Keywords

Introduction

In recent years, the financial crisis, effects of climate change, accelerating disparities between the rich and poor, popular discontent, intractable political conflicts, and major population movements in the world have meant that universities have increasingly mobilised to address societal challenges. Many policy documents (at the international, national, regional, local, and university levels) make clear that some of the responsibility for finding inventive responses to these challenges rests on the shoulders of universities. We will assert that in order to take up their responsibility, universities must maintain themselves as universities, that is, as (pedagogical) forms of public and collective study that do not protect and facilitate but that complicate and expose learning and research. We see that, by doing so, they constitute a very particular way of dealing with challenges, one that is worthwhile maintaining and that requires the campus as embodying forces that sustain students’ and academics’ power to study and think.

In what follows, we first sketch how two trends threaten to make the university (as an institution and campus) increasingly irrelevant by calling into being two figures: the independent personalised (vulnerable) learner and the innovative autonomous researcher. They merely require the university as a protecting and facilitating infrastructure for their increasingly personalised learning and research trajectories, which lead to excellence and employability. In the second step, we explore how to reclaim the university as a particular arrangement of study practices that contributes to the future in a particular way by complicating learning and exposing the ‘learner’ and the ‘researcher’ to practices of public and collective study and common pedagogical infrastructures (embodied in the campus). We propose that these pedagogical infrastructures help students and scholars become ever more sensitive to different worlds and what those worlds have to say, and in this way, increasingly response-able.

Becoming Independent Learners and Autonomous Researchers

In the current European discourses on the university and its inhabitants and the various policy instruments organising the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Research Area (ERA) (European Credit Transfer System, European Qualification Framework, Dublin Indicators, Key Performance Indicators, etc.), the orientations of excellence and employability clearly frame the role of universities in a particular way. They define research as the production of knowledge, education as the production of learning outcomes, and service as the production of impact on social and economic development (innovation). Furthermore, they outline the figures of the ‘independent learner’ and the ‘innovative researcher’.

Today, in English but also in other languages, we see increasing use of the notion of a ‘learner’, which implies leaving behind the old notion of being a student. While ‘student’ still seems to refer to the place of learning (a student is at a university or higher education institution) or a kind of social position (‘I am just a student’), the self-conscious ‘learner’ has emancipated (disconnected) herself from all institutional attachments: her only concern is learning. Everything else is secondary—‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how long’, and ‘through what’ refer only to modalities. This learner is a figure that is constantly addressed in policy discourses and for whom all kinds of policy instruments and procedures are being developed (Simons, 2021).

We can refer to the ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) and its guidebook to help us to describe the existential condition of the learner (European Union, 2015: ECTS Users Guide). The ECTS is used by many educational institutions to organise, reform, and monitor their programs and curricula in terms of the accumulation of credits, which may be obtained in different institutions and can be the result of both formal and non-formal learning. However, accrued, the ECTS credit is ‘a quantified means of expressing the volume of learning based on the workload students need in order to achieve the expected outcomes of a learning process at a specified level’ (ECTS Users Guide 2015 p. 35). Credits can be accumulated and transferred, and those credits can lead to a qualification. The basic principle is the quantification of study based on the time needed to produce particular learning outcomes. The guidebook strongly emphasises that it is a ‘learner-centred approach’. It is from here that we get a good impression of the kind of learner that the ECTS is imagining:

An independent learner may accumulate the credits required for the achievement of a qualification through a variety of learning modes. She/he may acquire the required knowledge, skills and competence in formal, nonformal and informal contexts: this can be the result of an intentional decision or the outcome of different learning activities over time. (Ibid., p. 18)

The learner imagined or projected here engages in a learning process that is independent of concrete educational contexts, but at the same time, someone whose learning experiences and outcomes can always be counted, accumulated, verified, and recognised (validated). In that sense, the independent learner appears as a kind of de-institutionalised (detached) student.

The notion of a ‘learning outcome’—one of the key building blocks in the European space of higher education—helps to understand what is needed when looking through the eyes of the learner. Learning outcomes transform sites of study into environments with more or less productive learning activities and allow to clarify to stakeholders what learners have achieved, while at the same time clarifying to learners what they can ‘get’ or gain. The basic logic is to decide in advance and in detail what the outcome of each learning activity should be (European Commission, 2012).

