The Twice-Marginalized University: Can It Save Itself This Time?
title: "The Twice-Marginalized University: Can It Save Itself This Time?" slug: "fanchunping-again-marginalized-university-can-it-save-itself.en" date: "2026-06-26" category: "education" author: "Fan Chunping (Zhigeng)" excerpt: "In May 2026, Khan Academy, TED, and ETS jointly announced the Khan TED Institute—a genuine degree alternative. The second marginalization of the university, an institution that has existed for over a thousand years, has erupted. History is either repeating or rhyming—the question is whether universities can save themselves."
The Twice-Marginalized University: Can It Save Itself This Time?
Author: Fan Chunping (Zhigeng)
In May 2026, at the TED2026 conference, three non-profit organizations—Khan Academy, TED, and ETS—jointly announced the founding of the Khan TED Institute.[1]
This is not an online course platform. This is a genuine degree alternative: total cost under $10,000, assessed by competency mastery rather than seat time, with graduates receiving clear proof of what they can do—not a credit-hour checklist of how many classes they sat through.
Partners include Google, Microsoft, Accenture, Bain, McKinsey, and Replit—all employer-side forces, directly involved in setting skill standards and employment matching.[1]
The news barely caused a ripple—nothing like the buzz around a new ChatGPT release, SpaceX's upcoming IPO, or Trump's comments about investing in AI companies. The headlines were bland, soon pushed to the margins of the algorithmic feed.
But I believe this is one of the most important education stories of the year—arguably the most important.
Because, as a cross-disciplinary education researcher, I have watched something unfold gradually before my eyes: the second marginalization of the university—an institution that has existed for over a thousand years—has erupted.
The university's first marginalization occurred at the end of the 19th century. The second is happening now. Is history repeating, or merely rhyming? The answer depends on whether universities can save themselves.
I. The First Marginalization: When Universities Couldn't Produce the Talent Needed by the Industrial Revolution
Rewind to the mid-19th century.
Steam engines roared, railways stretched across continents, telegraphs ticked in Morse code. The First Industrial Revolution had already transformed Britain; the Second was redrawing the world map.
Factories needed engineers. Railways needed mechanics. Telegraph companies needed people who understood electricity.
What were universities teaching at the time?
Theology, classical literature, philosophy, Latin, Greek—the medieval seven liberal arts, virtually unchanged. Oxford and Cambridge were still producing clergy and gentlemen, not engineers. The University of Paris debated scholastic philosophy. The entire European higher education system turned a blind eye to the Industrial Revolution.[2]
Society couldn't wait.
Trade associations founded technical schools inside factories, which gradually grew into institutions. Germany's Realschule, France's École Centrale, Britain's Mechanics' Institutes—a wave of new educational institutions, independent of the university system, along with civic universities focused on practical training, emerged to directly meet industrial needs.
The university was marginalized by real-world demand.
German Universities' Self-Rescue
Self-rescue began at the University of Halle (founded 1694), one of the first European institutions to introduce natural sciences and German-language instruction, breaking Latin's monopoly on academia and incorporating physics and chemistry into the curriculum. The University of Göttingen (1737) followed, establishing Europe's most advanced scientific library and physics laboratory of the time, emphasizing the unity of research and teaching. Faculties of natural science, engineering, and technology were founded one after another. Science and technology—society's most advanced productive forces—were brought into the university system. These reform experiments became the prelude to Humboldt's reforms.
Enter Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussia's Minister of Education—more precisely, head of the Section for Culture and Public Education within the Prussian Interior Ministry—drove, between 1809 and 1810, a university reform whose influence persists to this day.
The core idea: unite research and teaching. The university would no longer be merely a place to transmit known knowledge; it would be an institution for investigating the unknown. Professors must not only teach but also conduct research. Students must not only attend lectures but also participate in research.[3] This marks the origin of what we now call the second of higher education's three functions—transmitting knowledge (educating), researching scholarship (producing knowledge), and serving society. Some now speak of a fourth function: cultural construction.
This model was realized at the University of Berlin (today's Humboldt University of Berlin), founded in 1810. The institution established emerging disciplines in the natural sciences and engineering, bringing chemists, physicists, and biologists into the university system.
The results were immediate. Germany rapidly became the world's center of higher education, and subsequently its center of science and technology.
In the latter half of the 19th century, German chemical, optical, and mechanical industries led all of Europe. A saying spread widely: Germany defeated the French army on the battlefield—in its laboratories.
Nations around the world sent delegations to learn from Germany. The United States dispatched tens of thousands of scholars to study there; upon returning, they transplanted the Humboldt model to reshape Johns Hopkins University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard's graduate school. Japan's Tokyo Imperial University was modeled directly on German universities. When China introduced modern university education in the early 20th century, it too drew mainly on the German model—shifting gradually toward American universities only after the Boxer Indemnity.
That time, the university survived. Through self-reform—bringing research into teaching, incorporating science and technology into the curriculum—it found its place in society once more, becoming an indispensable force for social development.
Today, as society undergoes rapid transformation, the situation of that era appears to be replaying itself on a grand scale.
II. The Second Marginalization: The Gap Between Universities and the Real World Is Widening
Today, the situation universities face is strikingly similar to the mid-19th century. In recent years, voices within higher education have declared the classroom dead, the university dead. Professors who have exhausted every trick yet cannot get students to look up from their screens feel their hearts turn to ash. Some even say attending university has become an expensive waste—a waste of money, a waste of the opportunity cost of one's life.
