Who will defend the public university?

The contributors to Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, identify many contemporary pressures on institutions of higher learning in capitalist countries, drawing mostly on the experiences of universities in the Anglo-American sphere. Among the issues discussed in this book are the neoliberal and managerial restructuring of universities; the conservative backlash against demands for social justice; the colonial and imperialist foundations of Western universities and the dominance of English-language publications in global science, and; the argument that universities should maintain “institutional neutrality” with regard to social and political phenomena like the genocide being committed in Palestine by Israel. Given the breadth of the book’s 19 chapters, this review cannot do justice to every contribution. Instead, I focus on several themes that emerge across the collection.

Gloria Ladson-Billings’s overview of developments in the United States—particularly Florida, Texas, and North Carolina—brings home the coordinated nature of the authoritarian assault on universities. This has included government decrees regarding what can or cannot be taught; state bans on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) statements or programs; the weakening of tenure protection; legislation mandating the teaching of “conservative” curriculum, and; shifting accreditation of academic programs away from independent professional bodies or external review processes that have rejected government interference in these programs. We could add to this list other developments, such as the attempt to replace professional bodies with a government-appointed accreditation authority.

The trends described by Ladson-Billings are also present in Canada, and particularly in Alberta, reflecting the emulation of the American right by Canadian Conservatives. Intellectuals of the “anti-woke” movement in Canada are calling for the elimination of EDI criteria in academic hiring and federal research chair and granting programs, and the establishment of conservative “civics” schools. Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government in Alberta sought the power to vet university research funding applications in the Provincial Priorities Act passed in 2024, claiming that federal agencies disburse funds “based on a certain ideology.” Over the objections of its faculty, staff, and students, the University of Alberta’s management removed EDI language from its hiring policy in March 2026—a move lauded by Janice MacKinnon and Jack Mintz.

Issues that receive less attention by the authors in this book include the impacts of artificial intelligence and the normalization of online teaching on higher education. An exception is the interesting chapter by Christopher Newfield, which envisages the role of new technologies in a dystopian, post-democratic future for higher education. These developments, implemented at a radical pace since the pandemic, have profoundly destabilized the pedagogy and research skills that have long been foundational to the social sciences and humanities and that had adapted to earlier information technologies. AI, in particular, threatens to displace human labour while opening new avenues for the commodification of education. Just as we are on the verge of a technical revolution that calls into question the need for institutions like universities, academics are more poorly organized than ever to influence the direction that these changes will take. They have been through several decades of deprofessionalization and the growth of the academic precariat. The switch in 2020 to holding meetings and courses online, leaving offices, staff lounges, boardrooms, and classrooms empty, has eroded the interpersonal relationships that are essential to collective action in any workplace or community and may never be fully reversed.

Few of the authors address the question “What is a university for?” in relation to the climate crisis, and none refers to the climate justice universities movement, which is so far based largely in the Anglo-American sphere and gaining a foothold in Canada. The absence of such a focus stands out for me because I spent most of my academic career in the “flagship” university of a petrostate, trying (unsuccessfully) to redirect the ship while teaching the political economy of climate breakdown and state responses. The role of universities in relation to the climate crisis is what leapt to mind for me when I read Whitney Blaisdell’s comment that “the gap between what universities could do and what they actually do, is devastating.”

Liz Morrish’s superb summary of developments in the UK will resonate powerfully with Canadian academics. She describes the imposition of an audit culture, or managerialism, that has particularly disadvantaged the social sciences and humanities. University governance has been transformed from a far-from-perfect “collegial” model to an executive framework in which senior administrators are accountable to no one but the governments and private funders who hold the purse strings. “Once academics had been sidelined,” she observes, “vice chancellors were free to enforce managerial practices of top-down autocracy verging on authoritarianism. In the place of faculty democracy and discussion stand sham ‘consultations’ repurposed as relay stations for reactive policy making in the name of ‘agility.’” Christopher Newfield describes North American universities as modelling “autocratic governance.” Universities are not only “under siege” by external forces; they are also being transformed from the inside by the administrators (and some academics) who are aligned with, and rewarded by, those external forces.

