Instability and crisis are increasingly the ‘new normal’ across the world, but universities should approach this as a landscape of opportunity, solidifying their role as anchors of stability and leaders of progress, the Association of Commonwealth Universities’ (ACU) Congress was told. As change hurtles towards us from all sides and in new forms, universities will maintain their role as knowledge producers but will have to become knowledge diplomats too, participants at the ACU Congress 2025, hosted by the University of Nairobi, Kenya, on 26 to 28 November, were told. “Challenges like pandemics, cyber threats, climate change, and food security do not respect borders. So universities have to build research ecosystems that match the global scale of the problems they seek to address,” she noted.
