Lessons from lichens for the future university

Inspired by the writings of Donna Haraway, Ron Barnett and Henry Giroux, this article explores the value of the lichen-university metaphor in working towards post-neoliberal higher education. A lichen-inspired university sector would recognise that academics, like lichens, survive and flourish through entanglement, collaboration, and attunement to precarious, damaged environments. It would value the slow, the relational, and the interdependent over the competitive, the extractive, and the individualised. The lichen metaphor offers a point for departure for current critical university studies, and provides a coherent basis for a counternarrative to challenge neoliberal dogma.