The role of universities has been under greater scrutiny, from within the institutions themselves but to an even greater degree from those who live, work, and think outside its borders. This exterior agitation poses the same question—“what are universities for?”—but it does not start with the assumption that a university is an institution whose purpose is to seek (research) and disseminate (teach) the truth (in all its contested meanings).
Those working inside the university understand its fundamental values: freedom of inquiry and expression, academic freedom and intellectual integrity, and the equality and dignity of all people (Turpin & Bailey, 2024). How those values play out in the everyday is constantly being tested.
The university’s biggest threats are not only occurring in fascist and authoritarian countries, but also in traditionally regarded liberal democracies where these attacks follow a similar playbook:
Undermine public trust in institutions that question power, and reward those that remain loyal. The goal is not just to control universities, but to reshape the civic imagination—to erode the idea that higher education should nurture questioning, complexity, and dissent. (Spooner & Westheimer, 2025).
This is most evident in the United States in the current administration of Donald J. Trump’s targeted assaults on “the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more” (Edsall, 2025)—all of which parallel a well-worn trajectory to fascism.
The contributors to this book trouble both the internal and external assumptions about what universities have been in the past, what they are like currently, and what they might, could, or should be in the future. Universities have adapted, and continue to adapt, in response to the demands, constraints, and needs placed upon them by the governments, societies, and communities in which they reside and indeed serve.
One argument we wish to make explicit here is that universities operating in a liberal democracy have a special role to play, one that sets them apart from universities in totalitarian regimes and authoritarian and illiberal states.
In addition to seeking truth, making discoveries, and passing on knowledge and wisdom, the university in a democracy has as its unique purpose that of asking difficult questions of governments, of other power structures, and of society itself. Its role includes ensuring that public policy is informed by the best available evidence as well as helping to foster critical and creative citizens whose formation prepares them for a lifetime of meaningful employment, community engagement, and democratic participation. When a society and a university are operating in an optimal fashion, these processes are occurring both inside and outside of campus. The university is in the service of our current society but also, more importantly, to the aspirational one on the horizon.
It is imperative to acknowledge the moment we are in as well as the trajectories of our near past that affect and inform our present and future.
Among a variety of developments of concern, our current moment features the outright banning of entire areas of study, the abolishment of tenure, and the curtailment of academic freedom, as well as a near ubiquitous push toward performance-based funding (Spooner, 2024). It also features chronic underfunding, international student quotas, and anti-woke sentiment with pushback against equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives meant to permit greater participation in increasingly conservative and authoritarian interventionist states.
Still other developments include the widespread use and advancement of artificial intelligence and the uncertain ground upon which universities have based their diverse responses to it. It is a time of audit culture, anti-intellectualism, and disinformation (Spooner 2018, 2024).
It can be stated with little hyperbole that from our fields of study to our campus greens, academies and academics are under attack, just as our global democracies equally find themselves so challenged.
As Mark Kingwell elaborates, “Education is always political, and too often in the service of dominant ideas, not novel ones…. Intellectual inquiry should not offer comfort or affirmation of what we already believe” (Kingwell, 2024).
There is no question that universities have had, and do have, a wide variety of purposes and serve many constituencies, some discrete and diverse and some closely overlapping and entwined. We have seen, particularly in the United States (but also in Canada and the United Kingdom), how national and local legislators can deny or even erase academic freedom and intervene in the business of university governance. We have witnessed the influence of partisan funding of right-wing attacks on higher education.
As governments’ share of university funding has declined, academia has depended more and more on benefactors and donors to fund not just scholarships and bursaries, but to help with operations just to keep the lights on, as the saying goes. The volatility of student enrolments and the dependency of universities on tuition dollars, particularly from international students, have led to difficult decisions being taken on many campuses that have impacted program restructuring, amalgamations, and unit closures.
An emphasis on the need to compete for students coincides with an increasing emphasis on post-secondary institutions preparing students for the job market and, increasingly, being in direct training partnerships with business and industry.
That being said, universities have also learned to reach out and respond to community needs with new programs. In this we see how the values of universities are embodied and reflected in their actions and activities.
This culture of encouragement is also a truth of what universities hope for and aspire toward, all while recognizing the dangers of tokenism and superficial change. Such programs and celebrations illustrate a new role for universities: their desire to respond to societal needs and to build knowledge through action. In so doing they may offer us another truth: our need more than ever for a sense of hope.
In its aspirational ideal, the university is a place of hope and of our collective futurity. In deliberative truth seeking, there is hope. Every society and each generation of scholars must revisit the fundamental question “What are universities for?” and defend its ideals such as they are and are always becoming.
