 Thank you. Around the world universities are in turmoil. There was a time when they stood out to spinnacles of enlightenment where scholarly elites could profess to a superior knowledge based on reasons and evidence of the ways of the world. Their mission was to educate, to spread the light of learning to all nations and deliver their citizens from ignorance, poverty and subjugation. oedd yn ei wneud i'r cyfnod a'r cyd-deithasol yn y rhagisio cyd-dweud y gallu'r opresiwn oherwydd mae'r cyd-dweud yn ymweld i'r cyfnod, yn ymweld i'r cyd-dweud. Fy hwnnw, y dda'r unigion yn ymweld i ddechrau progresifol, ac mae'r cyd-dweud yn ymdweud i'r cyd-dweud yn ymwybodol yn ymddangos cymdeithasol. Llyfriddor hynny'n ei wneud. The Enlightenment programme has more or less collapsed along with the powers that sustained it. These were the historic powers of European-led colonisation by which the allegedly superior ways of knowing of dominant nations were imposed upon subaltern populations. The flag of universality has always been flown by victors in the struggles over knowledge. In our post-colonial world, however, the hierarchies that once propped up the academy's claim to intellectual hegemony have crumbled. As tends to happen at such moments, far from reaching an accommodation that would open up to other ways of knowing and being and to voices previously muted or suppressed, we're witnessing just the opposite, with the emergence on all sides of closed and self-righteous fundamentalisms, whether religious, political or economic. As we're all too aware, the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous and fractious place. Beset by weak and compliant leadership, universities present soft targets for hostile takeover, be it by multinational corporations wedded to the doctrines of neoliberalism, or by totalitarian regimes bent on the suppression of critical inquiry, or by sectarian organisations aiming to spread their own particular versions of bigotry and intolerance. So in the face of this threat it is imperative for universities to redefine their purpose. There is no going back to a rose-tinted version of the past to an imaginary golden age of cosited erudition. Universities can no longer take refuge behind self-serving appeals to academic immunity that have ceased to have any traction beyond their ivory towers, nor can they surrender to the profoundly anti-democratic forces that threaten their very existence. Some might argue, indeed do, that universities are already so tarnished by the historical legacy of colonialism, and today so corrupted by corporate interests that they would be better abandoned to their fate. For in their present form they are indeed bound to collapse as surely as the powers that sustain them. So perhaps they should be replaced with something entirely different. But I disagree. We still have our universities and they represent a priceless asset. So I want to argue in this lecture that rather than standing by and waiting for them to fall, we should already commence the task of shaping universities for the future. And for anyone of good conscience who cares about fashioning a world fit for coming generations to inhabit, no task could be more urgent and we need to start now. But there's very little sign that the regimes of management which have allocated themselves for business of controlling our universities have more than the slightest grasp of the issues at stake. Factuous mission statements merely paper over the abject failure of university leaders to address the question of what universities are for with the depth and seriousness it deserves. Their myopic vision is circumscribed by crude indices of rank and productivity. Financially universities have come off relatively lightly from years of austerity driven by the insatiable demands of international capital which have hollowed out many of our most cherished public institutions. But they've done so only by playing the same game. So across what many call the sector by which they mean a lucrative business operation conducted in national and international markets of the knowledge economy, knowledge is understood as a commodity. Research is driven by the demand for measurable outputs. Students are customers and teaching is designed to satisfy their expectations. Now it's long been obvious that this business model of higher education is unsustainable. Grossly overpaid vice chancellor of all principals acting as chief executive officers swelling ranks of managerial staff and ever growing proportion of academics whose career prospects are blighted by precarious conditions of employment and a student body bearing unprecedented levels of debt add up to a toxic combination. It cannot continue, least of all when the massive loans taken out by university executives to finance vanity building projects come up for repayment. Who will teach the students when universities can no longer afford to pay their staff. Everywhere indeed universities are in a crisis of headline grabbing proportions only temporarily overshadowed by the calamities of Brexit and Trump's America. But ultimately this crisis is not financial but existential. It is a crisis of purpose. And it mirrors to an extent a crisis in the global order. As the engine of economic growth collides with the realities of climate change the world it seems is poised on a knife edge. And we live in an age when people and ideas are moving and meeting on an unprecedented scale but also one in which arguments may be twisted and data manipulated to serve competing and often jarring world views. Public debate in many arenas has been reduced to a trade in sound bites. Truth is up for grabs. We need no reminding of the hazards that this entails to democracy, to society and to the environment. So to address these hazards nothing can be more important than to bring people of all nations and generations together across their multiple differences to learn and study in a spirit of reason, tolerance, justice and common humanity. No other institution apart from that of the university is currently equipped to take on this challenge. But to live up to