Rejuvenating ‘on Campus’ Education to Reinforce the Particular Response-Ability of the University

Abstract

In recent years, the effects of climate change, accelerating disparities between the rich and poor, popular discontent, intractable political conflicts, and major population movements in the world have meant that universities have increasingly mobilised to address societal challenges. In this contribution, we assert that to take up their responsibility, universities should sustain their delivery of education as a particular (pedagogical) form requiring a campus since it embodies forces that sustain students’ and academics’ power to study and think. We first sketch how two trends threaten to make the university (as an institution and campus) increasingly irrelevant by calling into being two figures: the independent personalised (vulnerable) learner and the innovative autonomous researcher. These figures require the university merely as a protecting and facilitating infrastructure for their increasingly personalised learning and research trajectories, which have to lead to excellence and employability. In the second step, we explore how to reclaim the university as a particular arrangement of study practices that contributes to the future in a particular way by complicating learning and exposing the ‘learner’ and the ‘researcher’ to practices of public and collective study and common pedagogical infrastructures (embodied in the campus). We propose that these pedagogical infrastructures help students and scholars become ever more sensitive to different worlds and what those worlds have to say, and in this way, increasingly response-able.