Towards the Digital University

Digitization is on everyone’s lips today. There is hardly any research agenda without digitization components, no trade association that does not refer to the impending impoverishment without it, hardly any social debate in the course of which someone does not talk about the opportunities and risks of digitization. Gone are the days when high school graduates ignored informatics due to vague ideas about the field and preferred to opt for something more down-to-earth or even more solid, such as mechanical engineering. Informatics is “in.” Its devices and processes have a decisive influence on the zeitgeist. They not only stand for technical or economic progress, but also for lifestyle and, thus, they make classic icons such as cars look rather old increasingly often. In politics, too, digitization has established itself as a large, independent topic. In Germany, the federal and state governments are launching large programs for infrastructures (National High-Performance Computing—NHR, National Research Data Infrastructure—NFDI, Competence Centers for Big Data and Machine Learning, etc.) as well as for relevant research, the latter currently under the umbrella term of the latest digital hype, Artificial Intelligence. But what is it about, beyond these buzzwords? And what does digitization mean for universities? What does, to add another term of its own, “University 4.0”