it universities must rediscover their civic purpose as indispensable components in the constitution of a democratic society charged with educating its citizens and furnishing them with the wisdom and understanding that will enable every generation to begin afresh to imagine a world different from the one we have and to offer hope for the future. In the marketisation of higher education however this purpose has been all but eclipsed putting at risk the freedom on which the integrity of scholarship depends as well as the trust that enables it to flourish. Education in the business model is limited to a narrow view of service provision with research answering to the needs of commerce and industry and teaching and learning geared to the demands of graduate employment. Moreover in its embrace of the principles of new public management dedicated to competitiveness and cost efficiency in the provision of services the model systematically undercuts the openness, generosity and collegiality that are of the essence if we are to collaborate in addressing the challenges of the years to come. Instead of collegiality we have the consortium which is a quite different thing resting not on openness and generosity but on partnerships of mutual self-interest. But most troubling of all perhaps is the extent to which the assumptions built into the business model have come to be normalised. They are so deeply embedded in the everyday discourse and practice of the university that it is increasingly difficult to imagine any other way of doing things let alone to put it into effect. It takes an effort of will to shake off the dense web of expectations, indicators and metrics that govern every aspect of academic lives especially when they are incorporated into the IT systems to which these lives are increasingly shackled. Originally intended as vehicles of facilitation these systems have instead become powerful instruments of surveillance and control. Now all this of course is well known. The causes and effects of marketisation in higher education have been much analysed and thoroughly understood. But we are much better at explaining what has gone wrong than we are in setting out what to do instead. Conspicuously lacking up to now has been an alternative vision a clear and coherent statement of the principles to which a university of the future should aspire the values it should uphold and the way it should work and that's what I want to present today. Let me acknowledge it once that the ideas I put forward are not purely my own they have rather emerged through intense conversations both with colleagues and students in my own institution, the University of Aberdeen and with friends in other places in Scotland, more widely in the UK and internationally. And these conversations began as part of a campaign to reclaim the university which I launched in Aberdeen in October 2015 and which has since joined forces with a number of similar campaigns initiated in other institutions under the banner of the university of the future. And what came out of them was a vision of the university as resting on four pillars namely freedom, trust, education and community. These are not mere keywords. Every pillar carries a heavy moral and philosophical burden and our conversations cause us to reflect in some depth on what they really entail. So in what follows I shall revisit the four pillars and spell out some of their implications and I begin with freedom. As a concept, freedom has been sorely abused as indeed has its cousin democracy. It is widely taken to mean a right or entitlement to be exercised by individuals, thinking or collectively in the pursuit and defence of their interests. Applied to society, it leads to the fateful equation of democracy with the will of the people, a kind of totalisation that drives out the very difference on which continuity and social renewal depend. Applied to the university however, it leads to the perception of its academics as an interest group, a scholarly elite, jealous in the protection of rights and privileges denied to ordinary folk. It's no wonder it appeals to academic freedom couched in such terms, cut little ice in a wider society suspicious of all forms of elitism and claims to superior expertise. But this is a false sense of freedom. Real freedom is not something one has. It's not a property or an entitlement. It is a condition that is fundamentally... It's rather the condition in which one is in which is founded one's very existence. It's a condition that is fundamentally open to others and to the world rather than circumscribed by pre-existing interests. So far from offering immunity or protection, real freedom portends exposure. It rests on a willingness to relinquish the comfort of established positions to take the risk of pushing out into the unknown where outcomes are uncertain and destinations yet to be mapped. So in the academic sphere, the real freedom open to all in a truly democratic society is both exemplified and intensified. Not in the defence of common interests but in the ongoing fashioning of community indifference. Now I'll return to that idea later. For now I just want to highlight the intrinsic connection between the respective freedoms of education and democracy. We cannot have one without the other. It's a connection to which the great American philosopher of education, John Dewey, drew our attention over a century ago. These freedoms, as Dewey insisted, are not handed down on a plate. Freedom, he tells us, is something to be achieved, to be wrought out. It's not a right that is given but a vocation that falls to us and that we have continually to work at. We can never give up on it and assume that it is already won. Or to put it another way, freedom is nothing if it is not practised. This, the practice of freedom, lay at the heart of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire's manifesto for a pedagogy of the oppressed. It is a means, he said, by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and to discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. To participate is to follow a calling