Debate: This house believes the university is no longer the home of knowledge
Four speakers, two positions, and a question the university has avoided answering for years
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In 1996 Bill Readings wrote that the university is "in ruins": no longer the institution of national culture but a bureaucratic apparatus run in the name of "excellence", a word that can mean anything and therefore means nothing. Thirty years on, the ruin has new tenants: rankings, citation indices, a few large publishers who own the infrastructure of scholarly publishing, and now language models that write in a minute what a doctoral student labours over for a whole season.
Those proposing the motion argue that the university lost its monopoly on knowledge not to an outside attack but through its own choices: teachers on short, precarious contracts, research valued by citation counts in English-language indices, and fees that have turned knowledge into a commodity. In their view, knowledge today is made above all in community archives, free-software collectives, the work of independent translators and the reading circles of exiles; and the university, if it still adds something, is no longer its home.
Those opposing call this verdict premature and dangerous. Wherever the public university has weakened, the gap has been filled not by knowledge commons but by platforms and private companies. The university is still one of the few places that pays for slow, unprofitable questioning, and for scholars from the Global South or in exile it is a fragile but real refuge. For them, the task now is to take the university back, not to abandon it.
This debate is neither a lament nor a celebration. It asks what institutional form knowledge needs at a time when writing has become cheap and authority is contested, who decides that form, and which of the university's tasks an open, multilingual infrastructure can take over and which it cannot.
Format
- Each side has two speakers. Each speaker has eight minutes, alternating between the sides, beginning with the proposition.
- Ten minutes of cross-examination between the sides, moderated by Lucas Moreau.
- Twenty-five minutes of questions from the audience, in the hall and online.
- Each speaker gives a two-minute closing statement. The audience votes before and after the debate, and the side that moves more votes wins.
Opening positions
- Hendrik Visscher (for): the Dutch university has become a firm whose products are degrees and rankings; knowledge happens there despite it, not because of it.
- Thandiwe Dlamini (for): the students who brought down the Rhodes statue in Cape Town in 2015 showed that the curriculum is a map of whose knowledge counts; a house that keeps most of the world outside is not the home of knowledge.
- Eleni Papadaki (against): no platform will inherit the seminar and slow reading; abandon the university and its heir will not be the commons but the market.
- Mehdi Ghorbani (against): for the professors expelled from Iran's universities, the university was not a firm but a place worth fighting for; giving up the idea of the university is a gift to authoritarian governments.
Questions for discussion
- If not the university, which institution will sustain slow, unprofitable research?
- Can open, multilingual infrastructures hold assessment, continuity and memory without repeating the university's exclusions?
- When the signature, the degree and the journal all lose their authority, who should judge knowledge?
References
Readings, Bill. 1996. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Collini, Stefan. 2012. What Are Universities For? London: Penguin.
Newfield, Christopher. 2016. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mbembe, Achille Joseph. 2016. "Decolonizing the University: New Directions." Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15 (1): 29–45.