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Introduction

For the past 20 years, governments in Europe and in other world regions have embraced international agendas for university reform (EU, OECD, World Economic Forum, UNESCO, and the World Bank) based on the argument that the future lays in an ideas-driven competitive global knowledge economy. Universities’ education, research, organisation, management, and governance were reformed to focus on employability, knowledge transfer, innovation, and entrepreneurialism. More recently, the financial crisis, effects of climate change, accelerating disparities between rich and poor, popular discontent, intractable political conflicts, and major population movements in the world have meant that universities are confronted with a diversity of other futures and are increasingly mobilised to address societal challenges (pressing environmental, economic, social, political, and technological problems) that have come under the spotlight. Many policy documents (at international, national, regional, local, and university level) repeat in one way or another that the responsibility for finding inventive responses to these challenges rests – not least – on the shoulders of universities. We will argue that in order to take up their responsibility, universities are confronted first of all with the challenge to maintain themselves as universities, i.e. as forms of public and collective study that do not protect and facilitate but that complicate and expose learning and research and, therefore, constitute a very particular way to deal with these challenges, one which is worthwhile to be maintained and sustained.

Today the university has to move in very “toxic” environments (the European Space of Higher Education, EHEA, and the European Research Area, ERA) in which it has to struggle for its very survival. Hence, today, academic responsibility refers crucially to a public engagement in order to ensure the very durability and sustainability of the university itself. This requires, for sure, innovation, invention, and experimentation with new forms, but, as we will argue, what is required primarily are new forms regarding her “pedagogy”, i.e. her power to study and think. This echoes, as we will indicate, Bruno Latour’s recent “hints for a neo-Humboldtian university”, referring to Alexander von Humboldt, a plea for a “radical reorientation: what used to be called extension, outreach or pedagogy is no longer the last but the first frontline and alongside which all actions of the future university will be evaluated” (Latour, 2016a, p. 10, italics by authors). To arrive at the exploration of this hint, we first sketch the figures of the researcher and learner, the two inhabitants of the contemporary, European university as it is designed today. The second section suggests that we recall the university as universitas studii, and pay attention to the university’s pedagogical form and public aspects. This is the basis to reclaim, in the third and final section, the university from a pedagogical point of view, that is, the mondial university that establishes new fields of (public) study as part of its pedagogy.

The Contemporary University: Protecting Learners and Researchers

The actual learning policies of the EU materialise in two European Areas, the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Research Area (ERA) (see also Masschelein & Simons, 2015),Footnote 1 which call into life the independent, personalised learner and the innovative, creative researcher. Both figures have to understand themselves as entrepreneurs who invest, calculate, speculate, accumulate, and capitalise (produce added value), and who require learning and research environments that facilitate and protect their individual learning trajectories and research careers (i.e. stimulating, flexible, transparent environments). For them, the university is but one of the possible infrastructures for their proper activity: learning and researching, which they increasingly manage as productive businesses.

A short overview of policy documents and statements is telling in this regard (see EC documents 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2012a, 2012b). In 2006, the European Commission published a modernisation agenda for universities based on the diagnosis that “European universities … are behind in the increased international competition for talented academics and students, and miss out on fast changing research agendas and on generating the critical mass, excellence and flexibility necessary to succeed” (European Commission, 2006, p. 4). The Communication of the European Commission, “A Reinforced European Research Area Partnership for Excellence and Growth” (European Commission, 2012a) states: “Knowledge is the currency of the new economy. A world-leading research and innovation capacity, built on a strong public science base, is therefore critical to achieving lasting economic recovery and to securing Europe’s position in the emerging global order. … to maximise the return on this investment, Europe must increase the efficiency, effectiveness and excellence of its public research system” (ibid., p. 2). And it defines the ERA as “a unified research area open to the world based on the Internal Market, in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely and through which the Union and its Member States strengthen their scientific and technological bases, their competitiveness and their capacity to collectively address grand challenges” (ibid., p. 3). Modern society faces a number of grand challenges, including climate change, the increasing scarcity of natural resources, public health, food security, and ageing populations. The responsibility for finding inventive responses to these challenges rests on the shoulders of modern universities, and on creative, independent scientists to carry out (in the words of the European Research Council) “investigator-driven research” that will allow “researchers to identify new opportunities” in any field, “rather than being led by pre-set priorities” defined by policy-makers.Footnote 2

