American universities are at a crossroads.
A generation ago, America’s institutions of higher learning drove technological revolutions that created our modern world. They split atoms, developed miracle drugs, invented computers and mapped the human genome. While innovations still come out of universities, especially in medicine, they now generate far more headlines for issues surrounding ideological conformity than progress on how they are addressing society’s greatest challenges.
Consider a scene from a different era: On a spring evening in 1969, a small team of researchers huddled in the basement of the University of Utah’s Merrill Engineering Building. The room hummed with the sound of a refrigerator-sized computer as they waited for a message from nearly 700 miles away. They were about to become the fourth connection on ARPANET and join UCLA, Stanford and UC Santa Barbara in laying the technical foundation — even the birthplace — of the internet.
Unmarked by ceremony or controversy, that moment helped launch the digital age. And in the following two decades, that same engineering department became the launchpad for other technological innovators, including Pixar, Silicon Graphics and Adobe founders.
Fast forward to the present. Too often, all society sees or hears about is the gulf between what Americans are experiencing and what their universities are teaching and researching.
The striking difference between the bold approach of the past and the inward focus of the present reveals a deep disconnect among many higher-education leaders regarding the true purpose, or soul, of their institutions. There are exceptions to this, and we’re proud to say that scholars in Utah demonstrate a willingness to partner with fantastic business, scientific and technological innovators.
The great American research university wasn’t designed to be a venue for ideological battles or a safe space for avoiding difficult ideas. It was funded and built to prevent and solve problems — to combine teaching, research and practical innovation in service of human advancement.
How can American universities reclaim their innovative spirit?
We can recapture the significance of our mission by first developing meaningful partnerships with private companies. Practical problem solving is never beneath the scholarship of talented researchers. The professors who built the internet or pioneered computer graphics didn’t see industry collaboration as a distraction — they saw it as fulfilling their mission.
Second, while researchers might study cutting-edge technologies, their innovations are often stifled by regulations and policy not suited for today’s rapidly changing technology landscape. The result is a growing gap between technological possibility and regulatory reality.
As the leaders, respectively, of Utah’s leading university and a national technology-focused advocacy group, we’re joining forces to meet the moment. We’re announcing a new partnership that will connect professors with federal and state regulatory experts to identify policy barriers and tailor innovations to get to the market. We’ll also advocate for policy changes that enable greater technological progress based on university-caliber research.
Finally, we’ll connect private companies with a leading research university to find and scale promising opportunities. We will focus on artificial intelligence, energy, health care, transportation, advanced manufacturing and other areas where regulatory bottlenecks often stifle progress.
This isn’t just another academic center or policy institute. It’s an attempt to recover something essential that has been muted: that universities exist to prevent and solve problems. We’re reimagining everything from how research is conducted to how students prepare for a rapidly evolving future.
The stakes could not be higher. Higher education’s drift from real-world problem solving threatens to accelerate American technological stagnation. Through our new partnership, we’re choosing the path of progress.