In the face of the planetary polycrisis, anyone who wishes to speak of social transformation and democratization cannot avoid addressing the role of higher education. Education, in general, and higher education, in particular, are rightly considered prerequisites for overcoming our predicament. However, the spaces where educational processes occur are increasingly being co-opted by the very forces that caused the polycrisis. As Mariya Ivancheva argues in her contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, it is therefore high time to focus on educational institutions as sites of struggle.
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In my twenty years of researching public universities, I have moved from the study of revolutionary projects that challenged the traditional elitist university model in the world system (semi-)periphery, to activist research about/against the sobering reality of labor and spatial relations in universities in core countries of the global economy. Starting as a student from the post-socialist periphery of Europe with a starry-eyed gaze towards ‘Western science,’ I have come to do work that exposes the contradictions of extractive academic capitalism that spills its toxic presence from core into peripheral contexts.
Through the lens of labor, I have observed and experienced an alarming encroachment on the democratic potential of public universities (if we consider there is one, and I do). The postwar ideals of the public university combining quality and equality have been cannibalized by systemic commercialization. Having moved away from the elite university model, serving only a privileged few, the public university of today exploits massification to extracts land, labor, money and knowledge from its workers, students, and the public, converting it into private profit. However, before I explain this new conjuncture, I will first elucidate the democratizing potential of universities.
Decentring the university
My research on universities was influenced by my experience as a woman from Eastern Europe who was born in Bulgaria in the 1980s and witnessed the decline of state socialism. Brought up in a liberal anti-communist tradition, I was intrigued why the new democracies in Eastern Europe were enclosing university education by introducing fees, championing Western languages and knowledge, and condemning the socialist intellectual tradition en gross. Reading research on the politics of higher education to make sense of this process, I stumbled upon a classical research and political ‘puzzle’: can the university institution, which has historically served as a tool for upper class reproduction, be transformed into a tool for reparation and redistribution towards those who were previously denied entry?
In both social democracies, and socialist countries, over the 20th century, higher education had become accessible to such groups: women, people of colour, blue-collar workers and immigrants. Yet, were gendered, classed and racialised dynamics truly challenged and the university a tool for democratic justice?
In the research for my book the “The Alternative University,” I sought to understand such process in the making. To do that, in 2008-2011 I lived extended periods in Caracas and studied ethnographically the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV). As the signature alternative university of late President Hugo Chavez’s turn towards socialism, the UBV challenged the elite model not only by changing its recruitment strategy. It was designed to counter global university norms and offer decentralized higher education to half a million poor people in Venezuela by decolonial knowledge production, South-South political alliances and community organizing at the heart of its curriculum.
At the UBV true democratization meant decentering the university as the sole possessor of knowledge. Instead of keeping education confined within university campuses, the UBV moved the study process into remote classrooms within poor neighborhoods, rural or indigenous communities. Each subject field had to reorganize education and knowledge production to shed light on the knowledge and skills communities already possessed. This process equipped and empowered these communities to understand and address the root causes of their own problems. Thus, the university was to become an anchor of a profound democratization process. Instead of treating democracy as an abstract concept that is implemented by experts from above, it was developed in classrooms, at public squares and in community halls by a lengthy, cumbersome but genuine conversation about the alignment of local values, practices, and histories with a political direction of travel for the Bolivarian project.
The process was not without contradictions. Within a system of value dictated by left male power and charisma, the labor of women that sustains the political and social project was made invisible. They received symbolic recognition but no significant financial remuneration or structural support for their vital work. Community projects were funded through communal bank loans, privileging middle class graduates from traditional universities who navigated the language of cyclical grant application, and no jobs program was rolled out to absorb UBV graduates in mass numbers. Academic freedom, fought in bloody battles by the former left militants, was now used by the opposition to block reform on traditional public universities and accreditation of UBV programs. The need for faculty to possess traditional university credentials to validate these programs while doing high workloads, and of traditional left activist credentials to validate the Bolivarian project politically, meant that the UBV was dominated by a ‘radical nobility’ of former student activists who received university education when it was accessible to the few, not the many.
