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June 2021

Joshua Kellard is Outreach Coordinator at Christian Heritage, Cambridge. A ceremony described as ‘once in a generation’ took place last week, as university officials from across the world gathered virtually on June 16th to celebrate the signing of the Magna Charta Universitatum 2020. The document reaffirms and develops a 1988 charter of the same name, and aims to declare what universities are, what they should stand for, and how they should operate in our 21st century. It is an ambitious statement, and should give pause to those of us who believed the days of global declarations to have reluctantly given way to institutional emojism and hashtaggery. Video may have killed the radio star, but it would seem that the draw of the ‘Big Charter’ lives on.  To anyone interested in universities, the declaration, and its predecessor, repays a close reading. In this post, my concern will be to introduce the two documents and their key ideas, before probing some of the assumptions behind them in the second, and then going on to provide a short response from a Christian perspective in the final instalment.  The Background The 1988 Magna Charta Universitatum was written to coincide with the 900th anniversary of Europe’s oldest University, that of...