Do We (Still) Need a Concept of University? A Critical Note

. . . one never follows in order to reproduce.

The university as a spatial and temporal institutional form has always had many faces – as much in India as elsewhere across various national traditions and trajectories – in keeping with its material bases as a handing down of experience and knowledge. Building on this assumption can push us in several complementary directions – whether in the shape of an appraisal given over to mapping the respective material bases for the handing down of experience and knowledge in specific historical conjunctures that have conditioned the university form, and/or a prognosis of the specific spatial and temporal forms that can emerge during the process (as indeed the effects that the passing on of knowledge can have upon ‘knowledge’ itself).

In this connection, it may seem almost inevitable and even imperative that the transmission of knowledge and experience immanent to the university institutional form has a near-anachronistic (and perhaps also archaic) ring to it. We may quickly recall that the word ‘tradition’ has its roots in tradere, which is the passing on or handing down of beliefs, habits, goods or texts, so that the process, howsoever contemporary and current, can always seem an untimely one.