Cooperating for the future of higher education: Walking the talk in the digital bifurcation

Abstract

Higher education is being reshaped by accelerated digital development in a context marked by multiple crises. Its future becomes an urgent question in a situation that makes the future increasingly difficult to imagine. What should universities' missions, resources, organisational forms, research priorities, pedagogical responsibilities and social commitments be? Can Higher Education Institutions still function as central sites for the production and transmission of knowledge? More fundamentally, should they merely adapt to global transformations, or should they help build a more desirable society? This article approaches these questions through scenarios understood here not as predictive methods but as tools for diagnosis, debate and collective reflection. At the centre of our analysis are digital technologies and the expanding power of Big Tech firms, whose infrastructures increasingly dominate economic life, public culture, state capacities and educational institutions. We therefore develop two contrasting scenarios. The first is dystopian: the colonisation and polarisation of higher education by Big Tech. The second is utopian: a cooperative, research‐led university in which environmentally frugal digitalisation serves democratisation and the development of individual and collective capabilities.