A critical point here is that, for the new managerialism to be installed, the governance bodies in which faculty have substantial representation must be disempowered by being made merely consultative, or having their purview progressively shrunk. Meaningful involvement of faculty in the direction of their institutions has been replaced by the hiring of external management consultants. Such processes have been extensively documented in the case of the University of Alberta by me and others.

Morrish observes that there has been relatively little resistance from faculty, staff, and students to neoliberal restructuring and the imposition of a corporate management model, raising a question that receives too little attention in the “critical universities studies” literature. That is the question of the agency for change. One can heartily agree with Newfield that to reshape universities to better serve the public good and decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles, “we will have to exert massive political agency, as professionals, as knowledge workers.” Yet, it is difficult to see how such collective action will be mobilized. By whom?

Peter McInnis, in this volume, argues that resources for student, staff, and faculty resistance to government encroachment and executive management include faculty unions, student associations, collegial governance bodies, and the protections of academic freedom and tenure. The problem is, these resources for collective action have often proven hollow, weak, or insufficient to mobilize and sustain the engagement of faculty and students needed to reassert their power. It is time to ask why this is. Needed are analyses of how organizations like faculty associations or student unions may be reformed to better represent, educate, engage with, and mobilize their memberships. Solidarity must be built and sustained—not merely appealed to during collective bargaining moments. We also need analyses of the legislative frameworks governing post-secondary education and how these may be reformed to democratize institutional governance and shore up the autonomy of these institutions from political interference.

Additional important explanations for the failure of faculty to act collectively to defend the public university from marketization and government control include the ways in which faculty are divided by disciplinary cultures, relationships to capitalism, and employment status. On the last point, it is notable that more than half of courses in many Canadian universities are now taught by contract academic staff. What stake should this precariat see for itself in institutional governance battles?

To the extent that a “faculty” identity exists, it is weak, largely corporatist, and riven with fissures. There is no homogenous academic community or culture at any university. Instead, faculties still operate, for the most part, in a siloed fashion. Worse, there is a hierarchy in which the sectors that are most valued by business interests and governing parties (typically medical and engineering faculties and business schools) receive the lion’s share of resources, while arts programs are progressively starved.

It is not coincidental that all the authors in this collection are academics based in the social sciences and humanities. The vision these academics share of the universally accessible, democratic, decolonized university reflects their intellectual formation and cultural milieux. It is typically academics from these disciplines (excluding economics—at least in North America) who are the active citizens of their institutions, who advocate a non-hierarchical, pluralist, and interdisciplinary approach to knowledge production, who defend the autonomy of higher education from the state, who actively support equity policies, and who resist the commodification of higher education and research. This vision seems to have less currency in the STEM disciplines and vocational schools where a positivist view of knowledge prevails and questions about the capitalist drivers of science and technology tend not to be asked. These disciplines are indeed those most closely fused with capitalist priorities, corporate funding, and private sector partnerships. It may be uncomfortable to acknowledge such cultural and political divides, but until we bridge them, we will not make headway in organizing effective collective action by knowledge workers.

From where I sit, the necessity to break down the cultural and institutional wallsbetween the STEM and arts disciplines (using shorthand here) is urgent, because of the role Alberta post-secondary education institutions (mainly their engineering and applied science faculties) have long played in legitimating oil and gas extraction and are now playing in cheerleading for investment in the military (“defence”) and “security” (policing, surveillance) sectors. The president and vice-president for research of the University of Alberta, in conjunction with municipal politicians, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and business associations, have repeatedly called for Edmonton and UAlberta to be designated the national hub for a renascent military industry (the Edmonton Region Defence Alliance). University officials celebrate their procurement of a $21 million grant from the UCP government to “transform the province into the premier hub for defence innovation in Canada.” This prioritization of military research was not approved by the university body responsible for academic affairs—the General Faculties Council; it was simply imposed by the executive. There is a great deal at stake in the struggle to reconstruct and reorient knowledge production.

