Postdigital Higher Education and the Knowledge Economy

The last chapter of this book delves into the recent developments of the university. Higher education is increasingly digitalized, the pandemic reinforced the use of technology in teaching and learning. Nevertheless, post-pandemic, traditional forms and teaching and learning have resumed as well. The change, it can be thought, is less dramatic than some would suggest. This chapter is interested in the turn from digital to postdigital in higher education scholarship: how are we to understand the prefix ‘post’? How are we to understand the movement from digital to postdigital? While the pandemic was a necessity for universities more than it was an opportunity, it is the climate breakdown and attempts to tackle it, that represent an opportunity for academia. Properly understood, the agenda responding to the climate breakdown—the Green New Deal—is simultaneously an agenda for redeveloping public institutions. Part and parcel of its promise should be a redeveloped public university. Only then can there be a mutually favourable and fair rapprochement between the public university and the knowledge economy.