Real Utopias

After having won acclaim for his scientific analysis of classes in modern societies, Erik Olin Wright turned to envisioning alternative social arrangements to capitalism in the early 1990s. Wright termed radical but at the same time feasible alternatives to the status quo ‘real utopias’. Theorizing the public university as a real utopia means identifying principles in the institution’s self-understanding which are congruent with multi-dimensional academia. These principles—identified as institutional democracy, academic freedom, and human development (human flourishing)—are both known to us and at the same time not fully realized. They follow the E.O. Wright’s fragments of real utopias rationale of the university closely: joys of discovery and learning postulate academic freedom, the value cluster of democracy postulates institutional democracy, and human flourishing postulates human development. Real utopias (as well as social utopias in general) relativize the present, exposing its partiality. Doing so, they help to clarify the maldevelopments and latent possibilities which exist in the present and thereby orient towards the future. They are the transformative ‘Where to’. Utopias function as catalysts for possible change. Future chapters of the university as an institution still remain to be written.