Higher Education and Degrowth: Reflections on Meaning Oriented Toward the Future

Abstract

The paper reflects on recent transformations in the university, marked by standardization, bureaucratization, and urgency, which undermine its critical function. It is not difficult to come across new paths that raise questions about the quality and role of the Academy. The text calls for rethinking university education – particularly professional qualification programs – through alternative paradigms inspired by Latouche’s concept of degrowth: overcoming the logic of efficiency and infinite growth, and valuing slowness, sobriety, community, and conviviality. Applied to education, degrowth entails slow education, ecologically situated and generative, opposed to a university reduced to mere certification; a laboratory place for sustainable futures, where emancipation, care for others, and care for the world are combined with an unhurried pace.