Universities are designed to generate academic/scientific knowledge on the one hand and to pass this knowledge on to subsequent students, e.g. future teachers, in an orderly and disciplined manner on the other. Despite all the openness (demanded or hoped for) in research, universities, therefore, are structured spaces that “have to” submit to orders and rules of passing on knowledge. These orders and rules include placing new knowledge in relation to existing knowledges and power structures and, thus, relating to existing academic disciplines. In this respect, universities are always conservative; breaking down disciplinary (scientific) boundaries to generate and value new and/or different knowledges is difficult. (Fleck 1979; Niewoehner 2012) However, universities are not only conservative in terms of knowledge/theorising and scientificity but also in terms of the people who are granted access and those who are allowed to generate new knowledges in research. Research on the decolonisation of knowledges, the structural analyses of power in/of institutions and organisations, and the emancipations of Queer and Black Studies –to name just recent developments– have shown how narrow the boundaries of admission for diverse students and research on other/alternative knowledge systems at universities still are. (Karenga 1988; Sharpe 2014; Brim 2020) And while we can read the (re-)structuring of study programs in the light of the transmission of disciplinary order, new studies also offer opportunities to tear down the boundaries of universities and re-frame them as inclusive spaces. Based on the example of the founding of a new faculty of education at a Swiss university, the paper will address the question of diversity and possible otherness in education science (studies). It will briefly historicise the “common understanding” of the university and assumed roles of those (not) present. (Biesta 2010; Stanley 2006) Questions about opening the floor to others and otherness will then be posed using the Swiss example: - Who is allowed to gain access? Whose voices will be heard? Is it safe to be visibly diverse? - How can education studies be structured to prepare for uncertain terrains outside the scholarly world? - How do we train future teachers to deal with the (multiple) unknowns when thinking diversity at universities is still uncharted waters? - Is the “pluriversity” a strategic exit or another threshold to keep unwanted people out?

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