Defending the University: Reflections on the Future of Universities and Research

This is a talk I presented at the 109^th Rectors’ Assembly

of Greek Universities on 10^th July 2025.

 (For the video-ed version of the talk, go to the 'Video and Audio section of my website: https://www.joannabourke.com/home-3)

The high point of The University was from the postwar period (1940s) to the 1980s, a period characterized by the rapid expansion of Higher Education, coupled (albeit patchily) with a dedication to the value of knowledge and critical thinking. It was a period in which the independent value of learning was highly appreciated. However, since then, we have seen a series of crises associated with government policies, attacks on the very premises of education, and the introduction of narratives about ‘Ivory Towers’. These crises have been largely replicated across the different national contexts within which I have worked: the timings have differed, but the general trends have been remarkably consistent.

These crises include:

·      The marketization of degree programmes, including the explicit requirement that disciplines as well as individual courses are primarily tied to marketable skills, economic mobility, and jobs.

·      Increasing pressures to privatize university provision.

·      The replacement of tenured or long-contracted academic staff with precarious employees on short-term contracts or on ‘teaching-­only contracts’. This has led to the Uber-fication of teachers.

·      Dramatic increases in forms of academic labour that do not contribute to either research or teaching. Even those who don’t have secure contracts are required to ‘play up, play the game’. In the UK, this has meant the imposition of the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) followed by the REF (Research Excellence Framework), as well as audits of teaching through the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education and the National Student Survey. These audits have been replicated in all the other countries I have worked in.

·      The result has been a continuous and time-consuming audit culture which includes repeated assessments, the expectation that all academics apply for research funding from national and European research councils, demands to ‘publish or be damned’, and the creation of students as ‘customers’ and their lecturers as ‘course delivery workers’.

·      The monetization and bureaucratization of research has affected everyone within the academy. Since the survival of entire disciplines often depends on achieving high rankings in the different assessment regimes, individual scholars and academic departments have found themselves required to justify decisions based on projected results. Multiple committees have been established to manage the process; annually, hundreds of hours are spent preparing the ‘returns’. Competition between (and within) universities have soared. Smaller disciplines and interdisciplinary research are especially vulnerable. These various audits are central components of the ‘new public management’ regime, requiring universities to become increasingly sensitive to their position in league tables. It is well known that larger universities have well-funded offices dedicated to preparing their league tables and lobbying for success.

·      The metrics used place great weight on entry qualifications, effectively ignoring exit qualifications, or the longer-term impact of Higher Education on students and their communities.

·      The introduction of metrics (often in the name of ‘transparency’ to both ‘taxpayers’ and politicians) purport to measure, regulate, and discipline academic performance but make little sense given the broader aims of pedagogue and knowledge-advancement. In effect, academics have become ‘one of the most measured and audited characters in modern society’, argues Peter Fleming in his wonderful book Dark Academia. How Universities Die (2021).

·      This relentless auditing has meant that time is diverted from the central aim of the university —­ that is, teaching and research: universities risk becoming part of an education–business panopticon. The average hours that a senior academic works is 57 hours a week – and up to 100 hours a week for early career researchers.

·      A related aspect is the ascendency of business values (primarily quantifiable ones) rather than academic values. The emphasis on market-shares or market-driven models of university budgeting has meant that educational values have come to be determined by market share, as opposed to intellectual criteria.

·      Academic governance (for example, the Academic Boards or Senates which used to be powerful forums in university planning) have been undermined; university governance is now streamlined to be much more ‘top down’ management.

For academics, all of this has led to demoralization and general confusion. The central parts of the vocation have been undermined: teaching is now about keeping the ‘customer’ happy (which means kowtowing to demands for high grades and educa-ment) (educational entertainment) while research is drowned under a tsunami of administrative and evaluative bureaucracy.

Given high level of uncertainty, academics have been cowered: it is far easier to simply acquiescence to the demands of neoliberal managerialism than to risk their careers by critique or protest. Homo Academicus has become Homo Zombicus!

These are not new problems. Two to three decades ago – here I am thinking of Bill Reading’s The University in Ruins (1996) and Henry A. Giroux, The University in Chains (2007) – revealed the extent to which The University was being run like a business rather than a public ‘good’ with the aim of advancing knowledge and critique.

This ‘business model’ has been characterized as necessary on numerous grounds, including

austerity, taxpayer accountability, political expediency, and an ideological rhetoric about ‘ivory towers’, or the misperception that academics are ‘out of touch’ with the so-called ‘real world’.

This latter criticism is a relatively new one, only applied to universities from the 1970s. Prior to this time, the term ‘ivory tower’ could have mainly positive connotations (it tapped into ancient debates about whether it was ‘better’ for writers and artists to be ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the polis; or debates about the virtues or otherwise of a contemplative versus active life). The almost wholly negative connotations of the term only emerged as a response to Nazism: individual intellectuals and artists have a duty to ‘fight’. By the time the term ‘Ivory Tower’ started to refer to universities (not until the 1970s), it was almost exclusively a term of abuse: to be in an Ivory Tower could never be a virtue.

