The University Must Bifurcate to Reclaim the Future

The University has become increasingly shaped by positivist-neoliberal rationality and its attendant systems of new public management, and subordinated to a technoscientific-determinist mindset. Education and research are not primarily being shaped for the intellectual enrichment of people or the construction of knowledge for its own sake, but by market demands and techno-scientific imperatives. Precarity undermines the flourishing and capability of staff and students. The University’s technological infrastructure is rented from major international technology corporations. There is an increasing dissatisfaction with the lack of public investment in education, within a wider mood of pessimism about what the future will bring in a time of polycrisis. Here we present a manifesto that calls for a University that makes a wager on bifurcation—diverging radically from its current positivist-neoliberal and technoscientific-determinist trajectory. We call for a University that embraces greater inter- and transdisciplinarity, public participation and epistemic diversity, more stability for staff and students, and a technological critical-reflexivity that permeates teaching and research. We call for a University of technological sufficiency and sovereignty, supported by new public digital infrastructure. We demand the development of a University that can help overcome the current mood of pessimism and reality of polycrisis, cultivating staff, students, and other partners who can help author better futures. We provide the beginning of a programme of bifurcation for the University that can support wider societal bifurcation, characterised primarily by a call for the creation of autonomous bifurcation labs. We propose ten reformist steps as preconditions to help build a new path for the University, a path which must ultimately end in a more radical change in direction.