In terms of the EHEA, we hear the ministers responsible for higher education in the 46 countries involved in the Bologna Process stating, in 2009, that higher education has to make a vital contribution in realising “a Europe of knowledge that is highly creative and innovative” and that “Europe can only succeed in this endeavour if it maximises and employs the talents and capacities of all its citizens” (Conference, 2009, p. 1). Hence, to improve quality and increase excellence is the most important societal aim of the university. Governments have to engage in this permanent struggle and to reemphasise every one’s duty to mobilise her competencies and talents and to be employable. A more recent document of the European Commission on “Rethinking Education” (European Commission, 2012b) does not hesitate to put the emphasis from the outset on “delivering the right skills for employment” and on “increasing the efficiency and inclusiveness of our education and training institutions”, the starting point being that education is about “boost[ing] growth and competitiveness” (ibid., p. 1). The conclusion, then, is that “Europe will only resume growth through higher productivity and the supply of highly skilled workers, and it is the reform of education and training systems which is essential to achieving this” (ibid., p. 13). It is difficult to state it more clearly than the document itself does. “Rethinking Education” means to conceive of education as the production of learning outcomes. This “fundamental shift”, as the document rightly states, implies that educational policy is essentially about “stimulating open and flexible learning” and “improving learning outcomes”, i.e. increasing the performance of learning environments (including the performance of institutions, teachers, students) which can be assessed through benchmarking (i.e. comparative performance indicators). The overall aim is a more efficient and effective production process, of which employability (i.e. the competences that are the learning outcomes) is the product.

When we look at these and other documents and declarations which, together with a large variety of instruments (e.g. European Qualification Framework, ECTS, several research funding programs …), circulate within EHEA and ERA, it becomes clear that the orientation towards excellence and employability frame universities within a discourse and strategy that aims at the mobilisation and exploitation of resources (learning force, brain/mind force, learning and creative potential, talents, …) to contribute to the growth of capital in all its different forms (individual, collective, social, human, cultural, economic, …). Such a mobilisation and exploitation would be needed for Europe to maintain its position in the global competition of the knowledge economy, in the war on talent and, so it is explicitly argued, in order to deal with the societal challenges of migration, climate change, etc. In this framing, research is defined as the production of knowledge, education as the production of learning outcomes, and public service as the production of impact on social and economic development. And the university is a place of production, a “learning factory” and a “knowledge factory”, that attempts to attract and exploit both learners and researchers. Hence, the contribution of the university in relation to societal challenges is understood in terms of the production, transmission, distribution, and application of scientific knowledge.

This installs a hierarchy in the knowledge-oriented university. It is first about scientific research (defined by its method), second, about research-based education (acquiring competences, including research competences, as learning outcomes), and third about impact (application and so-called extension). Hence, the “pedagogy” of the university and her public engagement are secondary and limited to the distribution and application of knowledge in research and extension. This marginalisation of university pedagogy – and all efforts and challenges related to education – complements well a (new) call for the autonomy of research. Research as the production of knowledge is increasingly defined as the core business of the university – in terms of economic value, financial return, and social prestige – and within the university itself research activities are increasingly protected against “teaching efforts” that are framed as risking to distract researchers from their intellectual production. In line with Stengers (2011), we can see here a kind of revival of academic freedom, but one mainly understood in terms of opportunities to take (entrepreneurial) risks and to increase output and in terms of protection from interference and imposed teaching responsibilities that might slow down the knowledge production process. So there is, in fact, an increasing tendency not just to separate research and education, but also to create a hierarchy and to attempt to instrumentalise their relation.Footnote 3

