Curating the European University

The university is an institution invented during the Middle Ages. As universitas magistrorum et scholarium the university was a specific community or association of scholars and students gathered around books and preoccupied with study and the search for truth. But what is the role of the university today? The meaning of teaching, study and research has changed with books being replaced by screens, with online learning environments replacing lecture halls and students becoming learners. In the light of a growing emphasis on innova-tion and development, competitiveness between institutions and the privatisation of knowledge, the role of communities of scholars and students is clearly changing. Some argue that the university enters a new phase, while others claim that we actually face the end of the age of the university. In order to address these issues, a conference was organized around an exposition of projects that present new ways of publishing, an alternative organization of a department, initiatives related to open access and open source, university architecture and accessibility ... Taking as a point of departure their exhibited pro-ject, each of the contributors to 'Curating the European University' reflects on the current challenges the university is facing today with a specific focus on its public role. The book, being at the same time a catalogue, includes textual and graphic descriptions of different projects, and offers a unique contribution to the public debate on the role of the university. The untrimmed pages of this book are intentional and part of the design.