Academic responsibility: The changing mission of HE A profound change is taking place in our understanding of the mission of higher education. Increasingly, we have realised that academic freedom must be accompanied by the exercise of academic responsibility, in the sense of making a contribution to civil society. Actively responding to societal challenges is one way of doing so – as many universities have demonstrated in the case of COVID-19. It is by now a commonplace remark that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything, everywhere. We should all prepare for a ‘new normal’. This is true, in particular, for residential universities, whose beautiful and comfortable campuses, in which they have invested so much care and money, were suddenly swept clean of students and professors in early 2020.