in which one both responds to others and is responsible to them. There can therefore be no freedom without responsibility. As academics, we are responsible for what we do in our studies and for the social and environmental transformations they set in train. And so the underside of academic freedom is care. Care for others, for the world we live in, for generations present and to come. And we care for others and for the world because we depend on them for our own existence, our own freedom. So this combination of freedom and dependency is of the essence of trust. And that's the second of the four pillars on which the coming university rests. To trust others is to acknowledge that we depend on them and on what they do without in any way curtailing their freedom to act responsibly towards us. There can be no freedom without trust and no trust without freedom. And that's why loss of trust is the greatest enemy of academic freedom since it leads to the replacement of autonomy and self-determination with surveillance and control. Of course there'll always be rogue individuals in the university community as any other who fail to live up to the trust placed in them. But it is surely better to start from the generous assumption that all can be trusted than from its negation that none can. Nevertheless, the premise that everyone is in it for themselves and that they will react only to threats and incentives lies at the root of much that currently goes under the name of management. That's a set of precepts and practices that universities have adopted more or less wholesale from business organisations. Regimes of management founded on the business model in which employees are classed as human resources, tasked with delivering corporate objectives and monitored for their compliance in doing so are inimical to the flourishing of any community of scholarship. Their importation into our universities, mainly during the 1980s and 90s, has done immense damage. For far from promoting openness and collegiality, they are virtually designed to set colleagues up in competition with one another for their own security and advancement and to create a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion, mistrust and even fear. I'm not exaggerating. Not only have I witnessed this at first hand, I've also had it confirmed in reports from one institution after another. We all know how trust, which may have taken years to build, can be broken down in no time at all. We know too that this breakdown affects relations not only among academic staff but also with students. They too are increasingly subjected to regimes of monitoring and assessment geared to the achievement of measurable results which are founded on the default assumption that students are motivated in their studies by strategic self-interest and therefore cannot be trusted. It hardly comes as a surprise that in a system of education explicitly set up as a competitive game with prizes in the form of grades, many students will seek to gain the system. The game familiar to any student essay writer is how to convert received knowledge and information into original results. The rules of the game set out in elaborate handbooks that are themselves devoid of scholarly content forbid copying a demand that all work should be novel. Players then are required to rearrange fragments of text or particles of information by means of a word processor into previously unrecorded permutations and combinations while evading detection by the monitoring software seamlessly known as Turnitin designed to catch them out. That this exercise should be thought to have any educational value whatever is a good indication of just how far, sorry, a good indication of just how far education has itself been devalued through its reduction under the business model to a results driven service industry. So when we speak of higher education what exactly do we mean by education and what makes it higher? It's extraordinary that in all the debates that are arranged around what universities are supposed to offer so little attention has been devoted to the question of education itself of how it is conducted and what it is intended to bring about. By and large these debates have been conducted as if we already knew the answers. Typically education is equated with a practice of pedagogy known as teaching and learning. A one way transmission of knowledge from insights of production in centres of research to those namely students who are contracted and have in most cases paid to acquire it. Universities tend to pride themselves on their teaching being research led implying that learners receive their knowledge at first rather than second hand. Students have the privilege of being taught by those at the top of their game working at the cutting edge of research in their respective fields. The closer their education approaches the summit of scientific and intellectual advance the higher it purports to be. But that is about the transmission of knowledge products newly minted by research is assumed without question. For at the very time that education has contracted into the pedagogy of teaching and learning research has been co-opted as an engine of the global knowledge economy and the one is a direct consequence of the other. So to recover the real meaning of education we must first think again about the meaning of research. Now there was a time when the main business of universities was scholarship and where their teachers and students were scholars. Teaching, learning and research insofar as they could be distinguished at all were all aspects of scholarship. But this time is no longer. The Don may on occasion assume the mantle of the scholar yet knows full well that in the new republic of academia it is an anachronistic charade. In today's regime of evaluation exemplified in the UK by the so-called Research Excellence Framework or REF scholarship has been consigned to the menial function of research support epitomised by such dog's body work as the compilation of dictionaries, critical editions, catalogue and databases. In itself it carries little