The orientation towards excellence in research and employability in learning that now dominates the university turns her into a habitat that requires and actually fosters the inhabitants of the university to look at themselves in terms of human capital, to become professionals (in their research and learning activities), and to develop a permanently calculating ethos in terms of efficacy and efficiency, investment of time, use of resources and return (Simons & Masschelein, 2009a). The main challenge for the inhabitants of the university is: How can one live up to the virtue of ongoing “competitive self-improvement”? The answer is the development of a professional entrepreneurial ethos, the permanent assessment of yourself (and your research or teaching, as well as your learning) on the basis of quality indicators in terms of productive value or improvement rationales in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Often, the installed mechanism is one of permanent peer comparison and benchmarking; that is, checking ourselves against our closest competitors. Confronted increasingly with the dictate of permanent improvement through permanent comparison, European universities, academics, and students are faced with an additional dictate: the dictate of pro-active self-adaptation and permanent self-mobilisation. It becomes an academic duty to look for opportunities (“niches”) to produce something of excellence, which, although indeed an empty concept (Readings, 1996), is the name for a pervasive regime of academic conduct. The space of the university today is a space that permanently and relentlessly mobilises researchers, lecturers, and students to orientate themselves to accumulation (e.g. of credits, quotations, projects, publications) and – often ignored in critical commentaries – to the permanent search for (accredited) recognition for their learning outcomes or research results. Academic conduct in search of excellence and employability implies indeed a particular mode of visibility. In order to “exist” as an academic or student, one is required to make oneself (in terms of performance) visible by permanently staging oneself, i.e. by constructing (academic) profiles and managing these profiles. This branding is not to be considered as an optional extra, but rather is characteristic of academic conduct as it is promoted today; branding or profiling is essential to run one’s business as an academic or student.

Today, the figure of the researcher and learner in fact embody the (productive) activities they are named after: research and learning. They inhabit the university as learning and research factories, and are primarily concerned with optimal (personal) working conditions. As inhabitants of these academic factories they are, thus, first of all concerned about recognised and validated excellence and employability, about (managing) their images and profiles, and not about a shared world, or the university itself. Against these developments, and precisely in order to deal with daunting societal challenges (such as sustainability), it is important today to reclaim the university, to ask her back, but also to reinvent and re-cultivate her. This implies, however, that we understand the university as a particular way to deal with societal and existential challenges.

Universitas studii: Re-calling Academic Study

Proper to the university in her originary form is indeed that she deals with societal challenges by turning them into objects/subjects of collective and public study. That is, by gathering, through certain pedagogical practices and material devices, people around these challenges as students. This was also the original Latin name for that European invention of the Middle Ages: universitas studii (an association for study). Students were those who devoted themselves to study (“studium”) something (a phenomenon, an issue, a problem) and the “scholar” was one of those students (one could call her the “eternal student”). The translation of “studium” entails: to “regard attentively”, “to devote to something”, “to consider”, but also to be respectful, to be concerned, to be thoughtful. Hence, studying is not primarily about producing something but about taking care of something. The notion of “scholar” also clearly indicates that the work of academics and students is essentially (and not accidently) related to the working or practices of a “school”: the university, which is bound to “studium”. Study is not to be equated with learning. The university marks the difference between learning Spanish, for example, and studying Spanish. The distinction between scholar (academic) and researcher, just like the one between learner and student is no word game; it is important for the way in which research (or learning) happens. At the university as “universitas studii”, research always directly relates to practices of making public and gathering a public around, with, for, and through that research as study. This means that it is not about scientific research as such, since scientific research can be carried out very well outside the university (as is increasingly the case). Research as study is about a particular kind of scientific research, which we could call academic study and which has nothing to do with retreating into an ivory tower.

