Every now and then, discussions appear as of whether academia is "useful" or not - and we now witness direct attacks to major Universities, even dubbed "useless". When reflecting pragmatically upon the question, without ideologies, one may ask "useful with respect to which scope?". I started thinking about the multiple scopes that Universities worldwide may cover, coming up with a fair list (see below). Would you agree on that? Add anything? How do you think perception and rankings would change, if we prioritize one scope or another?

1. Gather like-minded people. (Perhaps their most ancient scope) Universities are places where people with certain mindsets, skills and attitudes can meet and work together.

2. Generate knowledge. Understanding how things work, both theoretically or with an applied mindset.

3. Generate questions. Often new questions are sometimes more powerful than new answers. Until someone asked “who is responsible for AI mistakes?” or “can we uncover the code of life?”, those questions simply did not exist.

4. Find new things. and then recognize the finding, and verify it systematically.

5. Invest in high-risk-high-gain challenges. Working under relatively milder budget constraints, academic researchers can focus on high-risk-high-gain challenges, where the risk of failure is non-negligible, but with an associated possible gain that is invaluable and potentially open to everyone.

6. Teach knowledge from one generation to another, to foster the progressive addition of “things that are known” over time.

7. Teach skills. Pass-on practices and heuristics on how to do things efficiently and effectively. Skills are highly valuable for practical purposes – for instance, to enter and perform jobs.

8. Disseminate knowledge. While teaching occurs for students enrolled at Universities, knowledge can also be disseminated and broadcasted to the general public – a different target audience, who then receives a public service.

9. Generate artificial novelties. From technology to rules, from methods to art, humans use knowledge and discoveries to craft something new, being it a technology or a set of concepts, rules of desiderata.

10. Generate innovation. By giving a safe and controlled environment, Universities often help inventions to be tested, be developed even with low returns, face the challenge of economic sustainability, and eventually reach a maturity level leading to innovations across markets and societies.

11. Generate and promote culture. Universities can act as catalyzers and facilitators of the process of generating, aggregating and disseminating culture, thus contributing to building a sense of self-within-societies, and in shaping how societies would like to be.

12. Form professionals. By teaching skills and connect with the needs of industry and society, Universities form high-skilled workers who can readily contribute to the national and international economic system.

13. Form élites. Exclusive criteria to enter certain Universities may promote the formation of high-skilled (or “well-connected”) élites, by promoting exchanges and networking among young adults who will eventually participate in the real-world systems.

14. Create social networks. Universities are safe places where social networks can be established between students and researchers, promoting social tiers that can survive in time and potentially foster collaborations, ideas, referrals, and more.

15. Retain talents. Having successful Universities with strong tiers in the local working system allows to retain talents who may have otherwise moved elsewhere to study, and then to work.

16. Attract talents. Similarly, Universities may play as “added values” for certain areas, to attract high-skilled talents from elsewhere and from abroad.

17. Consult and cooperate with local ecosystems and networks. Academic staff can act as consultants and facilitators for the local economic system and its network, improving its competitiveness with lower costs.

18. Create national networks. By promoting national collaborations and projects, Universities stand as hubs and promote ecosystems and national networks and unions of scopes and intent, possibly fostering mobility of students and talents to address challenges and inequalities.

19. Create international networks. Similarly, Universities can bridge between countries and promote international collaborations. This can be an asset for disadvantaged countries, so as to network and acquire know-how, but also for high-income countries, so as to better understand cultures and markets.

20. Showcase. Academia is a national asset that can show – internally and internationally - investing capabilities, vision and prowess in research. Universities can be thus used as showcases of “bravura”.

21. Generate reputation (internally and internationally). Showcasing can be functional to generating reputation, which in turn fosters trust as an intangible asset.

22. Compete. Similarly to the evolution of sport events, academia can be a field where nations not only showcase, but also non-violently compete for rankings and reputation. It can be a scope on its own, or functional to other scopes such as attracting talents.

23. Publish. Evolving from a way of pursuing other scopes (mostly, sharing and disseminating knowledge), publishing has become a scope in its own right.

24. Enable investments. Academia enables the circulation of investments and assets, thereby attracting public and private investors, depending on their statute and connections with the economic system.

25. Provide alternatives. Societies believing that innovation is born through antithesis and synthesis have Universities as leaders of “antithesis”, where people are incentivized to think “out of the box” and provide alternatives to the current of ideas, storytelling, or challenges. Disruption may be not only economic, but also social, cultural or interpretative.

26. Generate a balancing “soft power”. The theory of the Separation of Powers suggests that democracies are stabilized by separating law-making, adjudication, and execution, to limit the risk of abuses. Informally, additional “powers” have emerged, such as the “fourth power” of press and media to influence public opinions. Academia can act as an additional “soft power” along those others, to shape public as well as governors’ opinions, produce fact-checking and identify fake news, verify claims and play the role of “slower”, but often “deeper” watchdogs of culture and knowledge.

27. Integrate all of the above. Even though other institutions and activities may pursue some of the scopes above (think of startups for bullet 10, professional academies for bullet 7, think-tanks for bullet 17, or the media for bullet 26), none of them integrates them all. Instead, academia naturally connects scopes and people pursuing such scopes, promoting interdisciplinarity and novelty, albeit typically at the expenses of efficiency. Nonetheless, this process produces unique outcomes by breaking silos of missions and disciplines.

Institutes worldwide may pursue a different set of scopes, with varying priorities – which makes comparing Universities even harder than what is captured by global rankings. As very qualitative examples to stimulate the debate, we may say that the main scopes of the University of Oxford are (but not limited to) bullets 1, 2, 3, 6, 16 and 19. Instead, the University of Bologna likely has a balance leaning towards bullets 2, 3, 6, 8, 11 and 25. (Just picked two of the oldest Universities)