value. Those who cling to a life of scholarship are treated as the fossils of a bygone age at best with indifference at worst facing redundancy. Research on the other hand takes pride of place as anything meeting the needs of commerce, industry or the public sector. Insofar as it leads to what the REF describes as new or substantially improved insights, materials, devices, products and processes. In academia as in industry the tagline new and improved must be attached to any proposal if it is to attract investment funding and to any product if it is subsequently to succeed in the marketplace. That's why so much effort is dedicated to demonstrating the novelty of research and to measuring the business take up the so-called impact of its outputs. For in the global market with ever more intense competition for dwindling returns only what is new sells or rephrased in the brutal language of corporate capitalism excellent research is the driver of innovation and innovation drives up profits. Now all this flies in the face of the real vocation of the scholar for whom research means what it says to search and search again. It means a second search. In this what was an answer in the first search becomes a question in the second and so it continues every search both doubles up on what was done before and is yet an original intervention that invites a double in its turn. There is no end to this. No final breakthrough into the light. Real researchers are anxious souls always ffondling in the dark where nothing is ever quite what it seems and there's little room here for optimism. There is however room for hope. For as every closure turns into an opening every apparent end point into a line of further enquiry research is the guarantor that life will go on that the well of learning will never run dry and that every generation can begin afresh. So what does research seek that ever evades its grasp? The answer of course is truth. Research in its proper sense uncorrupted by the business model is characterised neither by the novelty of its results nor by their impact but by its resolute and relentless pursuit of truth. Now of course truth can mean different things depending on the scholar's discipline or philosophy. What is truth for the physicist might not be what it is for the theologian or the anthropologist or the musician. Nevertheless the search for truth is common to all and is driven by a burning desire to get things right whether empirically, intellectually, ethically or aesthetically and what fuels this desire is not profit but curiosity with curiosity however comes care. Do we love the world enough past the philosopher Hannah Arendt? Do we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it? Are we curious enough to care? Because only if we are, Arendt foretold can there be hope of renewal for generations to come. Without care, without responsibility curiosity can only lead to ruin. Indeed curiosity and care both derived from the Latin verb curare meaning to attend to things or persons to look after them and to respond curiosity and care are two sides of the same coin and that coin is truth. So care, not impact is the hallmark of the responsible of the responsible search for truth. It is a way as I've already said of giving back to the world what we owe for our own existence and for the freedom that comes with it. But couldn't the same be said not just of research but of education in general? Isn't education also dedicated to the pursuit of truth? Is it not equally motivated by curiosity and care? And again it pays to attend to the words themselves because if research literally means to search again then to educate means to lead out. The word comes from the Latin compound of X out plus curare to lead. In this sense education is research-led not because it conveys the results of research at first rather than second hand but because it leads out along the path of inquiry that research in its iterative redoubling ceaselessly opens up. Insofar as it turns all answers into questions research can hardly be taught as though these questions were already answered. Education must go beyond the transmission of newly minted knowledge products as mandated by the pedagogy of teaching and learning if it is to truly follow in the footsteps of research. Now as a way of leading out education is fundamentally a practice of exposure that today's purpose is not to arm ourselves with knowledge or to shore up our defences so that we can better cope with adversity it is rather to disarm to relinquish the security of established standpoints and positions and by the same token to attend more closely to the world around us and to respond with skill and sensitivity to what is going on there. So in education lies the path to real freedom and it's a path along which teachers and researchers go along in each other's company as fellow travellers in the pursuit of truth. The journey can be difficult even uncomfortable with no certain outcome. The job of the teacher is certainly not to make things easy for students. It is however to set them an example to serve as a generous guide and constant companion in the conduct of their research and as a tireless critic of their work. And students following the teacher's example should not be afraid to copy just as a young musician would copy the teacher in learning an instrument or as the apprentice or be the master in learning a craft. This is not plagiarism, this is practice. As an apprentice in the crafts of the intellect the student practices under the eyes of the teacher only eventually to become those eyes watching in turn over the next generation. And therein lies the continuity of scholarship. It's a continuity founded on trust and the assurance that students who cannot be forced to learn are nevertheless eager to join in the scholarly endeavours of their teachers and to relay the torch of learning to generations to come. And that brings me to the fourth pillar of the coming university, namely community. And again, as with education and research I go back to the original that in sense of the term wunus meaning giving together. In the