For the independent learner, university education becomes organised as a network or platform of personalised learning trajectories they can navigate to guarantee optimal learning gains. One could say that as a personalised learner the student is someone who invests in her human capital and produces competences that increase her employability. For this learner, learning is a very stressful business that requires her to look for study trajectories with market value (added value), niches, opportunities to invest, choices with high returns, creative accumulation of competences, and ultimately, credits, which she needs to become accredited. One has to manage and accumulate these credits, and to count the learning time. Learners do not simply attend courses or go to university but make calculated choices. They look for competency-based education (so that they know or have a good idea of what they will learn), which offers flexible and efficient learning trajectories and clearcut modules, in order to allow for fast adaptations in terms of investment (of time and money) and in order to lead to employability. These learners require education that is orientated towards their needs, learner-centred, and personalised. The university is useful for their productive and calculated learning practices since—and to the extent that—it offers them protection and facilitation. The university is there for them—to protect them, to reduce investment risks, and increasingly today, to offer therapeutic support that helps them live their stressful lives—and it makes little sense to reverse the question and ask whether they are there for the university.

Many of the European frameworks have the following objective: transforming the student into a learner and making the learner independent of institutionalised forms of education since institutional rhythms and places are often considered as hindering personal learning trajectories. Clearly, there is only independency to a certain extent. The ECTS makes clear that the independent learner at least depends on recognition, validation, qualifications, and standards (that allow the learner to profile herself and manage her profile), and hence also on the agencies and procedures that support those to operate (Simons, 2021).

The situation is similar when it comes to research, which is seen as a production process, with knowledge as the produced output, increasingly regarded as a commodity (to be protected, sold, etc.). This offers not only a way of viewing or speaking about research but also a way of organising research. Accordingly, project-based research seems to have almost become the norm, with its detailed formulation of work packages as production units and with expected outputs defined in advance. Implicitly or explicitly, the logic of productivity functions as the guideline for research to be carried out. Research becomes something to be managed, with the proletarisation and professionalisation of the scholar into a knowledge worker or a ‘researcher’ as a logical result. This researcher becomes an inhabitant of the European Research Area, which serves to exploit the potential of research activities and guarantee a return on investment. Furthermore, the European Research Area wants to create a labour market for professional researchers (with a ‘European Charter’ and a ‘Conduct Code for Recruiting’, which are the central elements of the website EURAXESS—Researchers in Motion https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/charter-code-researchers). These researchers are considered or projected as being mobile, without attachments, and so ‘independent’. The idea is to call into existence the doing of research as a profession and the researcher as a professional. That is how researchers are defined, referring to the Frascati definition of research as carried out by ‘professionals that are occupied by conceiving and creating new knowledge, products, processes, methods and systems, and with the management of related projects’ (Frascati Manual of the OECD, OECD, 2015, 164).

The European space of research today is a space that permanently and relentlessly mobilises researchers, including PhD students and post-docs, to orientate themselves towards accumulation (e.g. of citations, projects, publications) and—though it is often ignored in critical commentaries—to look constantly for (accredited) recognition for their learning outcomes or research results. Academic conduct in search of excellenceFootnote 1 and employability indeed implies a particular mode of visibility. In order to ‘exist’ as an academic, what is required is to make oneself (in terms of performance) visible by permanently staging oneself, for instance, by constructing (academic) profiles and managing those profiles. This branding is not considered a pass-time but instead characteristic of academic conduct and being innovative as it is promoted today. Branding or profiling is essential to run one’s business as an academic. As for the independent learner, the freedom or autonomy of the researcher is countered by her increasing dependence on recognition of her productivity and ‘impact’ (H-index, Citation-Index, research profile, etc.).Footnote 2