Symptom One: AI's Impact Outpaces University Teaching Reform by Orders of Magnitude
The AI industry iterates every few months. University instructors, long disconnected from production and social practice, often lag behind their students in understanding and applying AI developments.
Over the four years of an undergraduate degree, or the three years of a graduate program, the foundational models and AI tools that profoundly affect individual learning and research will have undergone countless iterations.
Even where some universities or individual instructors try to keep pace with the AI wave, university courses take at least one or two semesters from proposal through approval to delivery. By the time a course launches, the industry has already moved on.
This is a structural mismatch—universities update on yearly cycles; technology iterates on monthly cycles.
Symptom Two: Credentialing Power Is Shifting from Degrees to Badges
In the past, a degree was the sole passport. Universities monopolized the right to judge whether you were qualified.
But today, a GitHub contribution record is more persuasive than a GPA. Kaggle competition rankings attract more employer attention than a master's thesis. Google Career Certificates, AWS certifications, Coursera specializations—these competency badges have already replaced some of the functions of degrees.[4]
The founding of the Khan TED Institute pushes this trend to a higher level: Khan Academy has the learning capacity for content production; TED has dissemination power, a thought-leadership brand, and a global network; ETS has a standardized assessment system—it is the world's largest testing organization (GRE, TOEFL are both under its purview).
Symptom Three: AI Itself Has Become the Teacher
Historically, a teacher's core value lay in being the person who possessed knowledge. But after the AI explosion, for foundational knowledge and general skills, any student can directly ask AI—and receive explanations clearer, more patient, and better attuned to individual pace than most teachers can provide.
Teachers are no longer knowledge monopolists. They are not even research monopolists anymore—when AI can independently design experiments, analyze data, and even write papers, conducting research is no longer an exclusively human domain.
III. The Possibility of Self-Rescue: Does the University Still Have Cards to Play?
I believe a few cards remain in the university's hand. But whether it can play them well is another matter entirely.
Card One: Transform Passive Teaching into Active Coaching
The teacher's role shifts from knowledge transmitter to thinking coach—no longer telling you the conclusion, but walking you through the path of how that conclusion was reached, and along the way, constantly challenging your assumptions, pointing out your blind spots, training your judgment.
This lesson requires universities to completely reconstruct their faculty evaluation systems—no longer evaluating professors by publication count and grant funding secured, but by the magnitude of improvement in students' thinking capacity. This is not a matter of tweaking the course schedule. This is evolution at the species level.
Card Two: Turn the Degree into a Lifelong Identity
Ninety percent of a Harvard MBA's value comes not from classroom content, but from the networks, resources, and trust conferred by the identity "Harvard person." This is something AI cannot replicate—because AI cannot issue you a diploma carrying social capital.
One possible direction for self-rescue: transform the university from a four-year consumption product into a lifetime membership. Graduation is only the beginning; the institution continuously provides career transition training, industry networking matchmaking, and entrepreneurial resource support.
Card Three: Turn the University into an Authentic Engineering Training Ground
AI can teach you theory, but AI cannot give you a real engineering context. Provide real-world contexts, real equipment, real collaboration in engineering training. Not virtual simulation labs—send students into workshops, into the field, onto project sites.
Card Four: Extend Education into the Domain of Meaning
There is one thing AI (at least current AI) cannot do well: help a person answer the question how should I live?
The university was once an important site for providing meaning. Regrettably, for a rather long period, the university alienated itself into a vocational training center and a paper factory, discarding the dimension of meaning.
IV. If Self-Rescue Fails, What Does Humanity Lose?
A genuine buffer zone.
The university is a unique social space: suspended between adulthood and adolescence, between family and workplace, between theory and practice, it allows a person four years of trial and error—changing majors, changing directions, changing worldviews—without immediately bearing professional consequences.
No online platform provides this buffer. Khan Academy's content may be excellent, but it provides no dormitories, no dining halls, no study halls or libraries, no late-night discussions with roommates about the nature of the universe and the meaning of life.
The old saying goes: against the current, either you advance or you retreat. Today, even slow advancement is retreat. If universities don't reform, they will disappear. If they reform too slowly, they will also disappear.
This is not alarmism. History is littered with universities that were marginalized and perished. The 19th-century German model, the Humboldt model, is a textbook case of successful university self-rescue. Can a success from two hundred years ago be replicated today?
Only time will tell.
References
[1] Khan Academy official blog, "Introducing the Khan TED Institute, a New Approach to Higher Education," TED2026 Conference, May 2026.
[2] On the disconnection between 19th-century European university systems and the Industrial Revolution, see: R.D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914, Oxford University Press, 2004.
[3] Wilhelm von Humboldt's higher education reforms, the University of Berlin model. See: Humboldt, On the Limits of State Action, and the founding documents of the University of Berlin (1810).
[4] On competency badges replacing degrees: Google Career Certificates, AWS Certification, Coursera Specializations, and the use of GitHub/Kaggle as competency proof.
[5] This article's views on the university as a buffer zone are inspired by David Graeber's insights on the sociological functions of university institutions.
Fan Chunping (Zhigeng) · June 2026