community we all have things to contribute because we are all different. The educational community to borrow a felicitous phrase from the philosopher Alfonso Lingus is a community of those who have nothing in common. It is a coming together in difference. And the university is a community in this sense. It is first and foremost its people a place in which they gather to study. One can only study by joining with others. No one ever studies alone. And that's why every university has to offer a place of gathering not just the socialisation in time off from study but for deep conversation. But we only have to look at the spaces of study of the contemporary university to see how the reduction of teaching and learning to service provision and the designation of students as customers has broken up the gathering. Classrooms that once hosted practices of study are rebranded as resource centres populated with banks of computers before which individual students, oblivious to their fellows play the information game on which their grades depend. Chalk boards around which teachers and their students previously gathered to write and draw screens for the projection of images on which drawing and writing are strictly forbidden. And the auditorium, once a place where students would assemble to listen together and to share in the experience becomes a theatre whose only function is to achieve economies of scale allowing the same information to be transmitted simultaneously to a mass audience. So how can community be restored to the university? Only, I think, by reclaiming it as a place of gathering a place to which students and teachers, researchers all are drawn by their love of learning and by their desire to study. Now this place is of course both one and many singular and plural and its greatest community, United Indifference comprises a plethora of lesser communities in just the same way that the universe of scholarship from which the university takes its name comprises a multitude of subjects. In short, the university is a multiversity. It has long been the convention to call every subject a discipline and to designate as a department the little community of teachers and students who in any particular place gather to study it. For every discipline then, there corresponds a department. These terms are not ideal, but we can live with them. They're not ideal because they rest on the model of the academy inherited from the Enlightenment which no longer really applies, if indeed it ever did. Following a vision originally articulated by the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers, Emmanuel Cunt, the task of academic scholarship is to raise a grand edifice of knowledge upon the foundations of the human mind like a castle with a thousand ruins in each of which is contained all there is to know about some aspect of the world. Every room of the castle corresponds to a particular branch of scholarship, a discipline and in it you'll find the assembled knowledge of that discipline along with a personnel dedicated to its study, that is the department. Put all disciplines together and you have the universe of human knowledge put all departments together and you have a university. But these days it's more common for disciplines to be compared less politely to concrete bunkers or silos, while a manager in my own institution was recently heard to say of departments including mine that they are no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. Who's purpose, I wondered? Have disciplines become ossified? Have departments become prisons? In practice, departments have never been the walled in divisions of a greater whole that their name suggests. They're in reality no more and no less than the transient convergence of scholarly lives coming together in difference that makes of each a community. And as communities they have always been open there never has been a time when scholars following their various lines of inquiry have not been drawn to other lines emerging from other sources. They've done so whenever it has been germane to their research. But the fundamental openness of both disciplines and departments is an inconvenient truth for those who would seek to manage the university along corporate lines. In their model the university is constituted not by interwoven lines of inquiry but by lines of control that work from the top down. The loyalty, cohesion and self-reliance of disciplinary communities which come from an intimate knowledge of the field and from working together and teaching the same students is perceived as an immediate threat to this control. And in the eyes of corporate management the way to address the threat is to use the alleged ossification of departments their silo mentality as a pretext for dissolution. They have to be amalgamated into larger multi-disciplinary conglomerates within which the bonds of community are broken and collegiality gives way to compliance. Now of these conglomerates the largest are in the fields of science, technology and engineering. And so far I've studiously avoided any mention of the division which more than any other rends the academy between these fields and everything else commonly bracketed under the rubric of the arts and humanities. I've avoided it because I believe it was inappropriate and unhelpful. But there's no escaping the way in which science, technology, engineering and rather oddly mathematics have been weaponised in the corporate capture of our universities. And this has happened under the cover of their acronym S-T-E-M, STEM. Higher education policy documents are full of references to STEM subjects. But what is evident from these documents is that STEM is not really a shorthand for a congerese of subjects but a front for the business model and the umbrella under which it has been imported into the university. The institutions of science and technology if not scientists and technologists themselves have been undeniably complicit in this. But it places champions of the arts and humanities in a quandary. Some advocate playing the same tune by marketising their disciplines. You only