As von Humboldt (1810) suggested, research is therefore not so much advanced through contact with “colleagues”, but rather through it being part of what could be called “pedagogical forms”, as the articulations of studium, forms that engage a public of students in a collective movement of thought. Which, in the words of von Humboldt, is operating in and for itself in these forms. Inquiry and thinking not only require public exposition afterwards (as written publication or “report”), but also precisely in actu, and this is what happens in lectures and seminars (when they actually happen), which in turn makes something happen to (and with) the public. Neither the writing of a text nor its reading can simply replace the working of these pedagogical gatherings (think also about the gatherings around blackboards in mathematics and physics), which constitute forms that turn matter into public matter (bringing it into company as part of the collective that is always in the making) and gather a public of students and scholars, that is, of learners and researchers as public figures. This public does not precede the event of gathering, but emerges in it. This gathering articulates, therefore, a movement of de-identification – we are no disciples (servants of a discipline), no civil servants, no businessmen, no researchers and no learners, but students and scholars. It is a movement that also disturbs, questions, or disrupts all kinds of stabilisations, fixations, or crystallisations in institutions and disciplines (Simons & Masschelein, 2009a). The movement has no real beginning and no end, it occurs and “takes place”, and implies that students and scholars are moving in a time of suspension (i.e. not simply a time of accumulation or re-production), that is, the particular time of studium or of scholé.

It is important that the university is dealing with issues and questions, with challenges to which we do not yet have a response, which implies that it is not just about finding solutions or formulating answers, but also always about the “formation” of people and world for a future that we cannot yet imagine. That was what Wilhelm von Humboldt (1810) clearly stated when he inaugurated the modern university, which was, one could say, a reclaiming and reinvention of the university as an invention of the Middle Ages. He claimed that higher education institutions are conceived as starting from problems that do not yet have answers yet, so that they remain in the state of investigation, and that higher education is a working through problems (ibid., p. 2) He also writes that “since the intellectual work within humanity flourishes only as cooperation, namely not merely in that one fills in what another lacks, but in that the successful work of one inspires the others, and that the general, original power … becomes visible to all, the internal organisation of these institutions must bring forth and sustain a collaboration that is uninterrupted, constantly self-renewing, but unforced and without specific purpose” (ibid. p. 1, italics are ours). Moreover, according to von Humboldt, the university as gathering with students (which was for him a “kind of study”) was at least as important (if not more so) for the advancement of “science” as (or in) the scientific academy (the gathering of colleagues): “If one declares the university as destined only for the teaching and dissemination of science, but the academy to its expansion, one clearly does the former an injustice” (ibid., p. 4).

The not-knowing (ignorance) that is at the basis of the university relates not only to things we don’t know (and which we know that we don’t know), but also to not-knowing what we don’t know (Rheinberger, 2007). Moreover, we don’t know how and to what extent our necessary abstractions (concepts, theories) and the possible new facts (and “data”), new nature, new things, new ways of doing that our sciences produce or conceive, will have consequences for our common life and common world. And precisely, therefore, we have to be vigilant, attentive, and thoughtful; we have to exercise caution: “il faut faire attention” (Haraway, 2016; Latour, 2017; Stengers, 2013). This also implies that we have to consider that we might be wrong or mistaken. This consideration is not an individual competence or capacity, and is not just a matter of attitude or choice. The exercise of caution is related to the way in which the university organises and arranges (exercises, makes) the possibility to object, to be confronted with what we have not yet considered. In this sense, the university refers not to a kind of institution (and embodied idea) but foremost to a practice consisting of material arrangements and technologies that make something possible. What it arranges, in creating possibilities for objection, is making public what one knows and thinks, confronting it with a public, and hence also it arranges the possibility to think in public, with a public, and before a public. Arguably, this was the unique force of that original invention in the Middle ages that is called “university”; it allowed thought to become public, and hence, to turn it into collective study. The academic or scholar within the university is, thus, not the expert or the one who knows, but the one who is looking, searching, the one who is moved by ignorance and ready to think in public and let her knowledge and existing ways of inhabiting the world be put to the test. This is the academic or scholar involved in study practices.

It is precisely the “pedagogy” of the university, i.e. her forms and practices of study, that arrange and embody such collective and public forms of thoughtfulness, cautiousness, vigilance, and attentiveness. And it is these forms and practices that are changed when organising today’s research and learning environments, approached in terms of customisation: that is, starting from what they offer for the learner or the researcher in their outcome-defined and outcome-driven business. Those collective and public study practices (including teaching, learning, thinking practices) are first of all interested in something of the world (a phenomenon, a thing, an issue) and what becomes of it. Hence, it is not about what becomes of “me” as learner or researcher, but what becomes of the world. And “interested” in relation to these study practices means: becoming attracted to, attached to, concerned about. It is also these practices that make it possible that, at the same time, people are trained and formed precisely through being interested in the world, by studying something in and of the world, and ultimately by taking care of a common world. It is these practices that extend the world, populate it with more beings and things, and invoke or conjure immediately the question of how to live together with these beings and/or things that emerge and come to life (Simons & Masschelein, 2009b). Again, it is important to stress that study is not a kind of disinterested activity of stepping back as complete detachment, but is motivated by a concern, a form of curiosity (as care), and hence, a stepping back as slowing down exactly in order to relate again, to re-attach and re-compose.

