Visions of what the university is and ought to be, whom it should serve, and the possibilities it entails, have long been fiercely contested.A battle of imagination over the past, present, and future of higher education continues to play out across various sectors, with frictions arising on multiple fronts.Images of the university as a civic institution oriented towards social justice compete with those of the university as a corporate entity and neutral serviceprovider for vocational training; narrations of universities as domestic institutions serving local communities run up against images of universities as 'global pioneers' dedicated to addressing global needs-and so on and so forth.Scholarship in higher education has been particularly dedicated to spotlighting the clustered images, metaphors, and narratives that background and nourish the pervasive 'corporate university' model (see, for example, Aronowitz 2000; Burkinshaw and White 2020; Drori et al. 2016;Washburn 2005).Images of the university as a 'market actor'; of academics as 'entrepreneurs'; and of students as 'consumers' are just some of those framings that have come under the scrutiny of theorists, concerned with their normalising force and practical implications, and with the realities they obscure.Despite robust commitments among scholars and activists to 'imagining the university otherwise,' a surprising lack of attention has been paid to the concept of the 'social imaginary'-a concept that has been articulated and developed by Moira Gatens (1996; 2004), Charles Taylor (2004), and Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) among others.As we seek to show, this inattention matters, since the social imaginary can serve to powerfully enable or constrain efforts to institute alternative visions of the university in specific contexts.
Churcher et al. (2026) studied this question.