have to insert an A for arts in the midst of STEM, they say. Thus turning STEM to STEAM and all will be resolved. But that would amount to capitulation. In my view to the contrary it is to the arts and humanities to carry the flame of scholarship not against science in which it has been all but extinguished but in its defence. It is to rescue science from itself and to rekindle its founding commitment to the common good and it is to this commitment to the common good that I now turn. Having reviewed the four pillars of freedom, trust, education and community where does this leave us? Certainly with a picture of the university very different from what we have today. In this final part of my lecture I want to revisit the key question of what the university is for of its purpose in the light of the principles I set out. There is no better place to begin than from the vision and foresight of the founders of our ancient universities here in Scotland. And just as we should aspire to do today they in their own time were attempting to establish something for which in these lands there was no president. In 1495 William Elphinstone Bishop of Aberdeen and Chancellor of Scotland declared his ambition to founding university which would be open to all and dedicated to the pursuit of truth in the service of others. Well this ambition should be ours too and it could hardly be stated more succinctly. Yet it is betrayed in every single respect by the contemporary business model of higher education. I've already shown how the principle of education as the pursuit of truth has been trounced by an exclusive emphasis on novelty in research and on transmission in teaching and learning. In the UK's frameworks of excellence for the evaluation of research and latterly of teaching the word truth appears not once. What comes is rather innovation when it comes to research and employability when it comes to teaching. But I want now to turn my attention to the other two components of Bishop Elphinstone's ambition namely openness to all and service to others. Now these principles of openness and service are inextricably linked and they add up to what in my title I call the common good. A university that is open to all and of service to others is a university for the common good. So let me first be clear what I did not mean by this. I make no appeals of the common man the universal human subject endowed by nature the interest from the start whose improvement was the project of the Enlightenment. To explain what I do mean I return to John Dewey who is thinking on democracy and education I touched on earlier. So Dewey education was fundamentally about communication but he meant this in a sense very different from what we understand by the term today. Our present idea of communication inflected by contemporary data technologies implies the transmission of information. But for Dewey communication was about forging community and as he insisted does not rest on what people have in common to begin with. Like the freedom it entails it is rather something that continually has to be worked at. So participants coming in with different experiences and perspectives on things must be ready to move on from where they stand and cast their imaginations forward along paths that meet with the imaginations of others who do look likewise so as to achieve a degree of consensus or what Dewey called like-mindedness that makes it possible for them at once to carry on their lives together and to go their own ways. Communication for Dewey or what I think we might be better called commoning but coming together in difference and the differentiation made possible by coming together and a university should be a place of commoning. So then what's the good to which commoning contributes? It's not a commodity nor even a supply of commodities. It's not the same as goods. Factories produce goods that universities are not factories. Goods are finished. Universities however are places of renewal and the common good is nothing if not perpetual renewal. In his recent book called Reimagining Britain Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby describes the common good thus. The common good and all the values and practices it encompasses is not something legislated or mandated but is the sum of innumerable small and large actions by every participant in society. That's Welby. It is in this sense none other than social life itself, the ongoing creation of persons in community. It's you and I and everyone else in our mutual relations or in short it's the world we inhabit in all its fullness and commoning is a guarantor that this world can carry on of its continuity and sustainability. So to say that universities serve the common good is to insist that they play an essential role in underwriting this guarantor. But it's a role from which today's universities have largely abdicated. Indeed they've set themselves up as providers of knowledge products for government, commerce and industry and as services in the form of training and qualification for their students beyond tell. And just as the common good is distinguished from the supply of goods. So there's all the difference in the world between acting in the service of others and providing services to others. One is founded on generosity on giving what we owe for our formation as participants in a social world. The other is founded on contract or rendering services for payment. Now to contribute to the common good as I've suggested is to follow a calling in which it combines both freedom and responsibility. It is to accept a certain way of life motivated by a duty of care. And in the university this is a life of study. And literally the call to study is a vocation. And yet just like service vocation is also a term that can be taken in quite different senses. So the brand of course of study as vocational implies that it is expressly designed to provide the individual student with qualifications to entry into a career. Now it's easy to gloss over these ambiguities in the understanding of service and vocation or to conflate good with goods as universities routinely