Does the Pulse of Campus Life Still Beat?

The essence of this article has long been on the author’s mind. After reading Dr. Kawtar Abouhazim’s article in Times Higher Education regarding what co-creation taught us about solving university problems together, I felt inspired to write for this column. Co-creation in the context of higher education is a governance paradigm that goes beyond mere consultation or symbolic participation, asserting a real sharing of power among all stakeholders. Thus, universities would no longer position themselves merely as actors or subjects of policy, but as entities that, alongside lecturers, students, alumni, staff, and the community, produce meaning, direction, and institutional solutions—transforming recommendations directly into policy, curriculum, and resource allocation.

Higher education institutions in Indonesia are currently trapped in a highly systemic existential crisis. Behind the grandeur of university buildings and the sweet claims of accreditation, our campuses have slowly transformed into degree-printing factories controlled by an obsession with quantitative metrics, bureaucratic formalism, and acute academic feudalism. Lecturers and students no longer move as a learning community hungry for truth, but as administrative engines preoccupied with the unification of superficial criteria. This condition worsens when academic ivory towers choose to isolate themselves from social reality. Instead of being laboratories for solutions, campuses are turning into defensive bureaucracies. Faced with the crisis of education commercialisation, campuses tend to remain silent because they themselves benefit from market logic: fees rise, scholarships are used as a narrative for reputation, while access for marginalised groups narrows.

In the face of scientific publication malpractice for the sake of promotions, institutions choose to turn a blind eye because those numbers support accreditation and rankings. Even when AI-based academic fraud becomes an epidemic, the campus response remains stuck on technical prohibitions rather than dismantling the root problem: an evaluation system that only values output rather than the thinking process and intellectual honesty. The root of this silence is ecosystem fragmentation. Lecturers are busy chasing SINTA and Scopus rankings without caring if their research is read by the public. Bureaucrats are busy meeting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) without asking if those policies ease the burden on students. Students are busy chasing GPAs and certificates without the space to criticise the structures that produce them. All three operate on different tracks without a substantive meeting point.

This view aligns with Dr. Klaus Schwab’s (2016) perspective on the disruption of Industry 4.0, which asserts that educational institutions that fail to break down traditional barriers and transform collaboratively will quickly lose relevance in an era of global discontinuity. Consequently, campuses are losing their primary function as critical public spaces. They no longer produce integrity, but rather dissonance—speaking of sustainability and SDGs externally, while allowing commercialisation and fraud to flourish internally. As long as there is no co-creation mechanism that forces lecturers, students, leaders, and the community to sit at the same table to formulate problems and audit solutions, campuses will continue to be a collection of small, tall, but isolated towers—grand in statistics, but fragile in integrity.

Student and faculty involvement in Indonesian campus policy has so far been merely shallow, performative participation. Participation that is purely for show without real impact will quickly be realised by the academic community and trigger a decline in trust. The practice known as ‘tokenism’ by Dr’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) is clearly visible in the treatment of students and junior lecturers. Students in their alma mater jackets are often invited to university forums or faculties—frequently pulled away from lectures or practical sessions—solely for ceremonial purposes such as the inauguration of new buildings or the signing of partnerships, just to show the public they are present and to increase the number of attendees and photos for accreditation. Their voices, anxieties, and aspirations regarding high tuition fees or poor facilities vanish without clarity once the ceremony ends. The same tokenism affects young academics. Trapped at the bottom of a feudal hierarchy, junior lecturers are treated merely as administrative staff executing the tasks of their seniors. When they attempt to voice curriculum updates, the dangers of manipulative research patents, or budget transparency, their views are often dismissed under the guise of ‘lack of experience’ or perceived as disrespecting seniority. This paternalistic culture kills intellectual courage early and fosters a destructive attitude of apathy.