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When was the University? On the Future of Engagement
06.01.2026
Date/Time:
Type: Lecture
Location: University of Hamburg
When was the University? On the Future of Engagement
The university is in crisis. On the one hand, we witness attacks on academic freedom, threats against specific fields such as postcolonial or gender studies, and the silencing of student protest. Foundational principles such as public accountability and representativeness are captured by right-wing, anti-liberal actors who reframe them as “viewpoint diversity” or “anti-wokeness,” turning them against the institution itself. This perceived threat of the university as we know it stands in sharp tension with demands for decolonization and the radical redefinition of the university as a space of learning and critique.
In this talk, which builds on conversations with my US-based colleague Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, I examine the relationship between the liberal model of the university and the current authoritarian drift that we can observe on a global scale. The temporality of crisis may not capture the longer genealogies of the current moment, nor the multiple politics of knowledge undergirding scientific and institutional practice. In fact, the crisis universities face today is not only the result of external political attack but long-standing internal entanglements. I therefore ask, “When was the university?” to examine some of the pathways of how we got here and re-imagine how to move forward.