do in their mission statements. They can declare their aim to transform the world with their research and in their teaching to enable every student to fulfil his or her calling while boasting about the millions of pounds earned in grants and contracts and their success in securing high paid employment for their students. But no amount of papering over can hide the fact that mission and boast are in flagrant contradiction. Universities cannot operate as profitable businesses and serve the common good at the same time. And to adopt for the former is to renake on any commitment to the latter. Or which is it to be? Or more to the point, if universities are not to run on the business model where is the money to come from that would keep them afloat? Well, pay for it. For there are financial costs to be born and like any other organisations, universities have to balance the books. Now in the UK most universities are set up as charities. Some of their support comes from philanthropy and some from other charitable organisations that part fund their research. But much of it still comes from the public purse. Arguments range over the justifications of this support given that the benefits are cruel overwhelmingly to the better off in our society. Universities to their credit can point to the real efforts they've made to open their doors to students of poorer backgrounds to give them opportunities never enjoyed by their parents and grandparents and to set many on a path to distinction in their careers. It sounds perverse and indeed downright elitist to argue that it is not for universities to operate as agents of social mobility to assist students who start out at a disadvantage and yet this is what I propose. As charitable institutions whose educational purpose is underwritten by service to the common good universities should certainly aspire to provide the support necessary to allow anyone drawn to academic study to accept this calling regardless of wealth or background. What they should not do however is present this study as a means to an end namely to set up those who undertake it at an advantage or to raise them up the ladder of attainment in a meritocracy that puts the highly educated at the top with the most powerful positions the best incomes and the most enviable lifestyles. For if that were the purpose of higher education then its claim to work for the common good would be a sham. It would serve only the good of those lucky enough to succeed in it and for that very reason it would scarcely warrant public support. Think the problem lies in underlying assumptions that are perhaps inadvertently brought in whenever we use such words as disadvantage or mobility. These words conjure up a competitive society in which some inevitably fare better and others worse and where the same words are used to frame policies of higher education they cannot help but reproduce the very hierarchies that universities are pledged to overcome. There will be winners and losers and this is not to serve the common good it is to reserve it for some at the expense of others. Now cynics of course will argue that the ideals I presented of fulfilling a calling and service to others are fine for those whose own prosperity is otherwise assured that for those who lack the means they surely remain a pipe dream. How can the idea of a university that is open to all in the surface of others can have any traction beyond a moneyed class if in practice it's open only to individuals who can afford to study there. But this objection only underscores the importance of providing adequate levels of public support for students who need it precisely on the grounds of the contribution to the common good that their studies will enable them to make. It may sound crass but it is surely preferable for public money to be used to enable those who are fired by a burning desire for academic study to fulfil their ambition than to subsidise the upward mobility of those who are not and whose only interest in higher education is to obtain the qualifications that would open the door to comparatively well paid employment. And yet from the pronouncements of most politicians and policy makers you'd not only think that the vast majority of students enter university expressly in order to enhance their employment prospects but also that it is entirely right that they should do so. It's a view moreover that resonates powerfully among members of the public whose own children's education is on the line. And it accounts at least in part for the profound antipathy towards university education bordering on contempt that is widespread among the many who have been left behind in the race to the top and made to feel surplus to requirements in the shiny new world of corporate globalisation. These are people, be it noted, who are also vociferous in their defence of democracy. Their idea of democracy may be dangerously warped for reasons I've already outlined and yet in their diagnosis of higher education they are not wrong. It is perceived to be a system designed to produce a cosmopolitan elite that has gone out of its way to corner every advantage for itself and whose global ambitions have been allowed to ride roughshod over people's grounded sense of belonging to place, community and nation. Indeed the corruption of democracy under the banner of populism is in part a backlash against the globalisation of higher education for which the latter must take its share of the blame. This list between democracy and education is already tearing our societies apart and it's vital that we find ways to heal it and to do so I suggest we need to return to the idea drawn from the work of John Dewey of both education and democracy on the basis of commoning. This is to insist on the one hand that democracy lies not in the willful imposition of majority rules of the exclusion of all other interests but in a never ending quest for like-mindedness for ways of going along together in difference. And on the other hand it's to insist that education is not a gateway to the higher echelons of society but a way of leading life in which