In these present conditions, and while we stand in this oldest European university town, we need to ask questions about our universities, our institutions of higher education. While names, buildings and reputations do their best to suggest the continuity of an on-going process of gathering knowledge, the institutions of education are going through fundamental changes.

Remember the ivory tower? Although always a cover-up story - covering up the material conditions of the production of knowledge - that traditional image has never been so far from reality as today. The realities of post-war Europe have been marked by a process of democratisation of education. And as 'different' kinds of students entered the Academy, they brought with them different questions and agendas. Norms of class, sexual difference, ethnicity, 'race' and sexuality were questioned; structures of knowledge were challenged. While the institutionalisation of these new knowledges remains a difficult and fragile process, critical knowledge and the questioning of power relations have been put firmly on the agenda.

But this democratisation coincides with 'university goes to the market'. In the exact sciences, research is increasingly financed by multinationals and pharmaceutical companies, with commercial interests in genetic engineering or the patenting of life forms. Social science scholarship has been increasingly shaped by the agendas of social policy. Who pays for knowledge? is the key-question. Where does the money come from, and which agendas and ideological frames are attached to it?

'Think we must', Virginia Woolf wrote in different historical time, think we must about our participation in the ceremonies, professions, and institutions of today. About Women's Studies and the ways it has and can transform the institutions of education. How can we make it work for our concerns, as a place for developing the tools we need for critical analysis and action? What kinds of strategies do our feminist knowledges, both inside and outside the institutions require? What kind of spaces do we need to think, to gather and to transmit knowledge?