Eleven years after my first visit to the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow, I was delighted to return from 29–30 October 2026 to participate in the XVII International Conference on Higher Education, organised by the HSE Institute of Education. The conference theme, The (Non-)Homogeneous Landscape of Higher Education: Institutions, Trajectories, Effects, brought together over 600 participants to discuss some of the major challenges facing higher education today.
In 2015, I attended the HSE conference at a time when South African universities were experiencing the beginnings of the #FeesMustFall student movement. While we were discussing student engagement, governance and higher education transformation in Moscow, students back home were challenging the very foundations of the post-apartheid university. I remember learning about the post-Soviet transformation of Russian higher education and finding fascinating parallels, but also significant differences, with our experiences in South Africa.
Returning eleven years later was therefore something of a homecoming, and an opportunity to reconnect intellectually with colleagues at HSE.
The three-day conference included around 100 papers on the economics and stratification of higher education, institutional diversity, student trajectories and wellbeing, academic careers, and the growing significance of big data and artificial intelligence. A particularly interesting aspect was the attention given to how differently students experience higher education, even within the same institution.
I had the privilege of delivering the closing keynote on 30 October, entitled *From Student Engagement to a Relational Student Experience: Transforming Higher Education for Human Formation and a Future World Fit for Life.
The invitation was to reflect on student participation, engagement and representation in university life. These have occupied much of my research over the past two decades, from student governance and political activism to student development, wellbeing and the wider student experience.
But I wanted to ask a somewhat bigger question.
In a world where generative artificial intelligence makes information increasingly abundant, ubiquitous and instantly accessible, what is the distinctive purpose of higher education? What kinds of human beings do we want universities to help develop? And what constitutes a successful student experience?
Drawing on the African philosophy of Ubuntu — umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people — I explored the possibility of understanding the university itself as a relational and pedagogical institution.
The argument moves beyond student engagement as participation in academic and social activities towards considering how the entire university experience contributes to human formation. It also raises uncomfortable questions about institutional cultures, student agency, power, inequality and the everyday encounters through which students experience university life.
I will not give away the entire argument here, except to say that I ended with a provocation:
Do the relationships through which students experience our universities model the relationships we hope they will reproduce in the world?
My thanks to Professor Evgeniy Terentev, Dr Maksim Nikitin and colleagues at HSE for the invitation, the excellent intellectual exchange and the opportunity to renew old connections and establish new ones.
Eleven years on, the questions have changed, the technologies have changed, and our universities continue to change. But the question of what higher education is ultimately for remains as pressing as ever.
Conference website: https://educonf.hse.ru/en/2026/