generations even as they overlap can contribute to each other's ongoing formation. In a recent interview following the release of this film Peter Liu documenting the events that took place in Manchester two centuries ago with the violent suppression of a protest to demand the reform of parliamentary representation the film's director Mike Lee observed that the people who gathered on that day in St Peter's Square were hungry for education and hungry for the vote. They knew that education and democracy go hand in hand as twin foundations for human flourishing. And yet nowadays Lee went on to say people who feel themselves to be equally downtrodden are both apathetic about education and cannot be bothered to vote. What, why he wanted is that. And there could be no more dramatic demonstration of the need to reconnect education and democracy on the basis that the commitment of both is to the common good. It is no more for education to keep the wheels of the economy turning than it is for democracy to protect its vested interests. So why should people participate in the democratic process and why should they go to study at a university? They should do so as Lee intimated in his interview because they are hungry. This hunger is not for advancement or promotion. It's not satisfied by eating at a higher table. It's a hunger to enjoy a life that is rich, fulfilling and generous. Lived in freedom and in trust. And this is to find in study a way of life not the means to stage a career. Titan means something different here. There's been much discussion about the length of the degree course. Should it be four years or three or even two? The pressure for those who see in education the means to an end has always been to compress the time it takes in order to reduce costs and drive up efficiency. But what if we were to apply the same logic to human lives? Wouldn't it be much cheaper and more efficient to get them over and done with more quickly? The proposition is of course absurd. But it's no more... it's no less absurd than measuring out the duration of scholarship in years. To align study with life rather than with preparation for a career is to acknowledge that life carries on sorry that scholarship carries on as life does. We don't cease to study any more than we cease to age. Education is about maturation not matriculation. And the university should be open to all for any length of time but at any time of life who are hungry for scholarship. But any hint of advantage or disadvantage any idea of relative status and mobility must be laid down at the gates. It has no business within. We should not even hear of it. For the university I insist is a place of freedom wherein the structuring forces of society should be set aside or at least held in abeyance. So they may be returned finally to the founding ambition that the university should be open to all. For it to be a place of gathering this openness must primarily be to those who live around and about in what we could call the region. By this I don't mean a level of administration intermediate between the city and the state but a territorially unbounded field of life and activity within which are nevertheless hubs of concentration. The university is such a hub and a concentration of the intellectual life of the region. So without denying that universities and their scholars are and should be in continual dialogue with one another unconstrained by political and administrative barriers I want to insist that the region is nevertheless the lifeblood of the university in the very source of its vitality. This isn't just about outreach about offering the public or school children occasional glimpses behind the scenes or bringing in a bit of local culture to burnish the university brand. It's about fostering a scholarship that breathes the air the air of the region of its people and their history communities and environment and that's what makes every university different in its character and in its operandi even in its languages and customs. Without this differentiation higher education would become the bland, monotonous and standardised affair that it is increasingly becoming today. And undoubtedly the most pernicious effect of this standardisation is the rise of global rankings which the university is jostling for position on a scale that pits eminence against regional affiliation. The higher up the university the more disconnected it is from its media and the more wedded to the service of an international corporate elite. A university for the common good to the contrary is one that seeks distinction in its service to the region. Well I began with the purpose of the university and I'll now conclude with it. For William Elphinstone you'll recall it was to be open to all dedicated to the pursuit of the service of others. And when I and my colleagues at Aberdeen set out to draft our manifesto to reclaim the very university that Elphinstone had founded over 500 years previously we had once again to define its purpose in a manner appropriate to our times in the defence of democracy peaceful coexistence and human flourishing. And I'm rather proud of the formulation we came up with than I want to read it out. The primary civic purpose of the university in a democratic society is to educate future generations of citizens and to forge the knowledge needed to sustain a just and prosperous world. The university is a place where people of integrity from all nations gather in order to learn to think and think deeply about the nature of things about the ways we live about truth and justice, peace and conflict freedom and responsibility the distribution of wealth health and sustainability beauty and virtue They learn to weigh these thoughts against the evidence of experience and to translate them into policy and practice systems of law and governance as well as to great works of science, literature and art. These things are the foundations of civilised life our university will be a place in which they can be incubated and nurtured. It is what it means to build a university for the common good and I commend it to you. Thank you.