Performing the University: Influencers, Content Creators, and the Crisis of Scholarship
This piece explores what comes after the university in a global higher education landscape reshaped by crisis, platform capitalism, and the erosion of public values. As universities contend with financial instability, political interference, and existential questioning – from the UK’s marketized sector to Argentina’s defunded public institutions and beyond – a parallel transformation is unfolding: the performative turn in academic and student life. In this new era, both academics and students are increasingly compelled to act as content creators and personal brands. Academics across continents now cultivate digital visibility through TikTok lectures, Substack essays, and Instagram “research reels,” often out of necessity in higher education systems marked by insecurity and relentless evaluation. At the same time, students are producing lifestyle content that showcases university life, promotes employability, and aligns personal identity with institutional prestige.
These practices reflect deeper shifts in how learning and scholarship are valued: not through depth, dialogue, or opposition, but through engagement, aesthetics, and platform metrics. Drawing on international trends, this contribution argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a platform university – a hybrid institution where knowledge production and consumption are governed by performance, branding, and visibility. In such a system, what is lost is not just academic rigor, but the space for critical inquiry, slowness, and collective learning. Rather than declaring the end of the university, the piece examines its mutation into a stage on which both educators and learners are increasingly required to perform. By situating this shift within broader debates on higher education governance, labor, and platformization, the article critically questions what kind of futures remain possible – or foreclosed – after the university.
What comes after the university, when its people must perform it?
Across the globe, higher education is in crisis. From the creeping privatisation of the UK sector to budgetary collapse in Argentina, from culture war politics in the US to government crackdowns on academic freedom elsewhere, universities are being hollowed out in ways that were once unthinkable. But while the headlines focus on institutional closures, redundancies, and defunding, a quieter transformation is also taking place: one that is not merely about what is taught, or how, but about who academics and students are expected to become.
In the age of platform capitalism, both academics and students are increasingly drawn into a culture of visibility, self-optimisation, and digital branding. The university is no longer just a place of study and scholarship. It is a stage on which we must perform, a product to be sold, and a content stream to be maintained. What, then, remains of the university when both teaching and learning become acts of digital performance? And what kind of futures can we imagine after the university, when its core values such as rigour, critique, public knowledge, are diminished to algorithms and aesthetics?
The rise of the influencer academic
Academics around the world are adapting – some enthusiastically, others reluctantly – to the demands of platform culture. In the UK, where many early-career researchers juggle multiple short-term contracts, and in countries like Brazil or India, where higher education is under constant political and economic threat, digital visibility offers a lifeline. TikTok lectures, Substack essays, research explained via Instagram stories – these are not just forms of outreach, but strategies of survival.
Building a personal brand has become a form of reputational insurance in higher education systems marked by job insecurity and relentless performance evaluation. Publications matter, yes, but so do likes, views, and follower counts. Metrics, once confined to research excellence framework (UK) or QS rankings, have become intertwined with the personal metrics of influence. While public engagement should, in principle, be celebrated, the logic governing this engagement is increasingly driven by attention economies rather than intellectual substance. The result is a new figure: the influencer academic. Someone who translates research into digestible clips, sells their academic persona as a niche brand, and navigates between scholarly legitimacy and platform performance. While this may appear empowering, it is often shaped by structural constraints. The labor of performance is unpaid, uncredited, and often gendered and racialized. Moreover, those who opt out risk invisibility.
Students as branded content creators
The same logic now applies to students. Marketized higher education long ago reframed them as consumers: paying for a product, demanding value, and reviewing their courses like any other service. But what’s new is the expectation that they also act as creators: producing university lifestyle content, showcasing their experiences online, and curating their educational journey as part of their personal brand.
On TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, students post “A day in the life at [insert university],” “Which uni is worth it?”, or “Study tips from a first-class grad.” These posts blend aspiration and marketing, often serving both as peer-to-peer advice and as informal advertising for institutions. In some cases, universities actively encourage this, gifting merchandise or reposting content to boost recruitment. The student becomes not just the consumer of the university experience but a marketer of it.
This trend is international. In the US, elite institutions are aestheticised through dorm tours and campus montages. In South Africa, students use platforms to critique inequality while still navigating institutional brand identities. In India, EdTech influencers offer exam coaching and productivity hacks, often in response to structural gaps in the formal system. Everywhere, the value of education is increasingly measured not in critical growth or civic contribution, but in online performance and market appeal.
What is lost when education becomes content?
At first glance, none of this seems catastrophic. Students are resourceful, academics are adaptive, and platforms offer new ways to connect and communicate. But there are deeper shifts at play. When education becomes content, knowledge risks becoming entertainment. When teaching becomes performance, learning becomes passive. When scholarship becomes branding, the value of critique, opposition, and slow thought is eroded. In this environment, difficult ideas lose ground to digestible opinions, and metrics displace meaning. The university becomes not a space of inquiry, but a performance of relevance, governed by algorithms rather than intellectual values.
These transformations are not happening in isolation. They are interlinked with broader systemic pressures: the defunding of public education in Argentina, the growing authoritarianism facing academics in Turkey and Hungary, the corporatization of universities across Southeast Asia, and the AI-driven deskilling of academic labor nearly everywhere. In each case, platform culture acts as both a symptom and a survival strategy. We perform the university because the institution itself no longer protects us.
After the university?
To speak of “after the university” is not to romanticize what came before. The traditional university has always been exclusionary, hierarchical, and implicated in systems of privilege. But it also held space, however imperfectly, for critique, community, and resistance. What we face now is not just its decline but its mutation into something new: a platform university where performance substitutes for participation, and where learning is always public, always strategic, always optimized.
In this platform university, students and scholars are not simply part of a learning community. They are brands, content creators, performers for an unseen audience, competing for attention, affirmation, and survival. What is excluded in this transition is not just the public mission of the university, but its imaginative potential: to be a space for thinking otherwise.
What comes after the university, then, may not be a clean break, but a messy overlap, where traditional values flicker within a system increasingly defined by techno-capitalism and digital labour. Whether this future can be shaped, resisted, or reclaimed remains an open question.
But one thing is clear: if the university must now be performed, we should at least ask: for whom, and at what cost?
