Policy discourses about the third mission of universities in the knowledge economy have placed the question regarding the relation between university and society again high on the agenda. The aim of this article is to reconsider the university's third mission, in the widest sense of its relations with society, and to do so through the lens of the common. The starting point of this reconsideration is the story of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps and their practices of studying the camp, giving way to a series of social and spatial transformations within the camp and its neighbouring area. The relation between university and society comes forward not as given or institutionally settled but as enacted within practices, more particularly within practices of study.