Introduction

Covid-19 upended the world as we knew it. For the first time in modern history, a global pandemic became a reality. While the origin of the virus remains unclear and a topic of much discussion, what we do know is that the interconnectedness of societies and nature enabled the virus to spread rapidly on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The pandemic demonstrated the importance of the public sector to society in terms of health care but also education. The ‘Covid moment’, if there ever is one, stands for the importance of non-marketized institutions and knowledge for social resilience. This book undertakes a study of the public university as a real utopia. Doing so, I draw on the social thought of the late American sociologist Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019). The book is future oriented. I attempt to ‘flip the script’ and approach the world of public university not as a residue from the past but still in need of exploration as well as worthy of realization. There is unrealized potential in the concept of the public university. In particular, the three dimensions of the public university are academic freedom, personal growth and the ‘untimely’ dimension of the university.