Activating the Third University: A Worlds of Difference Initiative

What are the responsibilities of a global university in a wounded world? 

Located in one of the wealthiest metropolitan regions in the world and engaged in research projects across the planet, the University of Washington (UW) is in the very early days of defining its responsibility in an unequal and unjust global society. Headlines announcing the latest environmental tragedies, outbreaks of violence, mass incarceration, and economic dislocations are indicators of the ongoing and overlapping work of colonialism, racism, extractive capitalism, nationalism, and patriarchy. While it is tempting to see the university as a place for solutions to these crises, it is important to note that university knowledge is, as Edward Saíd famously put it, “never innocent.”  

Situating the observer and the observed in the same critical field, Activating the Third University is a collaborative initiative that revolves around the proposition that the processes by which we define our responsibilities to heal our world are critical to developing our capacity to take responsibility. Taking our inspiration from A Third University is Possible by la paperson (K. Wayne Yang), our proposition is that our attempts to define an ethic of responsibility for the university writ large should also be attempts to develop the mettle of the decolonizing "third world university" that exists within the corporate "first world university."

To this end, during the 2023-2024 academic year, Activating the Third University will initiate an iterative and participatory process to involve the UW community at large, including our global partners abroad, in three tasks that focus on institutional, intellectual, and relational change: (1) making revisions to the UW’s Guidelines for Global Engagement, (2) holding conversations on the decolonial work that has emerged in Critical University Studies to theoretically inform revisions to the Guidelines, and (3) organizing a series of conversations and workshops meant to open up the global university to the needs of specific Indigenous communities in the Global South to practically inform revisions to the Guidelines.

Activating the Third University is one stream of the larger Worlds of Difference (WoD) initiative of the Office of Global Affairs (OGA) in partnership with the UW Law Sustainable International Development Graduate Program, the Comparative History of Ideas Department, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. WoD aims to facilitate conversations and collective endeavors to investigate, address, and redress the UW’s implicit and complicit contributions, as a global university, to the reproduction of global hierarchies of race, gender, class, and geography, and to the reproduction of knowledge as the preserve of those most privileged by such hierarchies.

The above image is from an article in the May 22, 2017 issue of Times Higher Education and was created by Ben Henning at www.viewsoftheworld.net.