Universities as gatherings of and as students are ways to intensify research, to turn it into a form of collective and public study, but also to produce “vigilance” and “hesitation”, which Stengers considers to be part of thinking and consideration, and which becomes manifest in stuttering (not in fast, uninterrupted discourses) (Stengers, 2005). Through such intensified research, students (and scholars) will come to know some things and learn some things, but it cannot be defined in advance what the findings are that they have to attain, who or what could make them change their minds and thoughts during their study process, who or what could object to them, could make them hesitate and ask whether they are not mistaken. In principle it can be everyone and everything. But as students they have something in common, i.e. the issue (thing) that makes them think, imagine, object, co-operate. And university pedagogy that makes study practices possible is exactly about that: to allow that “thing” to obtain the power to make us think (ibid.). This implies that the issue or thing must be made “present”, must be presented; just as Alexander von Humboldt, Wilhelm’s brother, “discovered” a new common world as object of study (or matter of study) through the large-scale grammatisation (drawing, sketching, mapping, picturing, graphing, collecting of natural life) and composition of a new shared world. The driving force was not just a scientific will to know, but academic curiosity expressed in a deep concern and acceptance that things can make us hesitate and stutter, and force us to think again. Alexander did not discover a hidden world, but carefully composed a world through naming, abstractions, drawings etc.; as scholar, he and his companions made the earth speak in new ways, that is, they transformed the earth into something to relate to, a world to be concerned about.

It is crucial to stress indeed that the academic concern with issues or things is not about avoiding or evading abstractions and addressing the concrete. These abstractions are needed to take a step back in order to re-attach to something, that is, to turn it into a thing of concern. It is here that we find both a slowing down typical for study practices, as well as an effective contribution of the “public” to these practices. Drawing on Dewey’s understanding of “the public” (Dewey, 1927/1991) academic research can be defined as studying something in the presence of those who are touched by the consequence of new ideas, new objects, new concepts, new interventions. The public – from the viewpoint of the university and its public study – is not what is located at the end of the production chain of knowledge (users of the produced knowledge, the learners, communities…), but all those in the presence of who we undertake our collective thinking and to whom we are responsible. University study – through its movement of abstraction (e.g. grammatisation of the world) that allows that we, and all others, can relate to something – is a public practice.

This public character makes academic study slow – it cannot decide in advance what it will take in to account and what is a priori defined as irrelevant in order to obtain in predefined outcomes as efficiently as possible. Therefore, as Haraway (2016) formulates it, academic study is perhaps not about accountability (always implying that we know in advance what counts and how to give an account), but about “response-ability”. This ability to respond implies “slowness”; however, it should not be confused with what today is often referred to as “slow science”. In the plea to slow down science what is often neglected is the university itself, that is, a very specific pedagogic arrangement that allows for public study. In neglecting the university itself, slow science risks reinforcing the hierarchical distinction between scientific research (that is to be protected) and university pedagogy (that somehow interferes with true academic life). Not “slow science” but “academic study” – it is for us indeed pedagogy that is decisive: to gather as students, i.e. to create conditions in which something is given the power to speak, interrupts our common sense and makes us hesitate, and hence, makes us think. Probably, and to draw on a formulation by Nigel Blake, Paul Smeyers, Richard Smith, and Paul Standish (1998), it would be more correct to say: it makes us “think again”. At the university it is not about personal or collective flourishing (today often suggested as a way to compensate for one-sided growth models), about who I and we become, want, will, or can become (today often promoted as a way to resist the focus on employability and other economic directives), but about what becomes of the world and about how to inhabit (as future “I” and “we”) the world.

