Universities Must Stay Global in a Fragmenting World

[Celerity]

As global fragmentation accelerates, higher education faces pressure to abandon its international mission—but history shows that open, engaged universities are essential for human progress.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/universities-must-stay-global-in-a-fragmenting-world



We have entered a period of profound redesign in the international system. While the ultimate destination remains unclear, one trend is unmistakable: fragmentation. This pattern manifests across trade, diplomacy, and multilateralism alike. We are witnessing the dismantling of existing structures and their replacement with narrower interpretations of international community, dominated by raw power politics. Both driving and resulting from this fragmentation is the resurgence of nationalism—that ancient but potent ideology that elevates the particular over the universal and seeks to construct more uniform societies.

In this context, higher education confronts fundamental questions about its future. Should universities become less plural and less international, aligning themselves with the broader drift toward monolithic polities? Should they confine themselves to studying the world as it exists, or continue playing their historic role in actively shaping it? In our highly polarised environment, the temptation to answer “no” to both questions is powerful. Yet the history of academia teaches us that universities exist precisely to convene the broadest possible community and to generate new forms of knowledge that transform society for the better.

The Enduring Mission

For centuries, universities have served as spaces of inquiry—communities devoted to understanding the world in all its complexity. These institutions of higher learning have consistently embraced a role that bridges knowledge and action. Harold Lasswell’s insight that understanding and action are inseparable should continue to guide us today. To study the world is, inevitably, to engage with it; to understand is also to transform.

The first dimension of this mission is internationalisation. Global engagement in higher education represents, above all, an epistemological imperative. Knowledge grows stronger through pluralism—through the encounter of different traditions, disciplines, and perspectives. Universities are, by nature, borderless institutions. Their task is to foster global networks of learning and research, to enable the circulation of people and ideas, and to defend academic freedom wherever it comes under threat. If the past century of extraordinary human development proves anything, it is that the movement of people and ideas drives innovation on an immense scale.

snip