This essay proposes that the future university should be a moral university, understood through the lens of critical theory. It draws inspiration from the lecture Horkheimer gave when he became Director of the Institute for Social Research (known as the Frankfurt School) in 1931, in which he attaches the purposes of higher education to the vicissitudes of human fate. Key here is the understanding of this fate in the dialectic relationship between individual and social wellbeing. Inspired by Horkheimer, this essay suggests four foundations for this future, moral university: community reflecting this relationship between
the individual and the social, interconnections between the social and economic realms, complexity in terms of knowledge engagement and change, that is the commitment to transcending the status-quo.