be taught. This will not only return Universities to what they once were and should be to survive, it will produce graduates with rigour, discipline and better equipped to join the working world.
Members of gyms purchase services. If they don’t put in the effort, they don’t get fit. If the euipment isn;’t working, they shouldn’t pay. Why are students any different?
By this definition, those people who attend these new ‘polytechnics’ are no longer students? Or would it be ok to use customer satisfaction because they are not at University so not as rareified?
Time is a trick of the mind: this article is based on the desirability of ‘adaptation’ to an emerging paradigm in which the social imaginary and living conditions are determined by speculative gambling on unproven tech and the whims of the bond markets. Hell, we can’t even attempt to renationalise critical national infrastructure without being roundly slapped on the wrist – how are we supposed to ‘reflect’ on a future in which imagination is constrained by power? It would be great if the consultancy and accounting industry were similarly encouraged to take a good look at itself – while hoovering up media and humanities grads, the Big 4 charge universities millions internationally for exactly the kind of advice in this article, which funnily enough leads to the closure of the courses that provide their keenest workers, or at least the recreation of a nineteenth-century style ‘funnel’ by which the children of the privileged reserve the right to ‘reflect’ on strategy and vision, while everyone else has to knuckle down and work for the stats. And regarding stats, this article has a stunningly naive attitude to qualitative monitoring, as if the implementation of targets does not inevitably lead to problematic distortions of reality common in industry: asset inflation, category errors, the prevalence of persuasion over reality, and the re-emergence of a subversive culture of reporting BS so as to be left alone by micromanagers (hooray for this!). I feel some people need to study sociology, which is tricky now after a summer in which this discipline in particular has been systematically undermined in the media, and courses encouraging critical reflection (‘Mickey Mouse!’ ‘lacking rigour!’ ‘anti-progress!’) are shuttered up and down the land. So academics, reflect, please, but only as long as you stay in your lane and put your shoulders to the wheel.
Universities exist at the heart of a complex societal ecosystem, and their survival depends on a clear, enduring purpose beyond basic teaching. As complex entities, they are subject to the same fundamental management principles as any enterprise—a point famously detailed by Henry Mintzberg, McGill University, in The Structuring of Organizations.
A university’s true purpose is to equip the rising generation with the knowledge, skills, capabilities, and vision needed to drive economic progress and adapt to global market disruptions. In an era shaped by technological shifts and rapid cultural change, higher education must cultivate creativity and agile leadership to the country’s advantage.
Forward-looking institutions must measure success by tracking alumni achievement and ensuring faculty bring real-world industry experience into the classroom. To attract elite, best-in-class talent to teaching faculties, university salary structures must also be in line with major professions. Furthermore, while students do not “purchase” degrees in a transactional sense, their expectations must guide institutional governance and design. Adapting Joseph Juran’s total quality framework, a university functions as an open system: taking in students, applying educational processes, and yielding graduates whose qualifications are genuinely “fit for purpose” in the workforce.
While some readers may highlight instances where this framework may not seem to fit, it is worth noting that successful organizations design their policies and systems for the norm, (NOT the exceptions). Edge cases are handled separately outside the core purpose and key processes.
A final point: most universities do not spend enough time capturing and analysing feedback from their alumni population or learning from long-term career outcomes. Nor do they measure the value-adding activities they helped cultivate—such as entrepreneurship and innovation—that directly impact the country’s economy. The key question is: are universities disruptive enough to transform themselves before influencing the reshape of the broader economic spectrum? Or will they continue repeating the teaching of old knowledge to students who can now access the most up-to-date information with ease from an AI agent or an online training platform?