An Introduction: After the University?

Around the world, universities find themselves in crisis, with higher education governance, academic labor, and the meaning of scholarship undergoing profound transformations. In the United States, progressive understandings of higher education are being challenged and perhaps unmade, in the wake of the electoral and political success of far-right populism. In the United Kingdom, the decades-long defunding and marketisation of higher education has culminated in a financial crisis with existential consequences for many universities, leading to mass layoffs of scholars and administrators and engendering a deep ‘shock therapy’ for curricula, research priorities, and everyday working practices. In Argentina, the far-right populist government’s attempts to defund public education have had potentially lasting consequences for universities basic functioning. Elsewhere, authoritarian governments have worked effectively in recent years to further curtail academic freedom in scholarly environments in which it had already been precarious. Meanwhile, the rise of techno-capitalism and artificial intelligence poses profound questions for what it might mean to study for a degree or engage in scholarship in the first place, perhaps most pressingly in the humanities and social sciences.

What is at stake is a qualitative transformation: universities are being reshaped through governance, labor, and knowledge practices that render them increasingly unrecognizable when compared to their democratic and civic ideals. If these anticipated trajectories continue, universities may come to function as platforms for market-driven credentialing, behavioral management, and data extraction. This prospect forces us to ask not only what universities have become, but also what they might yet turn into.

In summary, in diverse societies around the world, the meaning and purpose of higher education and its capacity to contribute to civil society and the promotion of democratic forms of citizenship are now in question. To us, the changes that have brought about this crisis seem so profound that extant modes of analyzing higher education governance and practice, often through the concept of the neoliberal university, seem increasingly inadequate. At the outset of the second quarter of this century, the question arises to what extent universities are still ‘universities’ in the classical sense of the term. Or is higher education moving past the age of the university?

In this 15-week series, we as the guest editors (bios below) for this Social Science Space project, also highlight how the accelerating pace and governance of universities does not only transform institutions structurally but also deeply shapes academic subjectivities, affects, and possibilities for political agency. In response to these questions, this series brings together short contributions by scholars from around the world. Each of these essays reflects on the meaning and the purpose of the university, the state of higher education, and challenges in creating and sustaining higher education systems with the capability of contributing to the pursuit of knowledge and social and political life in meaningful ways.

‘After the University’ Series Editors

Kristiina Brunila is professor of social justice and equality in education at the University of Helsinki, where she directs the international AGORA Research Centre on societal and educational transformations and inequalities. Her long-term research critically examines neoliberal governance in higher education, focusing on its affective and managerial dimensions. She has highlighted how marketisation and behavioral management reshape academic subjectivities and restrict political agency, developing concepts such as affective subjectivation to analyze these dynamics. She has explored the ambivalences of academic life under neoliberalism, the entanglement of therapeutic culture and governance, and the rise of precision education governance.

Daniel Nehring’s research looks at the personal consequences of (de-)globalization and the ever more rapid and unpredictable remaking of the social world. In this context, he currently pursues two lines of research. The first is concerned with the transnational diffusion of knowledge and, in particular, the cross-border production, circulation, and consumption of psychotherapeutic discourse. The second considers institutionally situated experiences and practices of self, belonging, and interpersonal relationships in transnational social space, with a particular interest the lives of highly-skilled migrants. Through both lines of research, Daniel hopes to contribute to sociology’s incipient ‘global turn’, while at the same time adding to sociological understandings of the changing patterns and possibilities of transnational social life.