As we know, the ‘Ivory Tower’ critique of universities has been most scarily espoused in the US today, where research has been targeted, not on the grounds of quality, but simply because of its content. This is not unique to the U.S. (note the dismantling of the Central European University in 2018), but has fallen to previously unimaginable depths in the U.S. recently, where simply including concepts such as ‘race’, ‘slavery’, ‘gender’, ‘inequality’, ‘trauma’, and ‘protest’ in titles of research projects has resulted in grants been cancelled by the Federal Government without warning or consultation. This has been accompanied by attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives and the criminalization of student protest. So-called ‘controversial beliefs’ (such as greenhouse emissions, climate change, LGBTQ identities, and Critical Race Theory) have been forbidden by state legislation. Resisting such political intervention by state authorities is crucial not only for scholars and for the survival of universities themselves but also for the world in which we live.

Such attacks on universities are attempts to destroy the fundamental principle of intellectual freedom which, since classical Athens, has been crucial for social and scientific advancement. What is now at risk is the very idea of academic freedom. As Eve Darian-Smith explains in Policing Higher Education (2024),

attacks on academic freedom are emblematic of a destabilized world order unfolding on a global stage yet fought in the everyday experiences of teachers and students inside lecture halls, research labs, and seminar classrooms (p. 3).

It is a ‘red herring’ to suggest that ‘academic freedom’ means the right of academics to say whatever they want. Eva Cherniavsky points out that ‘academic freedom’ means the ‘collective freedom of the faculty to set the norms of academic debate, free from interference by administrators, governing bodies, or the state’ (p. 9). As such, it is very different to ‘free speech’. Historian and public intellectual Joan Scott explains that

Free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does. Are all opinions equally valid in a university classroom? Does creationism trump science in the biology curriculum if half the students believe in it? Do both sides carry equal weight in the training of future scientists? Are professors being ‘ideological’ when they refuse to accept biblical accounts as scientific evidence? (p. 6).

Cherniavsky argues that the university needs to continue to insist on

certain collectively established norms of relevance, coherence, and evidence. These norms are neither static, transparent, unproblematic, nor uncontested — however, they are altered not at the whim of the individual scholar but through the collective elaboration of new objects, methods, and stakes (Cherniavsky, p. 6).

Unfortunately, the floodgates to increased political interference into The University have opened. As we have seen in recent months, in the U.S., the Federal government is exerting direct power over staffing, research, and curriculums. Some universities (Oxford University, in the UK, for example) have invested in hedge funds – opening the door to unregulated financial industries, which use their power to brokage further expansion into university management and student services (such as unregulated, highly profitable student housing).

Universities are making pacts with, if not the devil, then the likes of Koch Industries (the second largest privately held multinational company in the US, with stakes in oil and fossil fuels). Billionaire Charles Koch gives hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide to universities, thinktanks, and academic Institutes, although with strings attached and threats of withdrawal of all funds if they question deregulation and free-market fundamentalism (see Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola’s Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War). This is only one of many ways private citizens attempt to control university institutions.

Such unprecedented political intervention has been made possible by a sharp decline in trust of ‘experts’ of all varieties, including academic ones. The majority of registered Republicans today believe that universities are actually ‘bad for America’. Only one-quarter trust scientists and only one third trust medical science.

Why should American trends worry us? We need to pay attention to what is happening in the U.S. because of its major role globally in educational policy: what happens in the U.S. has a regrettable tendency to migrate elsewhere: what happens ‘there’, can happen ‘here’. Globally, suspicion of academics is on the rise – and not only for those working in the Arts and Humanities. Scholars in STEM subjects are also increasingly recognizing the risks of short-termism which is integral to business-led, liberal-managerial approaches, arguing that it promotes ‘safe’ research rather than critical, innovative forms. It also opens up all disciplines to state scrutiny and intervention (Eve Darian-Smith, p. 173).

Defending the university is an important task. There are many defenses. Instrumentalist approaches to Higher Education fail to capture its full worth. Nevertheless, it is true that university learning is often a way for economies to grow and for individuals to improve their material, physical, and psychological well-­being. Universities enable people to develop skills that will result in increased individual productivity, improved industrial innovation, and economic growth. This neoliberal defence of universities maintains that students are responsible for their own employability, showcasing their ability to negotiate market competitiveness by making astute consumer choices. But it is a weak defence. Of course, students learn knowledge and skills that will be used professionally and productively: the convergence of education with the reproductive needs of society is therefore important.

