This paper develops a critical framework for examining how the university’s capacity to support epistemic openness, imaginative inquiry, and democratic engagement is reshaped by policy paradigms centred on market responsiveness, standardisation, and instrumental outcomes. These shifts unfold against the backdrop of escalating geopolitical tensions, declining democracy and academic freedom—trends that are not only concurrent but increasingly interrelated. As policy pressures mount to align academic work with both economic metrics and demands for innovation, the university’s role as a space for pluralistic imagination, where diverse perspectives foster democratic engagement and collective meaning-making, is increasingly constrained. Paradoxically, the same frameworks that promote creativity often undermine the conditions supporting epistemic openness, imaginative inquiry, and democratic engagement, compromising the university’s broader role. The presenter’s earlier narrative research with Lithuanian academics found that such reforms recast creativity and critical thinking as generic skills detached from disciplinary knowledge, an insight echoed by wider critiques. By reducing intellectual capacities to technical competences, reforms undermine the depth, unpredictability, and plurality essential for academic imagination, rendering their claims to foster innovation self-defeating. These insights inform the present theoretical inquiry, which rethinks how universities might reclaim their epistemic, imaginative, and democratic potential amid these tensions. The study adopts a theoretical-analytical approach, developing an integrative framework grounded in political theory. Drawing on Levinas’s ethics of openness to the Other, Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism, and Rancière’s dissensus, the framework reimagines the university’s public purpose as grounded in responsibility, dissent, and epistemic plurality, beyond outcome-driven agendas, to inform generative academic and policy thinking.

Authors:
Rūta Petkutė, Vilnius University, Lithuania

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Rūta Petkutė is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, Vilnius University, and a researcher at the Faculty of Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania.

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