During our election campaign we have mentioned several times the term degrowth. We see in degrowing the university a couple of benefits for education, sustainability, social responsibility and working pressure.
We would like to spark a conversation about degrowth at this university, both within the RUG community but also at all universities in the Netherlands.
We see this as our contribution to the degrowth movement that calls for more sustainable, post-growth economies. This poses an alternative to the current models that have depleted our planet from its resources and people from more income equality. At center of that movement is sustainability, social responsibility and democracy.
A few highlights from our memo:
- We propose a financing model for degrowing the universities. Under that model, maintaining higher education will not become more expensive, but also not cheaper. We don’t want to descale – we want to degrow.
- Our memo has sustainability and social responsibility at its core: it’s a contribution to the housing shortage situation, to the work pressure that plagues universities and to the quality of education.
- In combination with our other memos, we call for changing the incentives of universities to be run as businesses and rather be run as socially responsible, open and transparent institutions.
Read our memo here. If you would like to be part of DAG and work with us together for a more sustainable, socially responsible university, send us an email at input [at] democratischeacademie [dot] com.