A university for the common good

Abstract

The fortunes of anthropology, and of the university, have always been tightly linked. The university of the Enlightenment was committed to universal human progress, as was the anthropology that grew up within it. But both the university and anthropology were equally complicit in the project of colonial subjugation. Today, with the imminent collapse of the Enlightenment model of knowledge production, the challenge is to repurpose of the university to align more with sustainability than with progress. What part can anthropology play in bringing this about? This chapter outlines principles common to both the anthropology and the university of the future. These include: freedom, performed in a spirit of companionship rather than academic exceptionality; decoloniality, understood as a process that uncouples education from modernity and coloniality; multiversality, as a commitment to one world of nevertheless infinite difference; research, as the pursuit of truth through curiosity and care; amateurism, meaning scholarship as a labour of love; and a nomadic disciplinarity that binds multiple lines of interest. The chapter concludes by returning to the idea of education as commoning. How can the university of the future serve the common good? How can it heal the rupture between education and democracy?