There are no perfect solutions to the complex mess the planet is in right now, but there might be some better directions for the contemporary ‘university in ruins’ (Readings, 1996). In a world of struggling liberal democracies, climate change, biodiversity loss and global pandemics, this paper builds on the philosophical work informing the Ecological University (Barnett, 2018; Stratford, 2019) to shore up the theoretical groundwork for an ecological approach to higher education.