Strategic Research, Post-modern Universities and Research Training
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Strategic Research, Post-modern Universities and Research Training Arie Rip University of Twente, Science, Technology and Society (Faculty of BTT), PO Box 217, 7500AE Enschede, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]
The old division of labour between fundamental and applied or problem-oriented research has almost disappeared, and with it, the functional distinctions between universities, public labs and industrial and other private research. Doctoral research training can then also become diversified in terms of its content and its location. Closer analysis of ongoing changes, in particular, the emergence of a regime of strategic science, is necessary to specify requirements for a career in science in the coming decades. Disciplines as we know them may not be of major importance, but interdisciplinarity as such is not the answer. For universities, the key challenge is to diversify and recombine, both cognitively and institutionally, into what I call a post-modern university, which includes overlaps and alliances with centres (of excellence and relevance), public labs and various private organizations. In such a university, a doctoral student can wend his or her way through the types of locations, just as is to be expected of his or her later career. Higher Education Policy (2004) 17, 153–166. doi:10.1057/palgrave.hep.8300048 Keywords: doctoral programmes; science careers; science technology and society
Introduction In research training, students are trained for the world of science and research. But for which world? Traditionally, that is in more or less stable situations, the training task could be defined as bringing students to the research frontier of the particular specialty. Derek de Solla Price once calculated that you need 4 years to do this, being the time allocated to PhD training. In the present fluid and dynamic situation, research training has to prepare students for roles and skills that are not yet clearly articulated. And there is no assurance that their research career (if they will have one) will be located within a particular scientific specialty. The goals for research training will be moving target posts. One way to address this problem is to diagnose the changes, try to understand the longer-term patterns and to reason back to requirements for research training. This is the road I will follow in this article. Indeed, there have been attempts to diagnose what is happening and project a probable future.
Arie Rip Strategic Research, Post-modern Universities and Research Training
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The Gibbons et al. thesis about Mode 2 of knowledge production is well known (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001), and while it is simplistic in its projections, the diagnosis of ongoing changes appears to be right (Rip, 2000). The Triple Helix analysis of increasing interactions between universities, governments and firms is less ambitious in how it often limits itself to describing what is happening (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000). There is a link with the debate about changing roles of academics, wh
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