But, Higher Education is a process, not a product. Knowledge is intrinsically as well as instrumentally worthwhile: its mission is transforming its members, students, and communities throughout their lives. Higher Education teaches people to think, judge, and develop a deeper understanding of themselves and the world: contributing to the life of their communities both locally and globally. In short, transform the world. In an era of fake news, rising authoritarianism, war, and global financial, environmental, and health crises, the need for the kinds of critical thinking that comes from Higher Education are more imperative than ever. It was a fact that H. G. Wells was referring to when he quipped that ‘human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe’.

The University’s very existence is increasingly precarious. As philosopher Judith Butler put it, it is ‘quite incredulous’ that the ‘ability to think, to work with language and images, and to read, to make sense, to intervene, to take apart, to formulate evaluative judgments and even to make the world anew’ is now requiring a defence (p. 17). In 2023, after the Central European University earned the distinction of being the first university to be hounded out of a European country, its president and rector, Shalini Randeria, announced that

We learned that the university is a fragile institution, that it is very dependent on the conditions under which it operates in order to retain its autonomy as an institution and its values of academic freedom.

He added a more hopeful comment, however, observing that the sustained campaign by the right-wing Hungarian government

also reminded us that the university is a powerful institution – because were it not for that fact, an authoritarian regime would not spend so much time and energy.

It is an important reminder that a vibrant and healthy democracy needs universities. They are essential if we want to create a citizenship that can look beyond the pursuit of profit to notions of the common good in expansive (that is, looking beyond self-interest and local problems) as well as effective ways.

This is the hopeful message that University leaders need to heed. In times of war, massive rearmament, nuclear threats, climate crisis, threats to democracy, and growing inequality, we desperately need better universities. Our communities need critique, or the ability of ourselves, our students, and our communities to ‘think against the obvious’ in order to find solutions to societal problems.

Let me be clear: it is important not to catastrophise: politicians and powerful/rich individuals have always attempted to mould universities for their own ends precisely because they understand the importance of controlling how people think.

But universities have also never been static institutions: they are ‘continually reborn’, as John Dewey (the most influential American educational thinker in the first half of the twentieth century) put it. It remains as true now as it was in the 1930s. Even in the modern historical period, we have seen remarkable shifts in Higher Education – and, in many cases, for the better. Here, I am thinking of the opening of universities to women in the late nineteenth century, expansionist policies in the mid-twentieth century which welcomed working-class people as students, the invention of new disciplines (Sociology, Anthropology, Computer Science and Informational Systems, and Organizational Psychology, to take just four examples).  

It is important to remind ourselves that even these initiatives were highly contested and fought against by powerful opponents. Progressive change is difficult (my favourite quote is by Harvard Professor Louis Menand in his The Marketplace of Ideas where he writes that ‘trying to reform the contemporary university is like trying to get on the Internet with a typewriter’ (p. 17)!

If anyone can ‘make a difference’, it is the Rectors, Vice Chancellors, Managers, and other University leaders, working in their various roles to democratize governance, offer fair employment contracts, encourage mass inclusion, promote academic freedom and free speech, and build collegiality and community.

If we really believe that universities are public institutions committed to the common good and to fostering social responsibility, social inquiry, and knowledge, the fundamental question for us today is: to whom are universities socially responsible? To students, staff, local communities, wider society, international community, future generations? Or current politicians, billionaire donors, multinational corporations? To quote Henry Giroux in 2021: ‘The road to authoritarianism begins when societies stop questioning themselves and when such questioning stops, it is often because intellectuals either have become complicit with such silence or actively produce it’.

Rectors and other university leaders have an opportunity to create universities where this does not happen. We are at a critical historical juncture: now is the time to nurture critical pedagogies and reimagine The University for the twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Bok, Derek, Universities in the Marketplace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)

Brooks, Peter with Hilary Jewett (eds.), The Humanities and Public Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)

Burrell, Gibson, Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley, and Friends, Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at our Universities (London: Zero Books, 2024)

Butler, Judith, ‘Ordinary, Incredulous’, in Peter Brooks with Hilary Jewett (eds.), The Humanities and Public Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014)

Chatterjee, Piya and Sunaina Maira (eds.), The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

Cherniavsky, Erva, ‘Against the Common Sense: Academic Freedom as a Collective Right’, Journal of Academic Freedom, 12 (2021)

Darian-Smith, Eve, Policing Higher Education. The Antidemocratic Attack on Scholars and Why It Matters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), free online

Di Leo, Jeffrey R., Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (New York: Palgrave, 2013)

Di Leo, Jeffrey R., Higher Education Under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

Donoghue, Frank, The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)

Fleming, Oeter, Dark Academia: Despair in the Neoliberal University (London: Pluto Press, 2021)

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Smith, Joan, ‘Free Speech and Academic Freedom’, Journal of Academic Freedom, 8 (1017)

Wilson, Ralph and Isaac Kamola, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War (London: Pluto Press, 2021)