ABSTRACT
We understand universities as a nexus between research and society, defining NTNU and UCLA’s engagement with society as meshworking. We use this concept to emphasize the interactive and rhizomic features of three ways in which our universities already are complexly engaged with society: education, innovation, and interdisciplinarity. In this manner, we provide a different perspective on universities’ quest for excellence. We begin with a critical investigation of the slogan ‘research-based teaching’ and the growing emphasis on teaching quality as a concern separated from research. On the one hand, we argue that teaching is a vital channel for selecting, integrating, and making relevant research that is currently available. On the other hand, we warn against what we see as an emerging faultline between teaching and research, which may make teaching a less effective channel of bringing research into wider society. We also are critical of the predominance of one-way (linear) thinking about the relationships between universities and society in standard discourses. To go beyond this, we analyze how universities are public spaces that co-morph knowledge relationships largely through teaching and faculty members’ exchanges with colleagues in other sectors. The traffic in knowledge is embodied: former students and faculty members circulate widely. Further, we argue that universities are contributing to growing meshworked knowledge commons where much knowledge is liminal with respect to its use. We show how liminality may end when knowledge mixing results in mobilization of resources from the commons. Knowledge mixing is important for innovations. Interdisciplinarity is a significant part of those processes, found at both NTNU and UCLA. We demonstrate clear differences with respect to their institutional strategies and interdisciplinary practices for addressing the disciplinary faultlines, the interfaces, folds, and ruptures where much knowledge mixing occurs.
