Universities are occupied by management, a regime obsessed with ‘accountability’ through measurement, increased competition, efficiency, ‘excellence’, and misconceived economic salvation. Given the occupation’s absurd side-effects, we ask ourselves how management has succeeded in taking over our precious universities. An alternative vision for the academic future consists of a public university, more akin to a socially engaged knowledge commons than to a corporation. We suggest some provocative measures to bring about such a university. However, as management seems impervious to cogent arguments, such changes can only happen if academics take action. Hence, we explore several strategies for a renewed university politics.

Practicing and studying automated experimentation may benefit from philosophical reflection on experimental science in general. This paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses central issues in the philosophy of scientific experimentation. The first two sections present brief accounts of the rise of experimental science and of its philosophical study. The next sections discuss three central issues of scientific experimentation: the scientific and philosophical significance of intervention and production, the relationship between experimental science and technology, and the interactions between experimental and theoretical work. The concluding section identifies three issues for further research: the role of computing and, more specifically, automating, in experimental research, the nature of experimentation in the social and human sciences, and the significance of normative, including ethical, problems in experimental science.

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Systematic and fundamental thinking on normative, or normatively relevant, questions is virtually absent in the highly influential constructivist studies of science and technology. This paper is an attempt at changing this situation. After reviewing and assessing the role of normativity and reflexivity, in so far as it has been acknowledged within constructivism, a number of `normative reflexions' are presented. Three general approaches—social constructivism, ethnography and actor-network theory—are analyzed in detail. The main themes of these analytical and critical reflexions are: `missing issues', `locality', `relativism', `the winner's perspective', and `technoscientific success'. It turns out that constructivist views concerning these themes have a number of normatively questionable consequences. These consequences can be avoided if certain constructivist assumptions, which are empirically unwarranted or unnecessary anyway, are rejected. Instead, some constructive alternatives are proposed for a social study of science and technology that is both empirically adequate and normatively satisfactory.

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