Here are a few resolutions for universities I posted before New Year 2026. They’re not perfect and they’re not comprehensive, and they don’t cover nearly as much ground as the wonderful Reclaiming Our University manifesto. They also fall short of utopianism, but they’re still far more radical than a lot of the tiny bandages being applied to universities worldwide which are slowly being strangled by managerialism, neoliberalism, and anti-intellectualism, among other constricting isms. Please do get in touch if there are things you think I should add.
1) Stand up for the importance of good education for good lives for people, society, and planet.
2) End outsourcing: all staff in all areas of the university should be university staff, and they and their families should be offered opportunities for advancement. Outsourcing creates a permanent underclass.
3) Tie (don’t cap) pay: no staff member, whether cleaning, security, or senior management should make more than double what the lowest paid staff earns. If you can’t attract people w/ high salaries, you have to focus on fantastic working conditions including providing nothing but meaningful work.
4) Default on all building loan debt: it was the finance bros who wanted the fancy new buildings. Let the finance bros repossess the buildings. They can have ’em.
5) Put the building budgets into maintenance and adaptive reuse.
6) Decide how many students should attend based on comfortably, even luxuriously accommodating them within existing buildings.
7) Universities should be regional. They should also be regionalist and cosmopolitan. People should have a quality university near to them and they should learn about their landscapes and how to be citizens of them and of the world.
8) Pursue digital sovereignty: universities should collaborate to create the software and platforms they need, and not rely on the fascistic and extractive tech sector.
9) Decentralise, decentralise, decentralise.
10) Pursue meaningful shared governance and transparent participatory budgeting at absolutely every level.
11) Only pursue ethical investment, including in pensions.
12) Everyone should be able to attend university, with remedial classes offered to those who need to get up to speed.
13) Here’s some low hanging (rotten) fruit: abolish business programmes.
14) “Circle the wagons”. Stand together as a sector to speak up for it! We are not in competition!
15) Anyone of any age should be able to take any university class they like (as long as there’s room for them).
16) One from a colleague that I’ll expand on: “Prioritise clean air in all buildings. There is absolutely no need to lose half of my class to viruses every autumn.” I think this is part of a larger set of questions about public health, sustainability, resilience, regenerativity, and accessibility, that university buildings should set a gold standard, as should our mutual regard and conduct within them (see 4).
17) All on-campus catering and foodservice (which should be run either by the university or by local, not chain or monopoly providers, see 2) should be vegetarian. I’m an omnivore myself, but this would be a seriously meaningful move for the environment.
18) Teaching and events should all be hybrid for accessibility (but not using Big Tech. see points 8, 15, and 16).
19) Pursue postdisciplinarity: in which: “disciplinary and even institutional boundaries open up as sites for action and collaboration, applications and concentrations, tasks, themes, and projects: places where everything is in everything. A post- or anti-disciplinary university is one in which there is a way to everything through everything else, where subjects open possibilities of which a discipline alone might never dream.” (This is in my forthcoming book chapter, “Everything is in Everything: Border Pedagogy, Panecastic Method, and Postdisciplinarity in the Architectures” in Pedagogies for Anti-Disciplinary Design Education, out this Spring).
20) Boost human diversity at every level. Diversity is as important to institutions as biodiversity is to ecology.