Against this backdrop, we ask, what kind of society do we want universities to serve and to aspire to become?
Gathered in this volume are diverse and thoughtful voices from institutions of higher education. These voices insist that strong counter narratives exist to oppose the dangerous state of affairs facing liberal democracy and human rights. There are vital and useful alternatives with which to chart a course away from these dangerous elements of fascism in the world today. And so, we must say that this unwelcome truth requires that universities work much harder to defeat the tyrants of this world, trumped-up bully boys who are embedded in every aspect of societies around the world and in all ranks of the military, government, business, and industry. They are the twenty-first-century equivalent of the robber barons of the nineteenth century who believed that the goal of the expansionist colonial enterprise was to ensure their own incredible wealth and privilege at the expense of others, both mere lesser individuals and entire civilizations. This is a race and class struggle that universities must address.
There can be no reconciliation with the past if there is not first an understanding of truth even if it is differentiated, complex, and contested. Universities must help us to come to terms with this past. If we don’t, as the old adage goes, we are doomed to repeat it. Specialization, and an increasingly labour-market-focused higher education, means that fewer and fewer of today’s university students study other cultures, histories, languages, and literatures, in other words the humanities and arts. This lack contributes to societies deficient in understanding and knowledge that would better enable them to fight for themselves and for others.
If we don’t know about the unbelievable harm authoritarian strongman tyrants of the past have done, we will be helpless in the face of ruthless tyranny. “The banality of evil,” so eerily exposed by the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals and the reportage of philosopher Hannah Arendt (1963) serves to remind us of this truth.
The great Canadian socialist politician Tommy Douglas, along with those of his generation, experienced the rise of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism; Canada fought with allies in wars against these dangerous “isms.” Douglas understood that:
fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege. (Douglas, n.d.)
Up against such hard truths, what can a university be for? It seems to us that this question is almost as protean as asking about the meaning of life. If there were a simple answer, if only truth were that easy, then perspectives as different as hedonism and puritanism might be easily reconciled in an understanding that nuance and subtlety are lost if we seek easy short-cuts to the truth. Working to make a better world is not merely an individualistic endeavour; a world that is more just and equitable requires the commitment of entire institutions, particularly schools and universities.
Educators over the years have been warmed and inspired by the quotation attributed to Plutarch: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” Surely that is what, at least in part, a university is for. Do these conflicting images of fire capture the contradictions inherent in today’s university where knowledge is under siege?
We have valued highly the image of the lighthouse to represent the university; ancient lighthouses of course were once giant bonfires, signalling and warning of dangers below. The iconic image of the lighthouse, used for the symposium that instigated this publication, captures the glow of a light that guides us in new and safer directions, helping to safely navigate difficult waters. A beacon is a comfort to those who have lost their way, and the constancy of the lighthouse evokes the vigilance of standing on guard. Piya Chatterjee speaks of an “ethical charge [that] helps me anchor myself in these choppy waters and the jagged shoals which lie close under their surface.” This ethical charge is her own personal lighthouse as she navigates the dangers of researching “others” from her own privileged yet compromised position.
Tammy Ratt, calling for the need for Indigenous knowledge in universities, draws on the image of waskway, the birch tree, and its many uses in traditional cultures to represent the concept of all things being interrelated. The birch provides sap and shelter and medicines and, of course, hardwood to build with and to make fire. Trees have been potent symbols of life in cultures, mythologies, and religions across time.
The tree is a symbol that challenges us in our institutions of teaching and learning to ensure that such magnificence can, should, will, and must continue into the future. That is the threat and the inspiration, and that is the truth the academy must nurture and seek.
Let us not take for granted the precarious freedoms scholars in universities in democratic nations currently, though imperfectly, access as tools to complete their work, for it has not been long the case. In fact, it has only been a little more than a century that it has existed in higher education as it is currently conceptualized in North America. Academic freedom is most succinctly defined as “freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action” (AAUP, n.d., p. 292).
The threats universities and scholars face are many and include, among others, a creeping authoritarianism and democratic backsliding; growing adaptation of artificial intelligence, anti-intellectualism, and seeping post-truth rot.
Other threats include shrinking funding and ongoing government attempts to repurpose higher education as only an individual benefit and strictly to service the labour market and industry. Ever-present, too, is resistance to and resentment of change and initiatives that champion equity, diversity, and inclusion.
As a final thought, we wish to leave you with this slightly updated Greek proverb: “A society grows great when old folks plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” A properly functioning, reimagined, and fully aspirational university is, then, just that: an investment in the world’s collective future.
