Taking freedom back from the ‘Performative University’ special issue revisited: A dead end or a pathway to taking freedom forward?

In the summer of 2020, I led a guest editorial for a special issue on the ‘Performative University’, within the context of the Covid pandemic. The articles reflected on the state of our universities, which we framed as ‘Targets’ and ‘Terror’. The emergent response from academics at the time was more around indignation, along with a large dose of complicit resignation and some micro resistance. It certainly did not represent a form of individual and collective agency, which impacted on institutional and structural contestation of the performative practice of universities. This article will follow up on the special issue in a post-pandemic world, to explore what has happened to this academic response. Ensuing articles have illustrated a particular collective, caring form of critical scholarship, paving a path for ‘taking freedom back’. Moreover, what has emerged is the significance of pre-public processual and spatial turn of building a connected, political capital across institutions, disciplines, career stages and nations to then ‘take freedom forward’ in engaging other more intractable, non-academic actors within a public space. This offers some tempered hope in actively changing institutional practice, presenting us with a fundamental challenge to the bounded, managed and measured Performative University.