Robert J. Birgeneau, the Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, writes about the challenge for universities in a Commentary in the current issue of Nature Matierials (6, 465 – 467; 2007).From his article:

As information technology fuels the expansion of knowledge at an ever-accelerating pace, universities everywhere are confronting the question of how a successful university should be structured in the next century. In the past decade, changes have swept European university systems from Britain through Switzerland to Germany. In the United States, publicly funded universities are facing a growing gap in trying to remain at the forefront of higher education and research while competing with private universities with wealthy endowments. My own institution, the University of California Berkeley, widely regarded as one of the world’s leading public universities, must consider how to maintain and enhance its success as a pre-eminent academic leader while still retaining its distinct public mission and character. This is our challenge for the twenty-first century.

Read on at the Nature Materials website (subscription or site licence required).

A related Editorial in Nature Materials (6, 463; 2007) can be read here.

Frank Gannon, in the current issue of EMBO Reports (8, 7, 611; 2007), looks at different countries’ ways of funding scientific research, and asks whether the “pinnacle” or “plateau” model is optimal.