One path to building mutual knowledge and consensus around the university’s mission is to organize teaching and research as interdisciplinary problem-solving, bringing together academics from many different fields of knowledge. Funding agencies will have to be restructured in a similar fashion, to encourage interdisciplinary teamwork rather than the separation of technical and social knowledges. But where will the agency come from to instigate such changes?

Student “bodies” are likewise fragmented, and their representative organizations have been ineffective (outside of Québec) in halting the commodification of higher education. Whitney Blaisdell suggests that students have “given up their power” to create their universities. Again, we need to ask why this is, which means studying specific organizations and developing agendas for democratic reform. Students are generally decision-takers rather than decision-makers when it comes to degree programs and curricula. By the time they develop awareness of institutional issues they are completing their programs. If we envisage a significant role for students in shaping higher education, we must identify ways to make these questions part of their early undergraduate (or high school or CEGEP) education and to open space in their lives for their participation in university governance. This in turn means tackling the material conditions of higher education for most students today. They are working part-time or even full-time, sometimes parenting, and struggling with crushing course loads to complete three-or-four-year degree programs. Is it realistic to expect them to organize and sustain collective action under such conditions?

A third problem that receives too little attention is how to generate broad public support for universal, adequately funded, post-secondary education. What should faculty unions, student associations, and university administrators be doing to nurture relationships with surrounding communities?

Academics have many answers to the question “What is a university for?” To realize any of their visions, however, we must also ask who cares what a university is for, and how we can make higher education more valuable and relevant to a broad public. One answer is to make higher education truly universal, establishing a wide base of support for its benefits, but this requires first mobilizing public support for such reform.

Tom Sperlinger, in this collection, describes efforts to incorporate community-welcoming building design and programming in a new campus of Bristol University. He reports, too, the Black Mountains College experiment in South Wales, which offers interdisciplinary degree programs focused on sustainable futures and system change but is reliant on uncertain government funding. Many Canadian academics would agree with Sperlinger’s observation that “there [is] a real space and need for alternative forms of higher education to provoke and challenge conventional universities.”

One such alternative is suggested by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, drawing on the experience of the House of Knowledge established by her Maori community. She is not optimistic about the prospects for decolonizing the universities founded by settler states. Sheila Cote-Meek calls on academics to examine “why and how our universities are perpetuating the erasure of indigenous peoples and knowledges.” Decolonizing universities is about so much more than hiring Indigenous professors or adding courses to the curriculum. Financial barriers to enrolment and moving to university towns must be eliminated. Degree programs must accommodate students who are both studying and participating in their communities’ subsistence economies. Such changes would, of course, make higher education more accessible also to working-class students, and to parents of young children.

The service of universities to extractive capitalism conflicts with their professed commitment to “reconciliation” or to “Indigenization.” Colonial extractivism disproportionately harms Indigenous peoples and obstructs the emergence of viable, ecologically sustainable, subsistence economies. Yet everywhere we see universities maintaining extensive ties to the extractive, polluting industries while profiling their “Indigenization” initiatives. This is an example of the compartmentalization of knowledge that Indigenous scholars so often identify as being anathema to Indigenous world views and cultural survival. Indeed, as Tammy Ratt observes, there is a hierarchy of knowledges in which the technical and economic frameworks developed to serve colonialism and capitalism are considered both authoritative and apolitical, monopolize most of the resources, and require the marginalization of Indigenous worldviews. The inclusion of the latter in the academy permits administrators to proclaim their pluralism, but stops well short of transformation of the dominant knowledge systems.

The contributions to this volume bring multiple perspectives to bear on the questions: What is a university for? How must universities be transformed so that they no longer function to reproduce colonial, imperialist, and capitalist knowledge and norms? So that they more effectively serve the public good and the needs of sovereign Indigenous nations? We are still left with very difficult questions about the agency for such transformation, and the strategies that might succeed in different contexts.

Laurie E. Adkin is a professor emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta.