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Throughout the period of strict COVID restrictions in 2020, the ‘Critical Theory, Education and Social Work Reading Group’ based at the University of Sydney continued to meet monthly via Zoom to discuss Raewyn Connell’s The good university: What universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change (2019). In a very palpable sense, the crisis faced by higher education institutions in this time—set against broader social and political crises triggered by the pandemic—was the backdrop for monthly discussions. In the book, Connell challenges us to rethink the fundamentals of what universities do. Drawing on the examples offered by pioneering universities and educational reformers around the world, Connell outlines a practical vision for how our universities can become both more engaging and more productive places, driven by social good rather than profit, and helping to build fairer societies.

Reading Connell’s book in the context of 2020 generated a rich stream of reflections on and responses to her text each month, especially from postgraduate students who are in a liminal space in the global higher education industry. They are often both students and precariously employed staff; both visible as sources of income for universities and invisible as its workers; both already within the university system and uncertain if they will remain.

In this chapter, three postgraduate members of the reading group—Meenakshi Krishnaraj, Ren-Hao Leo Xu, and Pat Norman—engage with Connell on university teaching, research, and professional work, respectively. Each in their own ways, and drawing from the experiences of different times and places, raises the question: How can we reimagine the ‘good university’?

The Guru in the Good University (Meenakshi Krishnaraj)

Raewyn Connell, in her book The good university (2019), argues that the logic underlying teaching needs to be changed. On engaging with Connell’s work on teaching in the ‘good university’, I began reflecting on its implications for the role of the teacher in the Indian context. Particularly, the positioning of the guru, the portrayal of the guru in Western literature, and the transitions from the role of the traditional guru to the modern teacher in India. Most university teaching is designed based on defining the student as lacking in knowledge and positioning teachers as being filled with knowledge.

Connell (2019, p. 49) argues that this design of the ‘empty-vessel pedagogy’ and lecture being the predominant method of teaching at universities is a cause for concern. Connell argues that the classic university technique of treating the lecture as the primary method rarely yields sustained learning and that it offers few opportunities for students to challenge the social limits embedded in the hegemonic curriculum. Connell suggests that the role of the teacher should change to help students take their next step once they have identified their direction.

I found this to be interesting as it resonated both in the contexts of India and Australia. However, within the Indian context, it aligned closely with the modern universities introduced through colonialism. Simultaneously it differed from the assumptions of traditional knowledge systems within India, which were more closely aligned with Connell’s arguments for a how a teacher should be in a ‘good university’.

Connell emphasises the need for a democratic approach to teaching where the teacher no longer stands over the students as the machinery from the republic of knowledge, which is fundamental in the Indian context. A change in the role of the teacher may support not only democratisation but also the decolonisation of education in the context of India. There exists a contrast between higher education institutions and traditional knowledge systems. By exploring the differences in the role of the teacher in the guru (teacher)-sishya (student) parampara (tradition) in India, on the one hand, and the role of the teacher in higher education, on the other, we may be able to come to a new understanding of teaching—one that emerges from within a local cultural context.

Connell argues that while democratising the role of the teacher might appear to make it less dignified, in essence it is a demanding, skilled, and rewarding role. However, the potential implication of this change in the status of the teacher may play out differently in India. While the guru continues to enjoy a high status even today, the profession of teaching is of low status. This can be understood historically: as universities emerged in India under the colonial rule in the nineteenth century, a need emerged for ‘formally-trained’ teachers. While the modern university brought many advantages, the institution, Rao (2014) argues, was grafted into local cultures without any regard for the host culture. This pattern of staffing formal educational institutions persisted through the period of national independence in the mid-twentieth century into the present. Along with the increasing demand for teachers, the structural adjustment programmes adopted by the Indian government in 1990 under the influence of the world bank and International Monetary Fund resulted in the decrease of state funding and increase in privatisation of education. This resulted in the hiring of teachers, who were both underqualified and lacked opportunities, to further engage in training (Jayaram, 2003; Varghese, 2015). Teachers were positioned as ‘meek dictators’ whose objective was not even the passive transfer of knowledge; rather, it was to simply ensure that university students passed their assessments (Kumar, 2015). Priority was given to credentialing that enabled students to seek employment (Sheikh, 2017). Rote memorisation and teaching for the test became predominant patterns that underpinned the learning and teaching process.

By contrast, the historical tradition of the guru-sishya parampara is predominantly based on the oral culture. The Upanishads were possibly the first documentation of this pedagogy, which noted that learning was seen as a result of the student’s capacity to question and the teacher’s capacity to answer. However, the colonial translation of the guru-sishya parampara cast the teacher as an authoritative esoteric with an unquestionable fountain of knowledge (Kaktikar, 2020). This positioning led to the negating of traditional oral culture and a transformation in the positioning of the teacher. In the guru-sishya parampara, individuals who were seen as knowledgeable and capable of enabling others to gain knowledge and skill were raised to the status of a teacher—as opposed to enforced authority due to their employment as a teacher.

Today the guru exists only in a few circumscribed fields: namely, that of spirituality, and associated traditional art forms like dance, music, instrumental knowledge, astrology, yoga, and the martial arts. Traditional knowledge systems of language such as Sanskrit, spirituality, and these aforementioned art forms were quarantined from the university space governed by Western philosophical norms (Mohanty, 2001). The emphasis in Indian universities today on disciplinary boundaries, textual knowledge production, and technical expertise indicates a greater need for the democratisation of the university space as Connell suggests. This would also be of a piece with the decolonisation of education. While the National Education Policy of India (Government of India, 2020) aims to decolonise higher education and reintegrate elements of traditional knowledge systems, how this will be implemented is yet to be seen.

A different conception of the teacher can be seen in Indian history at ancient institutions of learning equivalent to modern-day universities. Established in the fifth century, Nalanda is considered to be one of the first sites of institutional higher education. Nalanda was an ancient Buddhist institution in the kingdom of Magadha. Teaching at Nalanda followed the oral culture of recitation and exegesis of texts, combined with discussion and interrogation. Such discussions at Nalanda would occur every day in over 100 pulpits, where students and teachers would assemble to test and advance knowledge, as well as challenge what was known (Beal, 2001).

Teaching in present-day Indian higher education is fixated on enabling students to obtain credentials that enable them to compete in a capitalist society (Sheikh, 2017; Varghese, 2015). This reflects Connell’s depiction of teaching in universities across the world. The teachers at Nalanda and the gurus aforementioned had greater control and agency over what was taught, and they were not governed by state or market imperatives (although power and material support were certainly in the mix; see Chandra, 2007). Yet today, the Western-style system of credentialing has also crept into how the guru is conceived, with demands for formal credentials supplanting the sishya of a particular guru that sufficed to secure their stature only decades ago (Kaktikar, 2020).

There is thus an emerging need to transform the role of the teacher in both traditional knowledge systems and current universities and to establish a relationship between the two. This is possible only by treating the university as a democratic workspace, for all its workers as argued by Connell, and by decolonising the curriculum to consider knowledge systems beyond what is currently recognised as legitimate in universities. Perhaps a sharp historical point of difference such as the one drawn above may offer a place from which the democratisation of teaching in India can emerge.

The distinction made by students of traditional artforms in positioning the guru as the source of teaching, on the one hand, and the university as the source for validating that knowledge through credentials, on the other hand, was evident in three narrative interviews that I have conducted in my doctoral research. My research focuses on the role of flexible education in supporting the narratives of self-fulfilment for women in Chennai, India. The three women who spoke to me had been learning particular art forms from their respective gurus for more than a decade. Yet they felt compelled to seek a university degree through distance education in the same art form to gain the credential needed to attain social status and employment.

One of the participants in the study had been learning music with her guru for over a decade. She chose not to enrol in a traditional university course as she wanted to spend more time with her guru learning the art form. She believed that the teaching of her guru enabled her to question, examine, and explore the art sufficiently. However, with the support of her guru, she enrolled in a distance education programme to get both her Bachelor and Master of Art in Music. When asked about her decision, she indicated that society would view her as a failure without a university degree. Pedagogically, while she considered that her guru’s teaching provided her with the knowledge and practice necessary to become a professional musician, she also believed that the university course added value by exposing her to allied disciplines such as language and history. The focus of the university course at the time of enrolment was the credentials. It was the prior knowledge from her guru that enabled her to navigate the university course. While exposure to knowledge and information was made accessible by the university degree, the actual understanding and learning was facilitated by her interactions with her guru.

The guru in this case took the position that Connell discusses, being both the provider of knowledge in terms of the actual art form and also the one working on the side of the student in supporting her journey of learning. However, the dependence of the guru-sishya parampara on the knowledge of a singular guru needs to be considered. The university context by contrast provided exposure to other disciplines and to academic systems of knowledge, which were important to the student’s ability to explore diverse perspectives and meanings.

In order to redefine the logic of teaching in the Indian context, it is essential to consider historical systems of knowledge that are relevant to the community while at the same time adapting those pedagogies for the present. And this is so for both the guru and the university teacher. Specific cultural norms, such as the respect afforded to the guru, are important to reckon with. So, while Connell puts forward a compelling argument that the logics governing university teachers at present need to change, adapting it to suit local cultural sensibilities become crucial in the democratisation process and the process of decolonising education. To change the logics governing the university teacher in the Indian context may serve not only as the foundation for creating good universities, but also potentially contribute to the decolonising and democratisation of education in India more broadly.

Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Agenda? The Story of University Research in Taiwan (Ren-Hao Xu)

Research aims to produce knowledge. Rather than individual sparks of genius or theorising in a vacuum, it occurs as a social process. This process is termed ‘research-based knowledge formation’ by Raewyn Connell (2019, p. 12). In this domain, it can be seen that temporality and locale play key roles in research-based activity. Research-based knowledge formation and universities developed together (Connell, 2019). Universities as organisations provide the facilities, funding, and environment where scholars and students are able to conduct research and then produce knowledge. The university also operates as a social process. Its development is deeply integrated in group work. For instance, innovations in cutting-edge technology in universities are derived from the demands for problem-solving: the need for groups of different backgrounds to engage in teamwork in order to explore, for example, how specific technological devices can be utilised. Such knowledge production in turn has a need for administrative supports to keep the project operating smoothly. Through this single case, we can see how collective work is ubiquitous across various disciplines in university research.

Social processes are based on the complex dynamics of interaction between different entities; they are not a static status. Therefore, the way universities produce knowledge through research activity varies in different contexts. For instance, in the 1960s, the Australian government invested a vast amount of money in universities to meet its national priorities: bracing itself in the Cold War by energising research in the areas of nuclear and engineering sciences (Forsyth, 2014). Five decades later, research formation in Australia is largely driven by the neoliberal agenda. On the one hand, public sector funding for research has been increasingly replaced by market-oriented private sector funding (Connell, 2013). On the other hand, any disciplines that are significantly linked to ‘job readiness’ and economic returns find it relatively easier to receive government funding (Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2021). This is not limited to the case of Australia; this radical transition is occurring worldwide (Marginson, 2021). This broad pattern notwithstanding, a subtle exploration of the processes of knowledge formation in a given society is required, rather than a generalising across a range of different contexts. As mentioned earlier, knowledge production in the university is a social process. Thus, its spatial and temporal specifics matter. By elaborating on the case of Taiwan, this article aims to show how university research emerges in situ and how it changes under different political regimes. Most importantly, the case of Taiwan enables us to reimagine how university research and social change coexist and co-evolve together.

The history of Taiwan demonstrates how social process influence knowledge formation in universities and vice versa. In the pre-democratic era, research in Taiwanese universities was largely controlled by the colonial and authoritarian regimes, respectively. With the termination of martial law in 1987, research-based knowledge formation in the Taiwanese universities gradually freed itself from such direct political interventions. To exemplify the change in knowledge production as part of broader social dynamics, this article focusses on the Department of History at Taihoku Imperial University and its successor, National Taiwan University.

In 1928, the establishment of Taihoku Imperial University was approved by the Japanese parliament to service its national interests. Under this circumstance, the research conducted in the Department of History aimed to enhance the understanding of Southeast Asia from the perspectives of economics, anthropology, and linguistics (Chou, 2018). The university intentionally recruited academics whose research focus was about Southeast Asia or Asian history. The academics and students were supported materially to study any topic in relation to the Southeast Asian countries or regions. The knowledge subsequently produced was then placed in service of Japanese imperial expansion into Southeast Asia (Chou, 2018).

In 1945, the Kuomintang (KMT) founded its authoritarian political regime in Taiwan. The KMT saw to the structural rearrangement of the Department of History at the renamed National Taiwan University (NTU). During the following 43 consecutive years of the KMT’s White-Terror policies, the KMT’s priorities regarding Taiwan were the dismantling of Japanese influence and the legitimation of itself as the true representatives of China. In this epoch, researchers whose expertise was Southeast Asia were replaced by those who specialised in Chinese history (Chou, 2016). Furthermore, any historical studies had to be politically correct by the KMT’s standards. In other words, knowledge production was immersed in a different political process from the previous stage—research findings now had to cater to the ‘national narrative of Chinese legitimacy’ (Chen, 2018, p. 229; Chou, 2016).

However, social processes involve a vast amount of interactions with multiple entities and components. This means that permanent and total control is unworkable. Since the 1980s, research in Taiwanese universities gradually challenged the dictatorship. The local knowledge and novel understandings they produced also circulated into the civil society. Eventually, they became increasingly interwoven with the political push for democratisation in Taiwan. The 410 Civic Education Movement marked the historic turning point in 1994. It successfully mobilised different stakeholders to push the KMT regime into launching comprehensive education reform (Law, 2002). The legalisation of academic freedom came into place in the late 1990s. Under this new circumstance of political liberalisation, historical studies at NTU gradually became more plural. Government-funded research projects in the Department of History began to delve into such diverse topics as the cultural transformation of Taipei city under Japanese colonisation, the written contract in the sixteenth century, the history of First Nations Peoples during the Dutch occupation of Taiwan in the seventeenth century, and so on.

Along with the global neoliberal education reform movement, research-based knowledge formation in Taiwanese universities was plunged into the market-driven system in the 2000s. Undoubtedly, as outlined above, this change is yet another that has shaped the landscape of research-based knowledge formation in universities. Political interventions in research activities have been gradually replaced by the economisation of knowledge production. One of significant example of this is the ‘Aim for the Top University Project’, which was launched in 2005. It was designed to target funding to boost the performance of selected Taiwanese universities in the global ranking system (Ministry of Education, 2005). NTU was one of them. In this circumstance, performance-based policy tools and market mechanisms played a role in reshaping NTU, and more broadly, the Taiwanese higher education system. To gain the external funding, NTU tended to favour fast-moving and cost-efficient projects. This higher education master project remained for ten consecutive years. And during this period, research funding had largely shifted to the science-oriented projects. NTU even standardised the allocation of its internal research funding allocations according to ‘scientific criteria’. These factors led to knowledge production in the disciplines of humanities and social sciences drying up, including the Department of History.

Nevertheless, research-based knowledge formation in Taiwan has remained resilient in pushing back against the neoliberal reform agenda. Social processes and research-based knowledge formation in universities co-evolve together; it is not a simple single-direction relationship of political and policy cause, knowledge production effect. The creation of hierarchies and mechanisms of competition was opposed by the universities and the research it produced. The universities showed the government that the neoliberal agenda might lead our higher education to a better place in the global ranking systems. However, it would also erase our local knowledge. With the neoliberal mentality of cost-efficiency, valuable local knowledge would not have a chance to be funded as it takes time to develop. And universities did not work alone to convince the government to modify its research priorities. They cooperated with unions, associations, and politicians and formed a movement. Eventually, this coalition changed governmental priorities. In 2016, the government announced a new ranking-driven research funding scheme called the ‘Higher Education Sprout Project’, which would succeed the ‘Aim for the Top University Project’ (Ministry of Education, 2017). In this newer policy statement, it points out in circumspect language that ‘whilst we encouraged our universities to pursue higher performance in global ranking systems, the nature of university was also abandoned by us’ (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 2). Under the influence of New Public Management, the ‘Aim for the Top University’ project had presided over the reduction of public funding to Taiwanese universities, polarised the sector through its distribution of research funding, and deteriorated public support of many disciplines. To rectify this, the government made the statement that ‘the allocation of research funding in universities should not be based on the short-sighted interests’ (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 9). This latest funding project is now designed to enhance the ‘public good’ and ‘research in different disciplines’ through secured budget funding to the higher education sector (Ministry of Education, 2017). It partly explains why ‘Sprout’ was utilised for the title: it symbolises that higher education should be deeply rooted in order to grow. With the implementation of this latest project, the uneven allocation of research funding was slowly corrected, which enabled studies across different disciplines to be supported by the universities.

