This paper examines two broad dimensions of change in the American academic profession: (1) demographic and generational change, including increasing feminization, changing attitudes toward the career-family balance, migration of faculty positions to the professions (versus the liberal arts) and away from the research university sector; and (2) changes in types of appointments, work and career tracks, including the decline of tenure and the rise of fixed term appointments, which involve more ‘specialized’ and less ‘place-bound’ work roles and alternative career tracks. It considers these changes more broadly in the context of the changing nature of work in a globalized economy and the changing nature of the knowledge industry and in the context of similar developments in Europe and Asia. It concludes with an extrapolation of how these trends are likely to play out in the US context and in a new ‘globalized’ academic marketplace over the next 10–20 years.

Experts agree: higher education has to diversify continuously. Most prominently, Martin Trow had argued that ‘universal higher education’ and ‘mass higher education’ sectors had to serve the ‘new’ students while protecting ‘elite higher education’; Burton Clark pointed out that the university is functionally ‘overburdened’ if it does not become entrepreneurial in pursuing specific strategies. But the countervailing forces to diversification grow as well: ‘academic drift’ and initiative competition for being ranked among ‘world-class universities’ prevail, and intra-institutional diversity according to study programmes and departments has not gained popularity either. Do scholars themselves become key carriers of diversification? Substantial variety in research productivity is by no means new. Is inter-individual diversity within higher education a viable future of diversification? Do the data of the comparative studies on the academic profession suggest that strategic options of individual professors are salient?

The following is a slightly revised version of a lecture presented at the RIA/IUA/HRB workshop ‘Research Integrity: Promoting and Building Trust’ at the Royal Irish Academy of Sciences, Dublin, on 24 September 2009. Various thoughts and arguments presented in this paper are also discussed in the advisory report of Working Group 2 (Code of Conduct) to the ESF Member Forum on Research Integrity.

I am not a prophet, nor can I look into the future – not even at the end of this productive conference on essential changes in the higher education system. When the work situation of the academic profession, its diversification and academic freedom are at issue, the university as a whole is called into question, at least the university as we have known and appreciated it for a long time. Will that university have a future? This is not clear at all, especially when we consider the managerial university and the ever increasing marketisation of all aspects of university life. In the following, I present a few remarks about the continuously fading theory of the university, centred on the keywords education, university, universality, and quality.