Improving the Unreasonable University

We are feeling a fast changing world of information and communications. The media has intensely changed in the last few decades. We have now many powerful, simple and inexpensive ways of communicating, like the video conference. Very recent new media is used regularly by the common people to communicate and to learn. This has led to a transformation of teaching and learning methods, with all the consequences that this implies for university practices. In this article we make a summary of our combined experiences of nearly 90 years of working in Portuguese universities, particularly in teaching students for engineering physics degrees. Teaching physics and mathematics can be considered one of the hardest and most scientific courses in the university. We show the extreme need of soft skills either for the student, for the teachers and for all university staff. However, the urge of innovation motivates growing rates of scientific misconduct and pathological obsession, favoring areas more able to raise funding, and putting academia under the corporative type of management, instead of focusing on helping to advance knowledge and wisdom in our societies.