Who We Are
Cusanus Hochschule was accredited in 2015 as one of the few independent universities in non-governmental ownership. It was established to provide a viable alternative to academic education, which since the Bologna reforms has become increasingly modularized to facilitate fast-track education.
What began as a small institution with two founding professorships and 15 pioneer students, the university has now, in just five short years, expanded to include 30 employees, including six professors and over 100 students in Bachelor and Master degree programs. In addition, over forty students have successfully completed their studies to date. In the beginning of 2020 the university was renamed Cusanus Hochschule für Gesellschaftsgestaltung, thereby establishing itself as a new type of socially relevant university that goes beyond the traditional paths of technical colleges and universities.
Our Vision
Today’s societies are facing diverse and often difficult to understand challenges. These include social, economic and ecological crises as well as crises of democracy. As a university, we want to establish and cultivate a type of science that enables people to deal with these challenges responsibly and lead a good life in an often complex, chaotic and contradictory world. In particular, we want to contribute to a responsible society and, embedded in it, to a life-sustaining economy.
Self-Conception
In our teaching and research, the responsibility for our fellow members of society and the environment is central. Instead of a supposedly value-neutral academic distance to the world, our starting point is the concrete concern for the world and its problems. We seek to transform this concern into reflected compassion, into putting oneself in others shoes, into well-founded values and into responsible action. In doing so, we by no means throw existing scientific achievements overboard. But we do put them into perspective historically and at the same time offset them within a “new enlightenment”: an enlightenment that knows that all knowledge is context-dependent and is capable of exploring the problems of the world contextually with courage and originality; that can critically also examine the role the sciences play in the process. In this way, while remaining aware of what has already come into existence, we want to shape the future through a creative present.
