3. On Building a University for the Common Good

Around the world, universities have been converted into agents of globalization, competing for business in the markets of the knowledge economy. To an ever-increasing extent, they are managed like corporations. The result has been a massive betrayal of the underlying principles of higher education. In both teaching and research, universities have reneged on their founding commitment to the pursuit of truth, and to the service of the common good. With their combination of overpaid managers, staff in precarious employment and indebted students, they are manifestly unsustainable. Rather than waiting for them to collapse, however, we need to start now to build the universities of the future, and to restore their civic purpose as necessary components of the constitution of a democratic society. This article first sets out the four principles—of freedom, trust, education and community—on which any university must be built, if it is to meet the challenges of our time. It will then go on to consider the meaning of the common good, and how universities of the future can be of service to it.