Reclaiming the University and its Pedagogy

Our attempt to understand the university as place and time not for research but for public study, and insisting on the importance of university pedagogy, echoes Bruno Latour’s “hints for a neo-Humboldtian university” referring to Alexander von Humboldt (Latour, 2016a). Latour criticises the modern university for its “trickle-down epistemology”: that is, for taking itself as being “at the vanguard of a teaching and research process” and thereby assuming that “its results – progressively through education and training, then through outreach and … extension” – would trickle down “eventually reaching the general public” and ideally leading to the construction of a shared world view “where everybody would have become scientifically enlightened, at least able to follow, maybe to obey, the expert vanguard in important matters.” But such trickling down, so he argued, clearly does not work. We need, therefore, a “radical reorientation: what used to be called extension, outreach or pedagogy is no longer the last but the first frontline and alongside which all actions of the future university will be evaluated” (ibid., p. 10, italics by authors). This does not imply that we neglect basic research: “quite the contrary”, we need “immense advances in scientific inquiry”, but it means “that the order, priority and goals have been reversed.” According to Latour, we should (re)compose a common world while “rediscovering the old new planet”, which “should create as much creative energy as during the period that has been called the ‘age of discovery’”. For him “public engagement” (italics by authors) is no longer something to be “added once basic research has been completed: it is to which basic research is directed” (ibid.). In our understanding, arguing for basic research directed to public engagement is exactly about defending a form of public study, and re-opening a perspective on pedagogical issues.

To reclaim the university as pedagogic form, as form of public study, is to reclaim the right not to be part of the learning factory (being a functionary of the learning robots; Flusser, 1999), which produces learning outcomes or impact and that performs this production in a way that, through feedback loops, adapts itself ever better to exploit ever better the (creative) learning force (instead of labour force). Reclaiming the university is also about the right not to be working in a research fabric with its peer police and surveillance system and its knowledge distribution network. Maybe there is nothing wrong with a sustainable learning or research factory, but to reclaim the university, is to reclaim the right of a place (site) of public and collective study, of exposing and publicly “testing” knowledge. This is not a social right for learners or researchers to have optimal working conditions in the university; it is a right that is reclaimed by the world or in the name of the world. Reclaiming “university” is also about refusing that it refers just to a research institute, a training institution, or learning environment. It is defending its meaning as public movement of thought that articulates in pedagogic forms as particular ways to gather people and other beings and things. The university is a site where learners and researchers can become a public of students, a thinking public that does not exist independently from the issue that brings it into being. In conclusion, it is important to explore in a bit more detail what exactly is at stake in reclaiming the university: what is threatening today, and what could be regarded as an academic responsibility.

Today, it is nearly impossible not to think about academic work in productive terms and as an outcome-driven enterprise. And if we are right, this does mean that what is threatened today is the particular way in which the university could contribute to the formation of people and to dealing with the daunting societal challenges by being “thoughtful” and “regarding” (“studium”). Arguably, it is so difficult to actually engage in public study, as most (basic) mechanisms and policies have another figure of the student and scholar in mind; that is, they address researchers and learners, not academic practices. An obvious case is funding based on output that is aiming at “professional researchers” (and even “professional project writers”) managing their research as a business, which succeeds when they emancipate themselves from their institutional bonds (their attachments to the university) and when they ask themselves which research environment offers the best resources for their research (hence: “what can the university do for me?”). Professional researchers don’t want to lose time and are actually trained to save time (“to perform better with less”) and should consider most if not all university-related obligations as being distracting and to be avoided or delegated.

