Beyond Performance: A Call for Living Systems in the Wake of the Universities Accord
By Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne | Dr Demeter
What is a university? At its origin, a university was never simply a building or a bureaucracy, but a universitas a whole, a community of learners and teachers joined by the pursuit of wisdom. It was a commons of inquiry, conversation, and care. But in our time, the university has often become a site of performance, hierarchy, and managed knowledge. This article responds to the Australian Universities Accord with a call to return to the root: to reimagine the university not as a brand or business, but as a living system. One that breathes with the seasons, honours place, and regenerates culture.
Drawing on my experience across three Australian universities and decades of community-rooted work, I argue that true reform cannot be measured solely by policy outputs or performance metrics. We must ask: how do we fund place, not just programs? How do we embody equity, not just promise it? How do we centre Indigenous wisdom not as content, but as governance, economic design, and cosmology? This is a generational moment. Let us not miss it by settling for symbolic change.
Australia's Universities Accord Final Report outlines a bold, long-overdue blueprint for transformation. Its 47 recommendations call for equity, expanded access, the centering of Indigenous knowledge, a reimagined funding model, and new forms of governance. Yet as someone who has worked across institutions three universities in Australia, I must ask: where is the investment in place? Where is the true shift from extractive policy toward regenerative systems?
While the Accord sets goals such as increasing tertiary attainment to 80% by 2050 and investing in under-represented groups, its success depends entirely on how universities embody these aspirations at the local level. Having witnessed first-hand the misalignment between high-level rhetoric and on-ground reality, awards received without delivery, projects celebrated without support, I argue that unless we radically rethink our models of governance and economic design, the Accord will become yet another performance.
From Accord to Actuality: The Local Disconnect
The report emphasises equity, proposing need-based funding and bonuses to increase retention among regional, low-SES, Indigenous, and disabled students. But in my experience, institutions are still allocating disproportionate funding to managerial roles often exceeding $100K salaries, while casual academic and community-engaged staff remain underpaid, under-supported, and structurally disempowered.
Indigenous leadership, as celebrated in the Accord, must mean more than consultation or representation on committees. It must mean that life systems thinking including deep cultural ties to land, seasonal rhythms, community economies, and ceremony are woven into the university's economic model, governance structure, and curriculum. We cannot simply teach Indigenous studies. We must live First Nations wisdom.
Living Systems, Not Extractive Bureaucracy
As Arturo Escobar reminds us in Designs for the Pluriverse, we need to move beyond the "one-world world" a monoculture of knowing and governing and toward ontological plurality, where many worlds and ways of being can co-exist. In this pluriversal view, the university is not merely a site of transmission, but a field of emergence, woven through land, relation, and care. Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk echoes this imperative: knowledge is not abstract but relational, and true learning arises from right relationships with people, with land, and with story.
bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, calls us to teaching as an act of freedom an embodied, liberatory practice. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speaks of land as pedagogy, and Vandana Shiva challenges us to centre earth democracy within our institutional cultures. These thinkers invite us to reclaim education not as performance, but as a sacred process of becoming.
If we are to realise the Accord’s vision, we must fund people and places, not just policy instruments and PR departments. A university cannot claim equity if it abandons the real-world initiatives, community gardens, cultural hubs, local resilience projects that make its values tangible. Governance reforms must be rooted in the logic of living systems.
What does that look like? A governance structure based not on hierarchical control but on seasonal rhythms and collective decision-making. A budgeting model that recognises care work, creative practice, and local knowledge as forms of intellectual labour. Curricula co-designed with community elders and grassroots practitioners. A university calendar aligned with solstices, harvests, and deep rest.
Scenario Building: A Pluriversal University
In response to the Accord, we must begin to imagine concrete scenarios for reorienting universities toward regenerative practice:
1. The Extractive University
Prioritises growth, rankings, managerial expansion. Equity is symbolic. Students are consumers. Staff are expendable.
2. The Transitional University
Applies reforms reactively. Some progress, but core paradigms remain unchanged. Bureaucracy still dominates imagination.
3. The Place-Based University
Funds local initiatives, farms, arts, and bioregional planning. Emphasises grounded learning and community roots.
4. The Indigenous-Led University
Guided by First Nations cosmology and governance. Knowledge is relational, reciprocal, and embedded in land.
5. The Commons University
All research, curriculum, and tools are open-source. Intellectual property serves the collective. Knowledge as a public good.
6. The Seasonal University
Academic calendar aligns with solstices, harvests, and periods of rest. Celebrates festivals, reflection, and deep integration.
7. The Living University
Treats the university as a living system. Curricula adapt. Leadership rotates. All decisions consider ecological and emotional well-being.
8. The Embodied University
Centres somatic knowing, movement, ritual, and craft. Classrooms extend into gardens, studios, and kitchens. Students learn by being.
9. The Sacred University
Integrates spiritual and cosmological dimensions. Space for silence, story, ceremony. Knowledge seen as soulwork.
10. The Convivial University
Small-scale, relational, and human-centred. Prioritises joy, dialogue, and care. Administration is transparent and shared.
11. The Reparative University
Redistributes resources to those most harmed by colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. Truth-telling is foundational.
12. The Decolonial University
Dismantles Eurocentric curricula and hierarchies. Celebrates diverse epistemologies. Land-back as praxis, not metaphor.
13. The Ecological University
All infrastructure, curriculum, and culture is designed in alignment with ecological principles. Waste-free, closed-loop, regenerative.
14. The Apprenticeship University
Students learn through deep mentorship, trade, stewardship, and intergenerational skill transmission.
15. The Festival University
Learning as celebration. Assessment through art, story, song, and collective ritual. Performative, not performative.
16. The Emergent University
No fixed forms. Adapts continuously based on feedback, listening, and global-local shifts. An evolving, breathing structure.
Conclusion: The Time Is Now
The Universities Accord gives us language. But we must give it life. This is a generational moment to compost what no longer serves and plant something radically alive.
As Tyson Yunkaporta writes, "Sustainable systems are achieved through relationships, not control." The future of education depends on our ability to foster right relations with each other, with Country, and with the knowledge that emerges between them.
Let us fund place. Let us honour land. Let us build not for prestige but for planetary survival. Anything less is policy theatre.
At this threshold, I hold a quiet yet firm vision: to grow a new kind of university rooted not in spectacle but in soil. From Magical Farm Tasmania, a regenerative learning ground is already taking shape. Here, students come not to perform, but to participate in life. The seasons guide the curriculum. Care and creativity are core subjects. Wisdom is shared across generations, gardens, and galaxies. The machine may be too far gone but the field is fertile.
It is time to reclaim our right to learn in ways that align with life, honour land, and regenerate culture from the ground up.
https://www.nessvphotography.com/
About the Author
Dr. Emily Samuels Ballantyne is an eco-philosopher and regenerative designer based in Tasmania. She is the founder of Magical Farm and Regen Era Design Studio, and author of the forthcoming Spiral Shelves series. Her work weaves living systems, civic imagination, and cultural renewal.
www.regeneracommons.org | www.magicalfarm.org
