Reimagining Higher Education as an Agent of Collective Awakening

In recent years, higher education researchers and practitioners began to call on higher education institutions (HEIs) to contribute more to the common good by helping to resolve global challenges revolving around sustainable development. For HEIs to fulfill this public mission, I suggest that they critically reflect on ontological assumptions regarding the common good that have been entrenched in the modern civilization; specifically, “mononaturalism” and “dualism” that posit that the singular and common world exists objectively and independently of subjective experiences by humans. Without this critical reflection, HEIs might risk invoking “the scientific truth” to prematurely unify multiple worlds and goods by subjugating nonmodern others à la imperialism and colonialism. At the same time, the modern ontological assumptions have been recently challenged by the decolonial movement that advocates the “pluriverse” or the convivial coexistence of many worlds as well as by the contemplative movement that embraces the co-arising of objective and subjective worlds. Together the two movements show the potential to articulate “multinaturalism” and “nondualism” as new ways of imagining a common world and a common good. To illustrate how this potential might be mobilized to effectively respond to the global challenges created by the modern civilization, I offer a brief case study of the “Co-Innovation University Project” in rural Japan, which aims to establish a new university to facilitate the creation of the pluriverse, a common world that enables the inhabitants of different worlds to co-flourish and enjoy diverse forms of common good.