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Article
The University at a Crossroads
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Grosfoguel, Ramon, Hernández, Roberto, Velásquez, Ernesto (eds.) Decolonizing the Westernized University. Lanham, Boulder: Lexington Boosk, 3-14
2016-01-01

When we consider the European university, or indeed the university worldwide, the present is a moment in which it is as important to look back as to look forward. In the case of Europe, we are now in the middle of the Bologna Process-named after the Bologna Declaration organized by the European Union education ministers in 1999 aimed at reforming higher education in Europe and creating the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). It is a period prone to intense fluctuations between positive and negative evaluations, between a sense that it is either too late or too early to achieve the intended results. In my view, such intense fluctuations in analysis and evaluation are a sign that everything remains open, that failure and success loom equally on the horizon, and that it is up to us to make one or the other happen. The great philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote that by each hope there is always a coffin: Heil and Unheil. Though it is our main objective to focus on the European university, it would be foolish not to think that the challenges facing the European university today are to be found in all continents, however different the reasons, the arguments, or the proposed solutions may be. >READ FULL CHAPTER