In conversation with Sharda Nandram, professor of Hindu Spirituality and Society and Chief Diversity Officer at VU Amsterdam, & professor of Business and Spirituality at Nyenrode Business Universiteit, and Puneet Bindlish, assistant professor, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at VU Amsterdam, about their new book Rethinking the University: Harmonizing the Academic Space with Integrating Simplification.
Before we get into the book, I’m curious: can you tell me a bit about the journeys that brought you to this work?
Sharda: We’ve actually never fitted into one box. For me it has been psychology, economics, management, entrepreneurship and spirituality. We are always positioned at the boundaries of our disciplines, and that enables us to continually see what is happening across all disciplines. The crossovers, that is our strength.
Puneet: My path has been quite winding too. I started in science and engineering, moved into organizational behaviour, and eventually into religion and theology. I’ve always been moving across fields and contexts. That’s also what connects us.
Sharda: Connecting disciplines, but also connecting the university to society. And for me personally, the university has been part of my life since I was 19. More than 40 years now. It really became a second home, and that shapes everything.
40 years is a long time. You must have seen the university change a lot.
Sharda: Yes, very much. I still remember the first lecture I attended as a student in 1985. Students were sitting on their coats on the floor; the lecture hall was completely full. The next time I thought: I need to arrive early and sit at the front, otherwise I won’t even be able to follow it. Nowadays, students hardly come to lectures anymore, that is one of the biggest changes I have seen. But what I find more interesting is not that it changed, it’s how it changed. Students engage with knowledge very differently now.
Puneet: Exactly. Knowledge is no longer scarce: it's everywhere. That shifts the role of the university: from providing answers to guiding students to engage with knowledge, question it, and connect it to their own lives.
What was the trigger for writing this book?
Sharda: For me, it started with the student protests two years ago. I suddenly saw the university from a completely different angle. And it wasn’t the protest itself, those have always existed. It was the depth of the frustration. That stayed with me. I kept asking myself: how can people feel the need to ‘break’ their own home? Because for me, the university is a home. I started writing, invited Puneet, and from there it just grew.
Puneet: For me it was more gradual. As both a student and a teacher, you hit the wall, the structure cannot hold what you actually want to give. That tension stayed with me. This book grew out of that curiosity.
How did you go about exploring that?
Sharda: We didn’t explore these questions alone, we brought people into the conversation: academics, students, policy makers. We organized foresight-in sessions, looked at how universities across Europe and the US deal with tensions like protests, and spoke with scholars from all over the world.
What is changing in the world that makes these questions about the academic space more urgent now?
Puneet: The level of complexity. The challenges we face today are deeply interconnected. You can’t isolate them anymore, in the book we call it polycrisis. And universities were not designed for this level of complexity.
Sharda: Exactly. So what you see is a kind of misalignment. The world is changing fast, but the way we organize knowledge and education is not always keeping up.
Puneet: And that’s where the need to rethink really comes from.
Where do you see that misalignment most clearly today?
Puneet: You see it in the way academic systems are organized and what we measure. Think of it like farming. Our metrics have shifted towards these “fast crops”: publishing a paper, teaching a course, things that show results quickly. But universities were meant to grow trees. Mango trees. Olive trees.
Sharda: And the strength of a university is that it can hold both. The fast and the slow. But that second part, what we call becoming, deserves more attention. A university is also a place where you grow as a person, where you reflect and develop a sense of who you are.
In the book, you introduce the concept of ‘Epistemic Dharma’. What does that mean in practice?
Sharda: At its core, it’s about responsibility. At three levels: individual, social and systemic. When you connect that to knowledge, to a university, it becomes about ethics, care and consequences. So not just: what do we know? But also: for whom, and why? And that actually connects strongly to what VU already stands for: responsibility, dialogue, world citizenship. You see it in the Educational Vision, in initiatives like 3D-NEWConnective and A Broader Mind.
So the question is not: how do we reinvent everything? But: how do we build on what is already there, and consciously make space for connection, reflection and shared responsibility?
Some might say this runs counter to the individualistic, performance-driven culture many universities in Europe and the US operate in.
Sharda: I'm genuinely optimistic, the world is already pushing us towards more collective and interconnected ways of working. The complexity of problems today is simply beyond any individual. The subtitle of the book is “harmonizing the academic space by Integrating Simplification’. We applied Integrating Simplification as a design approach, where the work is organized in self-managing networks to work on questions that really matter and their answers become meaningful with coherent impact.
Puneet: Research projects that once could be managed by one person now require collaboration across disciplines, institutions, countries. That's already happening. And if you look at nature there are no truly isolated systems. Everything is interconnected. Ecosystems, symbiosis everywhere. Collaboration is not some idealistic dream. It's how things work when you step back far enough.
Where do you already see signs of that shift?
Sharda: A good example of that was during a foresight-in session. We brought together people from different faculties. Their response was: ‘We actually never do this; we don’t learn from one another.’ So much intellect gathered in one place, and yet we do not solve the problems of the community. It is fragmented, people want to hold on to their own space out of insecurity. But when you remove that structure, they turn out to be extraordinarily caring people.
Puneet: And there's another shift happening. The things that technology can do well are already taking over much of the measurable, executable work. What remains, what only humans can do, is everything that cannot be measured. Listening deeply. Understanding what is not being said. Feeling the texture of a room. Those capabilities are becoming more central. Not less. That's actually a great opportunity for universities.
Has writing this book changed how you see your own role?
Puneet: My perspective has shifted to a much more macro level. I think more about the role of the university as a whole. That changes how you look at your own work, even as a small professor in a large university. You realize what you do is part of something much larger. That's both humbling and energizing.
Sharda: For me, it deepened my appreciation for what is already here. There is so much potential in the academic space, also in our institution. Seeing that up close made me more hopeful, not less. With the knowledge provided in our book I see ourselves inspiring existing universities to reshape by integrating simplification and new ones to design universities more suitable for in the 21st century.
