University Third Mission & Local Responsibility

I would like to share with subscribers to PASCAL our reflections from the University of Catania on University Third Mission and Local Responsibility. Our paper was recently published on both the Global and the Africa editions of University World News at this link. We welcome your comments.

From the aricle...

Universities have traditionally been seen as autonomous structures with respect to political power and as seats of democratic citizenship that serve their cities and their region or country and the public interest in a broad sense, as institutions that increase and transmit the body of knowledge and spur invention.

The Magna Charta Universitatum and the subsequent Campus Engage Civic and Community Engagement Charter have recently unequivocally sanctioned these fundamental and indispensable aspects of academic institutions. Both of these documents are continuously monitored and updated to respond to the challenges of a particular age.

However, if the prestige accumulated over the centuries by individual university institutions, both public and private, was due – in whole or in part – to their ability to serve society, their ‘territory of influence’ has been understood in very flexible terms, extending from metropolitan areas to regions, to country level, up to and including in some cases a continent or the entire planet.

Indeed, all universities, despite their differences, share an international dimension as a common factor, in the sense that they are capable of putting students and faculty in permanent connection with other cultures, other countries and other realities. All of them also have a vocation to guide innovation and the economic and cultural development of the region in which they operate, taking the best from the experiences of ‘neighbouring’ territories.

The crisis that universities are experiencing today has many causes and has led in part to a concomitant crisis when it comes to trust in science. The recent pandemic has highlighted the heavy inertia of many university systems and their unwillingness to revisit their original mission.

Read the full article on University World News...