Together with the way in which both the ERA and the EHEA are being constructed, these ways of financing and shaping research and socialising “professional researchers” also dismantle the university in other ways. As mentioned earlier, there is an increasing tendency to separate education and research, to instrumentalise education in order to protect research productivity and, hence, to undermine and impede the university as the practice of public and collective study. Furthermore, the implication is that both learning and research are framed and organised in terms of an outcome and output orientation. It becomes less evident to work through problems, ill-defined issues, ignorance or “stupidity” (requiring public study), for pre-defined outputs have already decided on what counts and what does not. Finally, it is important to stress the privatisation that is accompanying academic capitalism. The increased concern with “intellectual property”, but also the importance of patenting and the protection through licensing and access codes, are clear evidence of this. There is an ambivalence in this commodification of learning and research, however. As Andre Gorz (2008) explains:

the ‘knowledge’ (and experience) dimension on which relies the yield of commodities is itself not of the same nature as these commodities: public study (and aspects of thinking, abstraction, conceptualisation, care and curiosity) itself can ‘by nature’ not be ‘owned’ or privatised and hence cannot become a true commodity. Knowledge, insights, thoughts (in the broad sense of the French ‘savoir’) can only be disguised as private property and commodity by reserving their exclusive use through juridical or technical artefacts (such as secret access codes, copyrights). But it is really nothing more than a disguisement, for it is not changing anything to its character of common good: it remains a non-commodity which cannot be sold and whose access and free use are ‘forbidden’ and ‘illegal’ exactly because this access and free use remain always possible. The researchers and learners, as so-called ‘owners’, cannot sell their ‘knowledge’ or ‘competences’, that is transfer its private property to someone else, they can only sell the right to access or the use ‘under license’ (Gorz, 2008, p. 37).

The increased regulation and juridification to support and enable privatisation, then, means that it is difficult, if not impossible, to take “the public” out of the university without destroying the university itself.

Academic responsibility concerns in the first place a “responsability” for a world university, or perhaps more accurately termed, a mondial university. A university that deals with local and global challenges in a particular way, while she is not interested in globalisation (and “global minds” moving around in a globalised territory or the global surface of the earth) but in “mondialisation” (“globalising”).Footnote 4 That is, to make and maintain our planet habitable and livable as a shared world. Hence, her central concern is not production, distribution, and application of knowledge, but care for our “worldly” living-together (with people, animals, rivers, things, bacteria, ghosts, ideas …). Her most important concern is what becomes of this shared world (and who and what belongs to it). Hence, a mondial university, a university that is not so much concerned about its added value or the added value it offers for learners and researchers, but about what becomes of a shared world, implies that learning and research are complicated, made harder, and slowed down because these people, animals, rivers, things, bacteria, ghosts, ideas … should have the opportunity to say something and to object. It is about an academic response-ability, which implies also taking up the challenge that they all can raise their voice, that is, they can speak to us, and perhaps foremost, “against” us.

Taking up a responsability for a world university would probably require, first of all, the “revaluation” of our common academic values: not first scientific research and then education (research-based and method-directed) and extension (application, impact), but first public and collective forms of study – forms of academic research – which require public methodologies. The latter implies the further development and elaboration of scientific instruments as “sensing devices for the state of the issue” (cf. Alexander Von Humboldt), for visualisation, for the involvement of publics (and not only “peers” and “experts”) in and through study (and not only after research). This response-ability is not to be considered as an abstract ideal. It can be a matter of governing and policy. In her yearly address as rector of University of Amsterdam, entitled “The unconventional future”, Karen Maex emphasises first of all education instead of research as the central issue of the university, and hence the reversal of the usual order (Maex, 2016). Not first research (within established disciplines, with known peers) and then education (with students), but education as the way to describe and compose a “field of study” (not a discipline), including the composition of the study-material and the study-object (e.g. future planet studies).

Let us end with subscribing to the slogan used by the German students in their actions against the reforms of higher education: “We are no human capital”. Indeed the term “students” has become synonymous with resources to be exploited, talents to be mobilised, the object of investment, the guarantee of a country’s competitiveness or, when addressing the possible disobedient component of human capital, the customers to be seduced. Perhaps their de-identification should at once be regarded as an affirmation: “we are no human capital, we are no learners, we are students”. And allow us to add to this slogan: we don’t want to be learners or professional researchers, but scholars, we don’t want to be functionaries of the learning or knowledge factory, we don’t want to be functionaries of a preprogrammed digital world and preformatted world of competitive research projects and learning environments, we want to (be able to) study. And perhaps we can add as well: we want to reclaim university pedagogy, we need university pedagogues.