The Accelerated University: Power, Governance, and the Loss of Academic Purpose

It might seem that the constant crisis of universities is best captured through their most visible excesses such as managerial frustration, disciplinary cuts, or the endless tally of publications and rankings. Yet the deeper problem is perhaps less spectacular, more insidious: a profound shift in how universities are governed, what they value, and how they shape and are shaped by those who work within them.

In recent decades, Finnish universities – long celebrated as models of democracy and equality – have undergone reforms driven by the logic of neoliberal governance. This has meant the mixing of public and private interests, efficiency imperatives, competition, and relentless demands for productivity and competition. As elsewhere in the world, these reforms have not only reorganized higher education but have reshaped what it means to be an academic, or even a university itself.

At the core of this transformation lies the rise of managerialism. Professors and lecturers no longer hold authority as members of a scholarly community but are recast as interchangeable producers of machinery modules, accountable only to performance indicators. If for example a subject area attracts no “demand,” it disappears for economic reasons. Academic staff are precarized, reduced to delivering units commissioned by administrators. Knowledge itself becomes modular, divisible, measurable.

Numbers are central to this new regime. They erase histories, contexts, and the invisible labor – often gendered – that sustains teaching and research. They obscure the uneven access to resources that makes certain forms of performance possible. Instead, numbers become seductive and sovereign techniques of modern power: they categorize, compare, and discipline, reaching deep into the body and psyche. An academic is always already less than someone else, and therefore must try harder, produce more, survive longer.

This is not only a structural change but an affective one. Neoliberal governance speaks to academics through constant ambivalences – optimism, and despair, competitiveness and vulnerability. Survival becomes an individual duty, framed in terms of resilience, flexibility, and endless self-responsibility. The ethic of collectivity, solidarity, and critique recedes, replaced by a new moral universe in which failure is personal weakness and psycho-emotional and anxious vulnerability a marketable identity.

At the same time, the university as well as the whole educational system becomes not just marketized and commercialized but also increasingly psychologized and therapeutic. Mental health, anxiety, and stress are explained through psychologized and therapeutic discourses that locate problems within the individual rather than in the conditions of academic work. The therapeutic ethos aligns seamlessly with neoliberal ideals of autonomy and competitiveness, producing subjects who are simultaneously fragile and endlessly self-optimizing.

These changes reveal the extent to which universities have abandoned their civic purpose. No longer sites for critical reflection on society, they are recast as edu-business, producing measurable outputs, resilient individuals, and marketable easy access knowledge. Academic governance is less about democracy than about control, less about intellectual community than about efficiency.

The accelerated university governs not only through structures and numbers but also through the management of affects and subjectivities. The constant ambivalence becomes central: academics are encouraged to be hopeful, positive and innovative, while simultaneously made to feel anxious, insecure, and never sufficient enough. This ambivalence is not accidental but productive. It keeps academics alert, striving, competing, and taking on failure as a personal problem rather than questioning the system that creates these affective encounters.

This is what has been called affective subjectivation. Academics are shaped into subjects who are supposed to feel psycho-emotionally vulnerable and inadequate, yet who must take responsibility for overcoming these psycho-emotional vulnerabilities through resilience, self-care, and endless productivity. The moral landscape of the university is thus built around contradictory imperatives: to be both autonomous and dependent, fragile and endlessly flexible.

Alongside ambivalence, academic life is structured by what can be called public secrets. These are the widely known but rarely spoken truths of academia: that workloads are unbearable, that short-term contracts undermine research and teaching, that metrics distort intellectual life, that bullying and discrimination persist. Everyone in academia knows these secrets, but they remain unspoken in official discourse, hidden behind glossy strategies, positivity imperatives, and promises of excellence.

Public secrets function as mechanisms of control. They create a sense of complicity: if everyone knows but no one speaks, the silence itself becomes a form of governance. To survive, academics must learn what not to say, what to overlook, and how to carry the burden of knowledge without naming it. This silence reinforces the authority of management and prevents collective resistance.

Another facet of the accelerated university is the rise of what can be termed precision education governance. Here, alongside marketisation, privatization and datafication,  behavioral and life sciences are mobilized to manage education and academic life with ever greater detail. Students and academics alike are monitored, measured, and nudged to behave in desirable ways.

This form of governance blurs the line between pedagogy and surveillance. It is not enough to teach or to research; one must also constantly demonstrate measurable impact, emotional resilience, and behavioral compliance. Precision governance turns universities into laboratories of behavioral management, where every action, interaction, and outcome can be tracked and optimized.

Perhaps the most profound consequence of these shifts is the individualization of struggle. Where earlier generations of academics might have understood their challenges as at least bit more collective – underfunding, political interference, structural inequalities – today’s academics are urged to understand difficulties in psycho-emotional terms. If you cannot cope, the problem lies in your lack of resilience, not in the system that demands constant overwork.

This individualization erodes solidarity. It makes it harder for academics to see themselves as part of a collective with shared interests and struggles. Instead, they are isolated competitors, each responsible for their own survival. In this way, neoliberal precision education governance not only restructures the university but also reshapes the very conditions of political agency within it.

The accelerated university thus raises urgent questions. What happens to education’s democratic promise when higher education becomes even more governed by metrics, marketisation, behavioral management, and psychologized and therapeutic ethos? How do power relations shift when psycho-emotional vulnerabilities become a technology of governance? And how, in such a landscape, can universities still foster the critical, collective imagination necessary for democracy?

The answer is not straightforward. There might still remain spaces of resistance: academics who insist on solidarity, students who demand equality and social justice, scholars who expose the hidden mechanisms of governance and inequalities. But these spaces have become fragile and increasingly marginalized while academics and the whole educational system have become more and more exhausted. The dominant trajectory is clear: towards universities that function less as communities of inquiry and more as machines of productivity, psycho-emotional and highly individualized vulnerability, and behavioral management.

Kristiina Brunila’s long-term research has critically examined neoliberal governance in higher education, with particular attention to its affective and managerial dimensions. Her work has highlighted how universities and academics are increasingly governed through neoliberal reforms, marketisation, and behavioral management, reshaping academic subjectivities and narrowing the space for political agency. She has developed concepts such as affective subjectivation to analyze how academics are compelled to internalize anxiety, insufficiency, and competition as personal deficits rather than structural effects.

Through discursive nomadic, deconstructive, narrative and collaborative approaches, she has illuminated the ambivalences of becoming an academic in neoliberal academia, the entanglement of therapeutic culture and governance, and the rise of precision education governance coining global transformations in education. This research, which she has pursued as a side project alongside her professorship, has foregrounded questions of power, subjectivity, political agency, and resistance in academia, while contributing to wider debates on how neoliberalism reshapes educational policies, cultures and practices as well as  knowledge production.