Universities play an important role in shaping tomorrow's society. Both through research and education, universities contribute to addressing current social needs. Increasingly, higher education policies at different levels (institutional, national, European) are trying to affect how universities shape the society of the future. In doing so, the depiction of the university as an ivory tower is often strongly criticized. By means of various measures, policy actors try to realize a "university for the people".

The desire to orient universities more strongly to the needs of the people is not new and has a long history. More specifically, countries whose histories are characterized by colonial oppression, often experimented post-independence with new forms of university education that claimed to be better adjusted to the needs of the local population so that these reformed universities contributed to the development of these new nation-states. However, these histories have often been neglected in the dominant historiography of the university in favor of a rather Eurocentric narrative that culminates in the idea of the global university in a knowledge economy. Therefore, focusing more strongly on these postcolonial histories of university reform also offers an opportunity to criticize the narrative of the university as an eminently European institution. The three case studies that take center stage in this project are the land-grant movement in the USA (1862-1890), the Cordoba student movement in Argentina (1918-1930), and open and distance education in South Africa (1946-1980).

In each of these three reform movements, a particular idea of the university was proposed to meet the needs of the population to realize a specific vision of the future. For each of the case studies, the project asks how ideas of the university were articulated and implemented in conjunction with desirable representations of the future and a particular, politically colored understanding of "the people." In this way, the research project intervenes from a historical-comparative perspective in contemporary political and academic debates about the future of the university and its relation to society.