As such, the orientation towards excellence and employability changes the academic world at all levels—including the mode of existence and ethos of the inhabitants of the university and the study practices. Indeed, the university is a habitat (increasingly platformised) where the figures of the independent, personalised learner and the innovative, autonomous researcher understand themselves as entrepreneurs and are involved in production (of competencies or knowledge), speculation (on profitable investment), calculation (of credits), accumulation (of competencies and publications), and capitalisation (of innovations and learning outcomes). They require fast science and fast education involving dashboards and learning analytics that help to automate and accelerate learning and speed up science. Platforms are increasingly involved and allow them to ‘operate’ and be ‘visible’ independent of time and space. Some may question why and whether the innovative researcher and the independent learner actually need the university. Their modes of existence no longer seem to be intrinsically linked to or interwoven with the university. However, these figures will likely stay within or make use of the university as long as it remains functional. So, as long as the university is oriented towards excellence and employability (and is (therapeutically) concerned for their vulnerability and work–life balance), it will remain relevant. That may be difficult to maintain since the independent learner and innovative researcher always look for other, more productive or enabling environments and platforms. That places the university in the position of needing to outline its added value for the learner and researcher. However,, in what follows, we seek to reverse the perspective, to start from the university and to reclaim it and its campus as a particular arrangement of study practices that (when given form) contributes to the future in a particular way by complicating learning and exposing the (independent) ‘learner’ and the (autonomous) ‘researcher’ to practices of public and collective study. By doing so, the university campus transforms them into dependent students and scholars who are sustained to become ever more sensitive to different worlds and what those worlds have to say, and in this way, they are becoming increasingly response-able.

The University as Universitas Studii

One could argue with good reasons that, historically, the university emerged as a way to address societal challenges. The oldest university (Bologna, founded in 1088) owes its emergence to the promulgation by the town of new laws aimed at collectively recuperating money from ‘foreigners’ (to cover debts run up by their fellow ‘countrymen’) and the need to turn these laws into objects of collective discussion and study. The university thus emerged as a public movement of thought and an association of students engaging in a form of ‘regarding’ and concern for a societal challenge.

When we consider the origin of the university, it indeed deals with societal challenges by turning them into objects/subjects of collective and public study (which is to be distinguished from mobilising and exploiting resources). It deals with them s by gathering, through certain pedagogical practices and material space–time arrangements, around these challenges as students. The Latin name for this European invention of the Middle Ages was universitas studii (an association for study), students being those who devote themselves to studying (studium) something (a phenomenon, an issue, a problem) and the ‘scholar’ being one of these students (one could call her the ‘eternal student’). The translation of studium is to ‘regard attentively’, ‘to devote to something’, and ‘to consider’, and also to be respectful, concerned, and thoughtful. Hence, studying is not first about producing something but instead about taking care of and engaging in something. The notion of a ‘scholar’ also clearly indicates that the work of academics and students is essentially (and not accidentally) related to the working or practices of a ‘school’, that is, the university, which is bound to studium. Here, study is not to be equated with learning. The university marks the difference between learning, for instance, Spanish and studying Spanish. Where learning is aimed at the end of learning, that is, at the acquisition of knowledge or competence by someone (I can speak, understand, and read Spanish), studying is instead about always further deepening the investigation, attention, and questioning. It is a way to not only be concerned about oneself (as a learner or learners) but also to take care of some public matter (that matters). Reclaiming studium is not orientating the university to a personalised aim (as the notion Bildung often seems to imply), or an empty signifier (such as excellence), but it points to the importance of its pedagogical forms in working through problems in a way that takes care of a shared future. Accordingly, to define Didaktik/didactics as dealing with the teaching–learning process also disregards the idea of studium, in contrast to a view of didactics as dealing with the teaching–studying–learning process (Uljens, 1997). This own or proper space, time and force of Studium is also taken seriously in the relational view of content-centred educative teaching in non-affirmative education theory (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Elo & Uljens, 2022). The distinction between the scholar (academic) and researcher, just like the one between the learner and student, is no word-game but is important for the ways in which research and learning happen. At the university as universitas studii, research always directly relates to practices of making public and gathering the public around, with, for, and through research as study. This is not about scientific research as such since scientific research can also be carried out very well outside the university (as is increasingly the case). Research as ‘study’ (and as scholarly activity) concerns a particular kind of scientific research, which we could call academic and which has nothing to do with retreating into an ivory tower.

