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Good morning. Last night saw the final of the fifty-third series of University Challenge, hosted by Today’s very own Amol Rajan. Imperial College romped away from UCL, 285 points to 120. After a quiet twenty years, Imperial leapt to the forefront of the competition in 2020 under the influence of Brandon Blackwell. Blackwell, an African American from New York, raised on the wrong side of the tracks, genned up on thirty thousand flash cards before coming to Imperial and transforming its quiz team.

The story is a parable of the modern university. Blackwell stormed a culture complacent in its scarves and mascots and disdainful of the riches to be acquired by making quizzing a career. He brought international energy, disruptive diversity, electric competitiveness, methodical strategy … and startling success.

But crucially he identified what it takes to be a successful team. The existing method was to choose the four biggest megabrains available. Blackwell realised that you didn’t need four quarterbacks. You needed three specialists and a generalist.

In doing so he recognised what truly makes a university. The dynamism of a university lies in three chemical reactions: the research reaction, when scholars tackle the coal face of knowledge; the teaching reaction, when the new wine of fresh minds is poured into the old wineskins of current learning; and the interdisciplinary reaction, when specialists in different fields spark and fuse and create new configurations. The skill of university leadership is to make these reactions evenly dynamic and equally important.

As Amol points out in reflecting on his first series, universities don’t find it difficult to recruit talented young people. But I see a real threat to universities in the commodification of knowledge and its reduction into data, as a source of superficial competition or no more than fuel for the voracious appetite of artificial intelligence.

A university will always partly involve the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. But the true goal of the university goes beyond knowledge. The ninetieth psalm includes the prayer, ‘So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.’ The dynamism of a university is the conviction that in the interaction of the different specialists and the odd generalist is found a result none could achieve alone.

The book of Proverbs tells us, ‘I, wisdom, live with prudence, and I attain knowledge and discretion.’ That sounds like a healthy University Challenge team to me. Because the real university challenge is not winning a quiz, but transforming knowledge into wisdom.

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