Interchange, Vol. 40/1, 1–23, 2009. © Springer 2009 DOI: 10.1007/s10780-009-9087-2 Towards the Idea of a World University MAARTEN SIMONS JAN MASSCHELEIN University of Leuven ABSTRACT: Could anyone reasonably oppose the idea that quality and excellence are essential to the university? However unlikely it seems, that is exactly what we would like to do in this article: we would like to reject the demand for quality and excellence in the university. We would like to arrive at a point at where the need for quality is no longer necessary. In this article, such a refusal will direct us to a proposal for using the spaces offered by the university and its teaching and research in a different way; in a way that transforms the university into a world university. This paper will argue that a world university is concentrated around attentive pools of worldly study. It is a university that has to invent new languages in order to answer the question “How can we live together?” In order to answer this question, and to be “present in the present,” we will clarify our argument that both acceptance and attention are needed in the world university. This position implies a kind of curiosity that is not driven by the “will to know” but by a caring attitude to what is happening now. KEYWORDS: University, critical analysis, ontology of the present, excellence, quality assurance, entrepreneurship, Foucault. In a time where quality and excellence are high on the agenda of all of us, the old idea of the modern university (cf. von Humboldt, Newman), that is, an institution for free academic research and general education, seems to have lost all of its attraction. It is not an exaggeration to claim today that this old idea of the university is dead. Moreover, it seems that we – we being the “last academics” with a vague memory of what that modern university was about – have already finished the process of mourning and we have allied ourselves with the community of the entrepreneurial academic staff. For us, that is, for all of us today as scholars, lecturers, and students, it is almost impossible not to be concerned with excellence and quality and with consumer satisfaction and economic utility. Meanwhile, these important changes within the university have been widely discussed, and from different angles, such as, for instance, the future of the (European) research university and mass higher