Dear Rectors and Policy-Makers,

Today the world faces new opportunities as well as multiple crises, a polycrisis: Democracy is under pressure; wars are spreading; global climate change and sustainability crises are accelerating. Digitalisation, which was once the object of hopes for democratisation, has given rise to a convergence of political and corporate interests into what some have termed “technofascism”. Futures are closing. Society is ill-equipped to face these overlapping crises. Our culture is more than just overwhelmed. Considering this alarming dynamic, universities face the challenge of providing critical and reflective knowledge for resilient and thriving societies of today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the University’s classical mission, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, for the sake of society at large and of the subject/person development (paideia), has become increasingly moulded by market logics and by technological determinism. The University has had a mission drift and is now beholden to a new public management regime and a positivist-neoliberal rationality. Students, academic and administrative staff are all quantified and metricised as economic units; economic thinking seems to be dominating the academic spirit.

The University is deeply embedded in corporate systems through its technological infrastructure and research partnerships, which shape how it conducts its teaching and research, and render it complicit in ecological and social harms. The University mistakenly believes it must keep up with technological developments and continuous innovation more than taking the time to assess and responsibly shape new technologies.

In the founding signatories’ living manifesto, The University Must Bifurcate to Reclaim the Future (https://zenodo.org/records/23688300), we put forward an alternative view and a new vision of the University which can be reclaimed from market and technoscientific dynamics. We demand a bifurcated University – introducing a new mindset and a new structure which is oriented towards overcoming the polycrisis through a vision of a humane societal future. The bifurcated University is built on a foundation of critical-reflexive inter- and transdisciplinarity and a community and societal centred ethos that embraces knowledge for alternative nature-society relations, including different types of research cultures, (open-source) technologies and arts. This is a University that bifurcates, branches away, from market-based rationality and technological determinism. It enhances a critical-reflexive mindset and a digital sovereignty which is built on the work and outputs of its staff and students, and which celebrates academic freedom for the development of society at large and critical knowledge as a public good. It is a University that rejects narrow techno-solutionism as well as green and ethics washing. We envision a University that thinks not only in terms of what skills and knowledge make good employees, but what skills and knowledge make responsible citizens empowered to think critically about the world and the technical, political, economic and social structures around them, who can imagine and work towards futures worth having, achieved partially by appropriating old and creating new technical systems and societal structures. We demand a new culture of a new University, including an educational milieu that cultivates the capacities of students who can care for and fruitfully co-exist with each other and the world through technology, not students who are subordinated to intertwining technological and positivist-neoliberal imperatives.

We think that the University is in need of radical transformation above and beyond reform. Reforms alone will be absorbed. Still, they can prepare the University for a sharper change in direction. With the following core demands, we are proposing to lay the groundwork, keeping in mind that reformative steps must ease the path to bifurcation, not supplant it.

We, the staff and students of our universities, and other allies, present and endorse these core demands executable at different scales by University leadership and national governments.

We ask for changes on three axes: Institutional Governance and Resourcing; Institutional Infrastructure; and Structural changes.

We demand bifurcation labs, a commitment to technological sufficiency, real institutional and curricular ethics and critical reflexivity, and open and inclusive universities in teaching and research, as spaces of wide participation. Our demands are for:

Institutional Governance and Resourcing:

• initiating fundamental and political discourse about the University for the future of education (“Bildung”) in the age of new opportunities and polycrisis – and of the University as a societal institution;

• support and resources for autonomous centres of bifurcation (“bifurcation labs”) with a mandate to inform institutional decision-making—places of experimentation, debate and dialogue founded with the mission of imagining new ecologically thriving futures, and how to reach them with the University, that is, how to reclaim the University itself and mobilise it for authoring worthwhile futures;

• implementing and fostering meaningful public participation (of civil society and lay experts) in research and other academic activities—the University can be a partner for contributory research and economy;

• incentivising and enabling critical-reflexive inter- and transdisciplinarity as mandatory parts in higher education programs in order to enable holistic and systems approaches, to face the world’s wicked problems, and to enhance critical-reflexive thinking beyond disciplinary silos — a critical-reflexive mindset scrutinises what seems to be given and is fundamental for real creativity in the direction of the good life;

• support and facilitation for staff who refuse to adopt or work on the development of problematic, objectionable technologies¹, as well as the phasing out—under the guidance and direction of new University review panels— of problematic institutional partnerships with entities subject to credible reports of facilitating or enabling human rights abuses;

• founding of University review panels, in each university, consisting of civil society and University actors (including student and staff union officials) to evaluate and advise on current and planned partnerships against a living ethical framework devised collaboratively between the university and civil society;

• ending time poverty with sufficient staffing for University stakeholders to explore their full potential;

Institutional Infrastructure:

• offering resources for experimentation with open-source software and hardware, and their default procurement status for University infrastructure which should also adhere to an ethos of compute and technical sufficiency;

Structural:

• investing in publicly owned and openly governed cloud, computing, data and AI infrastructures available to universities, public administrations and civil society;

• moving towards abolition of student fees and mobilisation of and secure commitment to student financial supports to enable accessible and de-economised education and a real alliance for desirable futures built with a plurality of voices—to grant the time and capacity of a greater number of (formerly excluded) people to think about desirable futures and how we might reach them.

In a world of proliferating civil and political conflict, impending ecological collapse, and increasingly structurally embedded risky and unpredictable technologies such as AI—which may exacerbate ongoing crises—the University needs to be a place of independent critical thinking and action, rejecting, creating or appropriating technologies for brighter futures, at a distance from positivist-neoliberal imperatives and new public management governance. We ask the leadership of higher education to support bifurcation now.

[NOTE: Greek and Italian Translations are available here (https://zenodo.org/records/23689844)]

Signed,

¹ In a world where regions such as Europe are pivoting to military readiness (leru.org/news/dual-use-and-defence-in-horizon-euro...), and where military-university partnerships (gov.uk/government/news/boost-for-skills-and-resear...) are increasingly normalised, we express concern that engineers and other academics could be marginalised or disadvantaged for refusing participation in projects with security or military applications.