Universities are falling short of their possibilities, inevitably with the world and the university entwined, all the time presenting the university with new challenges.Realising the Ecological University tackles this challenge by charting the university’s entanglement with eight mega-ecosystems - knowledge, learning, persons, social institutions, culture, the economy, the polity and nature - and offers principles through which universities can imaginatively explore possibilities that might enhance both the ecosystems themselves and the university. This book sets out, in broad terms, what it is to realise the idea of the ecological university. Barnett draws together relevant contemporary scholarship from philosophy, social theory, comparative higher education, ethics, and theology. He advances thinking in each of the ecosystems the book looks at and develops a particular form of the philosophy of higher education, at once realist, societal, critical, worldly, and Earthly, drawing on examples - actual and fictional - to bring the whole text to life.