These and other issues hampered the UBV project to live up to its potential of a university that democratizes Venezuela’s society and higher education, but the project is still valuable with all lessons that can be learned from it. However, it is difficult to find a critical voice that acknowledges some of its challenges without downplaying its inspirational aspects. Following Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013 and the intensifying U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, which culminated in a full-scale invasion by 2026, the regime became increasingly authoritarian and unwilling to address the material challenges faced by its population and universities. The few UBV faculty and students who did not join the waves of mass migration, were ever less willing to produce critical knowledge that could challenge the government. Meanwhile, I had also landed back in the Global North as it was experiencing the ripple effects of the 2008 global financial crisis and the enclosures of public commons. Public education was drowned under waves of austerity and commercialization, from which the UBV looked as a beacon of distant, intangible hope.
Enclosures of the university commons
As a postdoc working on several large projects focusing on Ireland, South Africa, and the UK, I studied the unraveling of the democratizing potential of Anglo-Saxon public universities. I encountered how complex global intersectional inequalities transverse historical disparities to produce the rather grotesque reality. Under the celebratory narratives of ‘student-centeredness,’ ‘widening access’ and ‘pedagogical innovation,’ research intensive public universities, combining quality and equality, became the victim of their own success. Their assets and functions were subsumed under capitalist logic and to the detriment of the communities which they were to serve. The UK, where I work, is a sobering example of how this model operates.
Here, university research is based on an exploitative model, facilitated by public funding bodies. Individual universities and academics compete for ever scarcer and more hard science and military spending-oriented research income. A Principal Investigator (PI, usually permanent academic) is encouraged to run projects like a plantation owner – extracting research labor from a revolving door of short-term contract workers: publication prestige and bids money become an asset accumulated by PIs and host universities with little credit for the precarious workers.
To receive funding, faculty must demonstrate the benefits to policy and commercial stakeholders. This puts research funding and public salaries in the service of the military-industrial complex rather than local communities or the broader public. In order to have access to the digital tools of proprietary software monopolists, universities pay by allowing corporations to capture publications and data from students and faculty through digital platforms. These corporations then process the data using a cheap, precarious workforce. The use of academic content by Big Tech companies to train AI models has brought the enclosure of public assets and the role of universities in ecocide to a new peak.
Meanwhile, university teaching is predominantly done by precarious teaching staff, who supplement research engagement for permanent faculty. Academics are also increasingly outsourced into zero-hour contracts with EdTech companies to teach on online courses hugely profitable for the businesses but not for the public universities. Even at wealthy universities faculty are squeezed out of office space and have to rent teaching and meeting space. And while student numbers and fees are steeply raising, thousands of faculty are being made redundant.
Thus, while universities extract huge fees especially from international students from the former colonies, their state grants, endowments, real estate and ‘human capital’ are redistributed towards corporations, invited to operate estates, research infrastructure, and services not exactly for ‘the public good’ (rather, for huge private profit). University faculty, students, and communities are rarely consulted in such processes and deprived of a say on the university ‘core’ business, decided in classified ‘public’ contracts prioritizing the interests of the free market over those of the public. The latter, however is ever more alienated from the university through (a not always undeserved, but currently selectively exploited) anti-intellectualist political narrative against academic ‘know-alls.’
The university as a terrain of struggle
I will not put a full stop where the struggle is ongoing. Two decades of research and participation in student and academic movements have taught me that public universities are neither solely spaces for reproduction nor simple sites of resistance; they are a terrain of class struggle. We must not let our guard down.
This struggle is about more than just fee-free education or ‘blue sky’ research free of public scrutiny. It is about forging a fundamentally new relationship between the public and the public university that aims to dismantle the state-market assemblage and democratize relations of labor and political participation. The sense of powerlessness that pervades our democratic systems is identical to the alienation felt by faculty and students within the commercialized university. To counter this, we need to look for good examples of decentering and democratizing the university, and the UBV offers one such model.
Yet, we also need to pay attention for cautionary tales of how benevolent critical initiatives aimed at transformation can be subverted and turned into new instruments for the extraction of value from the public good. A truly democratic socio-ecological transformation will require the collection and cautious study of the struggles with their successes, failures, and unintended outcomes from near and far eras and geographies.