The story of Taiwan highlights how university research is a key ingredient for making social change happen. As Connell (2019) argues, research is a circuit that traverses archival work, encountering materials, patterning, critique, and broadcasting. She highlights how research-based knowledge formation co-exists with its broader socio-political climates. Yet this does not mean university research is passively shaped by the ‘social’ or ‘political’, as demonstrated in my outline of Taiwanese higher education history, but that research is always already social and political. On the one hand, research operates through the norms, regulations, and habitus of universities and society, rather than in a vacuum. On the other hand, university research is capable of putting social processes onto a different course. And it is knowledge that makes this possible. The case of Taiwan offers evidence of this. Universities are powerful players for producing alternative visions of ‘reality’ through plural research agendas, especially from those starting from the standpoint of low socio-economic classes, racial and gender minorities, and the Global South. These may yet produce alternatives for universities and societies to turn over new chapters beyond the free market agenda. Change is possible as long as collective action happens.

Professional Staff and the Neoliberal University (Pat Norman)

Raewyn Connell’s The good university (2019) is important, particularly in this moment, because of its powerful message about the value these institutions bring to our communities and the way that value can be compromised by the thin market agenda. Connell reminds us that the academic enterprise is not a solitary one, but rather an interconnected network of people. A central idea underpinning the ‘good university’ is the notion of ‘the collective intellectual’: that the individual work done at a university is imbricated with the efforts of many, many, others. My own experience in universities has spanned many of these different positions: student, casualised academic, and member of the professional staff.

Connell refers to professional staff as ‘operations workers’, the staff who keep the university machine functioning. Connell notes the ‘constant, active interweaving, which makes up the daily life of the university workforce’ (p. 59) and which depends on ‘situational knowledge’ in order to function. This characterisation of professional work is accurate: the contemporary university is a complex and dynamic organisation with many thousands of employees working in its various departments and functions. Without the highly contextual knowledge associated with experience and institutional memory, it would be impossible for a single staff member to navigate smoothly in line with the demands of the academic year.

At the same time, these staff are engaged as ‘third space professionals’ (p. 56) who occupy roles that involve teaching, research, and other support functions. Interestingly, Connell draws on research by Whitchurch (2008) noting that these professionals are taking on roles that cannot be neatly classified, engaging in para-academic work, administration, management, and teaching. Being one of these ‘third space’ professionals can be enriching: I am simultaneously a librarian, a teacher, a research assistant, a publishing adviser, a research metrics data analyst, a networker, and so many other roles. I have been a counsellor to international students who are crying from the fear of losing their visas, because the university cannot fully resource writing support. I have helped academics with emergency re-writes of reference lists as they rush a publication to deadline. I cannot calculate how many weeks of time I have spent conducting systematic review searches across a range of faculties and projects. On weekends when I meet new people and they ask, ‘what do you do?’, I reply, ‘I’m a librarian’ and we have a nice conversation about how beautiful libraries are and the lovely, serendipitous feeling of finding a book in the stacks. In my career as a librarian, I have not shelved a single book.

As the number of professional staff in the university declines, the amount of work pushed back onto academics increases. Computer systems automate some processes. However, this requires that academics enter information and learn these processes themselves. That leaves less time for writing, reading, even thinking, which really is the ‘core business’ of a university.

Professional work more generally has been reshaped by what Connell has elsewhere called ‘the neoliberal cascade’ (Connell, 2013). One manifestation of this for educational institutions is the rise of audit culture, a situation in which both institutions and individuals are required ‘to make themselves auditable’ (Connell, 2009). In considering the structure of the operations workers in universities today, Connell (2019) notes a familiar pattern: a highly feminised workforce, with a large proportion of middle-class men in management positions.

Connell also notes the entry of corporate speak—the kind of convoluted managerial language Don Watson (2018) criticises as ‘death sentences’. And, of course, there is the primacy of ‘evidence-based practice’. My own research interests include the way the logic of ‘evidence-based practice’ and ‘what works’ in schools constructs a privileged model of professionalism, one that emphasises decontextualised, generalisable knowledge. Approaches such as these have no truck with the practical wisdom that is built by professionals over many years of experience and practice. Instead, our diminished workforce is encouraged to focus on that which ‘can be measured and reported’ to the provost, rather than that which might address the greatest need or have a profound, if less easily measured, impact. The episteme of ‘evidence-based practice’ aligns neatly with the neoliberal instinct for accountability and individual responsibility, and yet it negates practical wisdom by emphasising the decontextualised and quantifiable. Which is an ironic place to be, since the original Academy and Lyceum were founded by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were intensely interested in the idea of practical wisdom. What a difference 2400 years can make!

Managerialism, neo-Taylorism, workforce stripping, and deprofessionalisation are just some of the neoliberal practices seen in universities today, but these are set alongside a perverse and growing administrative workload. Graeber (2018) famously referred to much of this work as ‘bullshit jobs’, but I think his more useful observation is that this work is associated with the ‘utopia of rules’ (Graeber, 2015): the sweep of policies, procedures, forms, and systems generated by contemporary audit cultures. To be fair to the administrators who develop these policies, they are often trying to make the byzantine networks of contacts associated with the ‘active interweaving’ of the workforce more navigable for employees of the university. Shared inboxes, centralised service units and hubs, and single contact points from which problems may be triaged are designed to improve accessibility to services. And there is merit to that, yet removing the personal contact also has the effect of diminishing situational knowledge and the credibility needed by ‘third space’ professionals in order to properly help.

We have seen this happen at many universities across many branches of the institution through processes of centralisation, automation, and outsourcing, a problem Connell references in the book. Whereas in the past academic staff had a person with whom to build a relationship, now they must contact role-based email accounts, hoping their query does not fall through the cracks, not knowing how they can chase it up. Similarly, models of customisation and care in third-space teaching are generalised so that they can be fit to the largest possible group. Learning experiences are ‘delivered’, like a flavourless mass-produced pizza arriving safely inside students’ heads. How can this model be better than the care and customisation associated with situational knowledge and active interweaving? The answer is that it cannot: it is the product of an institution which is undervalued and underfunded, forced to economise because governments do not recognise the expense involved in truly good teaching and research.

As professional staff numbers are reduced, replaced by automated systems where possible or sometimes outsourced, there is a flight of institutional memory but, perhaps more worryingly, a degraded institutional imagination. Autonomy and experience are necessary for the development of practical wisdom—and practical wisdom creates opportunities for creativity and innovation in the university. Connell (2019) argues in the book that the fragmented work of the university is ‘held together informally from below, by the organizational know-how of the operations staff, and their ability to improvise and innovate’ (p. 60). This improvisation and innovation depends on the kind of deep knowledge of the institution, its culture and context, which is diminished by automation and outsourcing.

My first reaction—informed as it often is by political pragmatism and cynicism associated with membership in the contemporary Australian Labor Party—was to read The good university as utopian and unrealistic. However, Connell’s work has been a touchstone for me throughout my studies, and the reason that is so is because it benefits from re-reading. It is subtle. What I perceived initially as the utopianism of The good university actually speaks to a very practical reality: another university is possible. We have seen it in the past in the research and teaching academies Connell references earlier in the book. We see it today in a sense of mission and an ethic in which even the jaded still believe in what Connell refers to as the ‘vocational’ dimension to this kind of work. When staff negotiate a new enterprise agreement, I have friends—at the university and elsewhere—who say ‘you guys don’t know how good you’ve got it’. Actually, we do: that’s precisely the point. If universities cannot show the rest of society a different, better way of being, then where can? And why would we want to create conditions that worsen the experience for everyone? That, for me, is the biggest threat posed to the sector by the neoliberal instinct. It would be a tragedy for these institutions of wisdom, of the collective intellectual, that have given so much and have so much to give, to be reduced to something as transactional as credentialling factories.

Neoliberalism diminishes us all, professional and academic staff alike, but also students. The implications of Connell’s argument in The good university run deeper, though, for institutions. Universities have always pressed societies past the boundaries of what is, and instead showed what is possible. That is true of both the natural sciences and the social sciences. Universities have brought us Higgs bosons and human rights, neuroscience, and necropolitics. As a professional staff member, and a student, and a casual academic, and an advocate for the transformative, inspiring, character-building mission of universities, I think The good university reminds us that good universities help to build good societies: how could it be any other way?