From active citizenship to world citizenship: a proposal for a world university

Abstract

This article explores how universities can function as spaces where a world citizenship takes shape. First, Kant's distinction between the ‘private use of reason’ and ‘domestic gathering’, on the one hand, and the ‘public use of reason’ and ‘public gathering’, on the other, is elucidated. This distinction is used, secondly, to argue that the actual university organises ‘domestic gatherings’. In the name of excellence, it requires an entrepreneurial ethos of its staff, i.e. an ethos of obedience to a permanent quality tribunal, implying a permanent (self-)mobilisation confining the entrepreneur to a domestic gathering and the private use of reason (‘private citizens’). Based on this understanding, the third section develops a proposal for a world university inhabited by ‘learned individuals' acting as world citizens. It is a habitat in which an experimental and attentive ethos is present and where the public use of reason is ‘finding (a) place’. This public use of reason is not just about making things kno...