We have entered a period of profound redesign in the international system. While the ultimate destination remains unclear, one trend is unmistakable: fragmentation. This pattern manifests across trade, diplomacy, and multilateralism alike. We are witnessing the dismantling of existing structures and their replacement with narrower interpretations of international community, dominated by raw power politics. Both driving and resulting from this fragmentation is the resurgence of nationalism—that ancient but potent ideology that elevates the particular over the universal and seeks to construct more uniform societies.
In this context, higher education confronts fundamental questions about its future. Should universities become less plural and less international, aligning themselves with the broader drift toward monolithic polities? Should they confine themselves to studying the world as it exists, or continue playing their historic role in actively shaping it? In our highly polarised environment, the temptation to answer “no” to both questions is powerful. Yet the history of academia teaches us that universities exist precisely to convene the broadest possible community and to generate new forms of knowledge that transform society for the better.
The Enduring Mission
For centuries, universities have served as spaces of inquiry—communities devoted to understanding the world in all its complexity. These institutions of higher learning have consistently embraced a role that bridges knowledge and action. Harold Lasswell’s insight that understanding and action are inseparable should continue to guide us today. To study the world is, inevitably, to engage with it; to understand is also to transform.
The first dimension of this mission is internationalisation. Global engagement in higher education represents, above all, an epistemological imperative. Knowledge grows stronger through pluralism—through the encounter of different traditions, disciplines, and perspectives. Universities are, by nature, borderless institutions. Their task is to foster global networks of learning and research, to enable the circulation of people and ideas, and to defend academic freedom wherever it comes under threat. If the past century of extraordinary human development proves anything, it is that the movement of people and ideas drives innovation on an immense scale.
Tellingly, this year’s Nobel prize in Economics has recognized the work of Joel Mokyr, who has very compellingly traced back the origins of the industrial revolution and of the explosion in human welfare to what he called Europe’s Republic of Letters. This republic was nothing more than a network of open exchange and debate of scientific ideas. Universities played a key role in its existence and sustenance. And simply put, we would today be less knowledgeable, and significantly poorer if we had not allowed for this international exchange of knowledge to occur.
Equally essential is preserving universities as open spaces for discussion and deliberation. In an era of polarisation, where public debate often rewards outrage over reasoning, academia must remain a sanctuary for nuance. Campuses should serve as laboratories of rational discourse—places where disagreement is not feared but cultivated, where listening is valued as highly as speaking. To achieve this, institutions must reaffirm their commitment to free speech. This will most likely require creating spaces that are intellectually unsafe, that expose individuals to new and sometimes unpalatable ideas.
Academic institutions must also safeguard their autonomy. Universities lose their legitimacy when they become ideologically uniform or subservient to short-term political or economic agendas. Their social contribution lies precisely in their capacity to host dissent, to nurture interdisciplinary inquiry, and to keep alive the habits of reasoned debate upon which liberal democracy depends.
From Theory to Practice
Universities must also reconnect with the world of practice. Applied research—that which translates knowledge into solutions—is not a utilitarian deviation from pure inquiry but rather its natural extension. In a world demanding innovation to tackle climate change, inequality, and technological governance, academia’s relevance will depend on its ability to co-create with governments, businesses, civil society, and international organisations.
This requires new pedagogies that blend learning with doing, new research models that integrate diverse forms of expertise, and institutional cultures that value societal impact. The concept of “co-production of knowledge” captures this well: knowledge generated not in isolation but through dialogue with practice, grounded in real-world challenges and oriented toward collective problem-solving.
Universities must become hubs for entrepreneurship as well. Building products and solutions for the world’s problems represents the ultimate form of knowledge transfer. As communities of knowledge and as networks connecting individuals, investors, and other stakeholders, universities are uniquely positioned to foster entrepreneurship and, through it, to deliver genuinely positive impact on the communities and societies they serve.
In times of disruptive change, neutrality becomes a form of abdication. The university cannot retreat into abstraction while the social fabric frays around it. Its vocation must be to illuminate, to question, and to build. Internationalisation, openness, and engagement with practice are not merely strategic choices; they express the very essence of the university as a universal institution.
The university has always been a space of humanist aspiration—a place where we learn to think freely and to act wisely. Today, that tradition must evolve into a renewed sense of purpose, one that sees the pursuit of knowledge and the development of solutions to real-world problems as two sides of the same coin. The great task before us is to ensure that studying the world’s problems becomes, once again, the first step toward solving them.
This is a joint column with IPS Journal
Manuel Muniz is Provost of IE University and a Professor of Practice of International Relations.