When reclaiming the idea and practice of public and collective study, it becomes crucial to emphasise that the university is not about facilitating and protecting individual learning trajectories or research careers. Furthermore, public and collective study are no scientific meetings of ‘peers’ or ‘experts’ and there is no ‘collaborative work’ of ‘learners’. Instead, it is about gatherings that are not defined by predefined outcomes but are moved or driven from behind by issues and questions. As Wilhelm von Humboldt (1810) suggested, academic research is, therefore, not so much moved by the contact with ‘colleagues’ but rather through it being part of what could be called ‘pedagogical forms’ as articulations of studium, engaging a public of students in a collective movement of thought. This studium, in the words of von Humboldt, is operating in and for itself in these forms. Hence, academic inquiry and thinking not only require public exposition afterwards (as a written publication or ‘report’) but also in actu. This is what happens, for instance, in the lectures and seminars, which, in return, makes something happen to (and with) the public. This public of students does not precede the event of gathering but emerges through the event. The gathering articulates, therefore, a movement of de-identification—we are no disciples (servants of a discipline), no innovators and businessmen, no learners and researchers, no human capital, but students and scholars. This movement occurs and implies that students and scholars are moving in a time of suspension (i.e. not simply a time of accumulation or re-production), which is the particular time of studium i.e. of scholé.

It is important that the university is dealing with issues and questions, along with challenges to which we do not yet have a response, which implies that it is not just about finding solutions or formulating answers but also about the formation of people and worlds for a future that we cannot yet imagine. Moreover, we do not know how and to what extent our necessary abstractions (concepts, theories), and the new facts (and data), new nature, new things, and new ways of doing that our sciences produce or conceive, will have consequences for our common life and common world. For that reason, we have to be vigilant, attentive, and thoughtful. Furthermore, we must be careful and exercise caution: il faut faire attention (Stengers, 2013; Harraway, 2016). This implies considering that we might be wrong or mistaken. That consideration is not an individual competence or capacity and is not just a matter of attitude or choice. The exercise of caution is related to the way in which the university organises and arranges the possibility that one’s work will be met with objection, or that one will be confronted with something one has not yet considered or thought. In this sense, the university refers not to a kind of institution (or projected ‘idea’) but foremost to a practice consisting of material arrangements and technologies that make something possible. What it arranges, in creating possibilities for objection, is the chance to make public what one knows and thinks, confronting the public with that, and hence also to make it possible to think in public, with the public, and before the public. This was likely the unique force of the original invention in the Middle Ages called a ‘university’, which allowed thought to become public, and hence, turned it into collective study. It is precisely the ‘pedagogy’ of the university, that is, its forms and practices of study (including material infrastructures, obligations, and time–space organisations), that arrange and embody such collective and public forms of thoughtfulness, cautiousness, vigilance, and attentiveness. Furthermore, it is those forms and practices that are changed when today’s research and learning environments open up to personalisation (increasingly supported by digital tools) and a format starting from what they offer for the learner or the researcher in an outcome-defined and -driven business.

Becoming Attached and Dependent Students: The Campus and its Collective and Public Study Practices

From the perspective of the university, recognising the independent learner and the autonomous researcher as the owners of their own learning, their own research, their own publications, their own opinions, their own credits, their own profile, and their own learning and research trajectory, and pursuant of their own interests in view of the ideal of self-profiling, implies putting the learner and the researcher at the centre of everything. In this sense, the campus and the institution increasingly become targets for destruction and abandonment. The independent learner and autonomous researcher are not born through a process of emancipation from oppression but through the destruction of or separation from (inter)dependencies and attachments (to a place, a time, practice, and even a ‘matter’) that reduce flexibility, mobility and efficiency. The price for excellence and employability that these independent learners and researchers strive to achieve is ‘the triumph of sad passions’, as Spinoza calls it (Deleuze, 1990, 242), while Stengers (2020) reminds us that isolating them and entering them into a state of uneasy and anxious competition places learners and researchers in a vulnerable condition (under stress) and gives them an insatiable hunger for feedback and recognition.

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting move online by universities (with the digital space largely, but not necessarily, person-centred—the personal computer, the personal profile, the personal search, the personalised phone—and in a way the most ‘modern’ invention since it is said to be limitless and borderless) has reinforced and intensified the trend towards personalisation and putting the learner and the researcher at the centre, which implied the accelerated destruction or neutralisation of the campus (Masschelein & Simons, 2021). If that is the case, the university is increasingly being robbed of its unique capacity for study, that is, its unique power to create a ‘gathering for collective and public study’ (universitas studii), which constitutes its specific response-ability.

We perceive that the university matters as it stands as one of the ‘tools’ to address damaged and chaotic worlds, and to become capable not of solving problems but of responding to worlds, that is, sensing, imagining, thinking, and taking care of them (and perhaps we have to add the planet: see Chakrabarty, 2019). The university matters but it is, in fact, crying out for our concern. We should, especially as educationalists, be concerned with regenerating the campus as a common pedagogical infrastructure (including practices, architecture, time, and space arrangements) where the learner (and the researcher) are de-centered and public and collective study are enabled and sustained. Recall here what Humboldt stated, that professors do not exist for the students or the students for professors, but that both exist for ‘science’ (Humboldt, 1810). This is a formulation that we might modify a little in further qualifying ‘science’ as slow while confronted with the mess of the world through its students, but which states clearly that it is not about the learner or the researcher. The regenerating of a common pedagogical infrastructure that is getting the learner out of the center, and that instead of separating us from dependencies and attachments, reinforces the acknowledgment, as Isabelle Stengers states, that we are situated (always somewhere, sometime with some things) and that we are made able to respond (which is not the same as to solve problems) with others, thanks to others and also at the risk of others, hence, the acknowledgement that we are depending on and obliged by the relationships we create with others, both human and non-human (Stengers, 2021). This also depends on what we want to call pedagogic forms. So, if we have to become able to act and imagine the future, to become sensible to what the world has to say, and to ‘respond’, we see the need to regenerate (and not further sterilise or neutralise) the relationships between students and professors and ‘science’ or ‘matter’, that is, regenerate or rejuvenate the pedagogic forms that provide ‘questioning situations’ (Ibid.). These pedagogic forms are not in need of learners but of students, that is, people that accept and recognise to be dependent. Furthermore, these pedagogic forms embody forces that sustain the emergence of collective public study and the becoming of (a) studying body(ies), that is, a body(ies) that acknowledge(s) the need to be situated and dependent in order to sense, think, and imagine. Putting it otherwise, in order to become university students (and scholars), one needs the campus, which one depends on to embody affective intensities and forces that make us move or do something or prevent us from doing something (i.e. affecting us; Latour, 2004).

Becoming a student of chemistry, geology, architecture, geography, law, sociology, politics, or educational sciences entails becoming more and more sensitive to what these worlds have to say. University education is about acquiring organs (ears, eyes, tongue, nose, hands, minds) capable of making distinctions that matter in chemical, geological, juridical, social, and educational worlds. By acquiring organs suited to inhabiting richly differentiated worlds, we give voices to these worlds, expressed in how they affect the body or set it in motion. The worlds thus become more talkative and interesting. This acquisition and voice-giving are made to happen through artificial layers or setups, usually lectures, seminars, workshops, lab exercises, excursions, library visits, etc., which play a crucial role in enabling the world to become talkative and in sensitising us to what it says. Such setups enable us to taste the world, so to speak, and in doing so, to work on our ability to notice distinctions that matter—or in a word, to study. These artificial setups support learners to develop the effort, concentration, focus, and discipline required, on the one hand, to resist what we could call the automation of looking, reading, listening, and feeling and, on the other hand, to realise a certain attention and presence of mind. Let us very briefly refer to some concrete practices and operations that contribute to becoming a student.

First, we must point to all the mediatic displacements from one medium to another that contribute to transforming something into a matter of study. The notion of ‘mediatic displacement’, coined by Lavinia Marin (2021), refers to the event of transcoding, in “which more than one medium is used, successively, such that the effect of a medium is cancelled through another medium … It achieves a suspension and placing at a distance of something already embedded and structured by codes. … The lecturer’s voice displaces the text, the student’s gaze displaces the voice, the writing hand displaces the text and the voice, and then the text again is read and commented while displacing voice and writing, and so on, in endless circular movements of displacement. This educational suspension enables thinking to suddenly irrupt” (Marin, 2021, p. 52). Media that are subject to displacement can include slides, experimental setups, formulae and diagrams on blackboards, models, and also very importantly, the various forms of the spoken word. Thoughts and texts are literally turned to speech when they are spoken, but so too are formulae, numbers, rocks, and chemical elements. All are mediatically displaced into speech or talk, albeit in varying styles and tones according to the educational atmospheres of the different made setups.

Indeed, a teacher or student speaks differently, and is, therefore, differently affected by thoughts, texts, formulae, stones, and so on, depending on whether she is present in an auditorium or involved in a seminar, excursion, exercise, or webinar. These differences matter. We could refer here to the work of Françoise Waquet (2003), who has described how orality is a crucial element of courses, which we tend to forget because of our reliance on written sources. She points to the impact of the spoken word in lectures, exercises, excursions, and conferences, as well as in the endless conversations before and after courses in hallways and corridors. The university, for her, is ‘the milieu of spoken science’. Moreover, different kinds of sessions, with their particular setups, literality, and orality, lead the world to talk back, or ‘object’, in different ways, for instance, through the comments, clarifications, and questions of other students, confrontation with examples, and so on. One learns new words, new names, and so on that do not just represent immaterial thought. Different sessions also change how a world is loaded into words (and names) and how words can affect us. We need to be aware of the unpredictable and uncontrollable ways in which these sessions affect words (and gazes, etc.), and in which words, in turn, affect us.

In addition, what we could call a rediscovery of on-campus education (see also Masschelein & Simons, 2021) leads one to realise the presence and particular importance of bodily displacement. There are good reasons to claim that one goes to the university and to the campus and to recall that ‘course’ actually refers to a movement. Course programmes not only indicate what a course is about and who the teacher is but also tell students where to go. Going to the campus and moving across the campus, from one session to another, is also an undergoing and a form of exposure. It is the very opposite of being ‘installed’ at home or in your student room, and it is different, too, from surfing online. Walking on campus, attending and passing the various buildings, rooms, libraries, and so on, is not like navigating throughg the Blackboard platform, or clicking from one Zoom ‘session’ to another Teams ‘meeting’. In the words of Timothy Morton (2016), there are different times flowing out of different ‘things’ (shaping different spaces). Moreover, going to class, to the course, creates a particular in-between time, a time of transition, which makes one aware and expectant of the eventual adventure of an encounter, not only with others but also with something of the world.

Attending a course on campus is site-specific. You go to the university, to a particular room, at a scheduled time. This room is more or less dedicated to, and defined by, a certain practice. It has no bed or bath, but ordered seats, blackboards, tables, lab equipment, or collective screens, all of which place limits on what can be done there, forcing a certain discipline, a certain posture. In a lecture hall, you cannot normally move the chairs or the blackboard; your gaze is to some extent directed. This is quite different from looking at a laptop screen, which can display all manner of formats, allowing you to switch from one to the other without any change of posture at all, and always leaving you the option to click out of them altogether. Course rooms do not allow this option. Course rooms cannot be appropriated at will. You cannot simply make yourself at home in them; on the contrary, they resist your efforts to do so, reminding you that you are somewhere else, in a place of exposure, of study, with fellow students rather than family and friends, a place where you are not just a spectator but also a participant. Going to the course room thus offers a location that is neither ‘in the cloud’ nor at home. Whereas at home or in her student room, the student might indeed be considered to be the centre of attention and decision-making, the made setups of courses instead aim to get the student out of the centre, both liberating the student from having to decide everything for herself and also helping to make the world talkative and demanding or obliging.

The campus as a physical environment becomes a place of study through the enactment of multiple, emplaced collections and collectives, which engender encounters with worlds. A campus in this sense is an active educational force, both producing and being produced. Enactments have to be performed, and the collections and collectives that emerge from them are fragile and always temporary, even if material infrastructures and institutional contexts lend the campus a certain durability. In today’s conditions, where the figures of the independent learner and autonomous researcher promoted by EHEA and ERA increasingly demand personalised trajectories and environments (enabled by digitisation and platformisation) to optimise their production and accumulation processes (of outcomes and impact), university campuses (including their pedagogic forms) are increasingly threatened with abandonment, and hence, the particular study power of the university (its response-ability) seems to be at risk. In seeking to drive the regeneration or rejuvenating of the campus, we do not want to speak in the register of optimisation (of the learning process) and progress (of science), but we want to hint at making particular ‘gatherings’ (once again) capable of generating collective and public study and capacities to sense (to be affected). When we propose regenerating these gatherings/tools for collective and public study, it is not simply about restoring or reproducing the old tools but instead about re-beginning them and recultivating the art of staging the pedagogical life. According to Durkheim, that was the meaning of the notion of studium in the universitas studii, but it became threatened by personalisation and platformisation long before the COVID-19 pandemic, which has only strengthened and intensified the developments.