Higher education, violent modernities and the ‘global present’: the paradox of politics and new populist imaginaries in HE

ABSTRACT

Higher Education (HE) constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment. One way of establishing such an understanding of HE is to consider more fully the work of political theorists in relation to questions of power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the key problem of the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. In this task, I argue that a productive conceptual approach is to be found in the recurring idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature, an idea which I utilize to explore the role of conflicted national politics, moralising state practices, and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE. While most definitions of populism are remarkably consistent, the underlying reasons, processes and contextual particularities amongst institutions and groups are contested. Importantly, this definition cannot therefore suffice on its own in comprehending the place of populism in HE. Rather we need to conceptualise HE as an experimental ‘problem space’ (Scott 1997, 2004). Fundamental to this problem space are the political paradoxes that inhere within the aspirations of liberal democracy globally, within nation states, and within liberal institutions such as the university. In this paper, I engage the work of political thinkers who have sought to understand the role of modern nation building, the changing features of modern power and authority, and the rise of bureaucracy and technocratic rationalities as they impact upon political institutions – in this case, how they impact particularly upon HE. I draw chiefly from Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Chantelle Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Frederiche Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and Achilles Mbembe, amongst others, to articulate the paradox that concerns us – to consider how and why populist strains of national and transnational governance may find a home in HE as a consequence of unresolved and contradictory political dilemmas and conflicts. Importantly, in this context, the paradox of politics in HE is not necessarily the naming of a discrete conflict between two political logics or the process of a mass movement seeking to overtake HE in the name of a popular constituency. Rather, it involves a highly complex set of forces – emerging out of the bureaucratic machinery of modernity and the fundamental paradox of liberalism itself - that positions the university as a testing ground for the tasks of politics and governance, particularly in relation to state crises, crises in knowledge making and in critique and geo-political conflicts.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• Higher Education
• state experiments
• crises
• paradox
• politics

Introduction

Higher Education (HE) constitutes a space that calls urgently for new understandings in the contemporary political moment, including the impact on HE of the rise in transnational populist imaginaries.¹ One way of establishing such understanding is to consider the work of political theorists in relation to questions of knowledge and power in the modern nation-state, particularly as these impinge upon the rise of populism in the twenty-first century. A productive conceptual approach is to be found in the idea of political paradox in the political philosophy literature (e.g. Honig 2011, 2013, 2017; Mbembe 2003, 2019; Mouffe 2000a, 2000b). I utilise this idea of paradox to explore in particular three key issues that influence the potential for populism to live in the border spaces of the university: the role of geopolitics in shaping conflicted national political landscapes and HE; the expression of novel forms of authorial power in HE through the language of freedom and security; and the utilisation of moralising state norms, policies and scientific rationalities in reconfiguring the governing rationales of HE. I do so as one way towards conceptualising HE as a ‘problem space’ in the emergence of populism (Carr 2019; Scott 1997, 2004).

I engage, in particular, with the work of political thinkers who have sought to understand the changing features of the modern state – in terms of power and authority and its associated bureaucratic and technocratic rationalities – as they have impacted HE. I draw chiefly from Hannah Arendt, Bonnie Honig, Chantelle Mouffe, Etienne Balibar, Michel Foucault and Achilles Mbembe, to illuminate the paradox that concerns us here – how populist strains of national and transnational governance may find a home in HE by way of unresolved or contradictory political dilemmas, crises and conflicts. As Balibar (2016, 11) argues, ‘crisis summons critique’ and is necessary for cultivating novel forms of critical analysis and ‘new elements of intelligibility’ – in this case, comprehending populism as it shapes HE and its associated political crisis (Jessop 2015).

In considering Balibar’s claim (Balibar 2016), the paradox of politics in modern HE is an important conceptual ‘problem space’ for comprehending links between the state, transnational pressures and populism. Yet it is not easily mapped onto a more common thereotical understanding of populism (Laclau 2005). Whilst conceptualisations of populism as a political movement are important, in the case of HE it is arguably modernity and modern institutions themselves and their liberal paradoxes that demand deeper examination in relation to its growth, presence or rupture. For example, the representation of populism in HE is not necessarily the naming of a discrete conflict between two political forces or a mass movement seeking to overtake HE in the name of a popular constituency, although the latter is clearly possible. Rather, it involves a more complex set of forces emerging out of the bureaucratic machinery of modernity and the fundamental paradoxes of liberal democracy itself that positions the university as a testing ground for the tasks of politics and governance.

HE is today also being tested for its modernising features, its embodiment of geopolitical conflict (e.g. Brexit, Prevent) and ‘its supranationality of state power’ (see, for example, [Lefebvre 2009, 98]). And, in the reverse mode, HE is testing modernity itself and its institutions in the face of violent sovereign spaces and the turn towards what Honig (2017, xv) refers to as emergency politics – that is, when a sense of emergency in modern institutions brings ‘an end to real politics’. Taken together, this constellation of issues raises questions over how HE has come face-to-face with modern political crises and state experiments and, therefore, as representative of Scott’s ‘problem space’.

The paper is structured as follows. First, I provide a critical account of post-war HE, a period which was routinely marked by politics, promise, and contradiction, including the co-option of the public university by private interests, making HE vulnerable to new political imaginaries, including populism. These new political strains have emerged from a constellation of forces and discourses of state protectionism and securitisation, free-market liberalism, and pressure groups, including academics, evoking freedom as power. Second, I identify, through reference to a range of political thinkers, a series of conflicts that have emerged in HE, serving to create a paradoxical site with a capacity to afford populist strains (e.g. scientisms, technocratic rationalities) a home in the border spaces of the university itself. Finally, I outline the role that Achilles Mbembe’s (2016a, 2016b, 2019) work on necropolitics might play in comprehending the ‘civic death’ of the university as a space of political promise for challenging the legacies of colonial reason and its populist imaginaries which continue to haunt HE as a symbolically violent space of modernity (see also Bose 2019, 2021; Dragos 2020).

Setting the scene: the post-war paradox of HE and a history of the present

Catalysing Radical Immanence or the Death of Political Promise in HE: Historicising post-war HE as a ‘problem space’ of the present

It seems that a commonly held view is that in the years after World War II, and reaching a pinnacle in 1968, HE² offered important spaces for democratic deliberation, and to some degree, was perceived as autonomous from government. Yet, as Honig suggests (2011, 2017), there is always a liberal paradox that emerges in relation to free deliberative discourse in modern institutional spaces. Deliberative spaces, Honig argues (2011, 2017), are all too often co-opted into existing or new state governing rationales and are mobilised through the emergence of popular administrative and bureaucratic rationalities, states of emergency and exception (Agamben [1998] 2005) and latterly, through transnational global pressures.

Social theorists too had much to say about universities and their purposes and rationalisations in relation to the links between knowledge and modern power, long before WWII and into the present (Arato and Gebhardt 1982; Arendt 2005; Balibar 2016; Gilroy 2004). For example, Hegel argued that the modern state was the embodiment of the fusion of knowledge and power and so too were its universities as sites of knowledge-making (see Lefebvre 2020). Nietzsche, Arendt and Balibar have made similar aguments, particularly in relation to the early twentieth-century rise of populism, genocides and to the post-war myths of democratic deliberation on the European frontier. Therefore, on the one hand, the university was seen to represent an autonomous space within the nation-state with deliberative aspirations and sovereignty, whilst on the other, it was subject to regulatory and administrative state powers and its juridico-institutional rationales and bio-political notions of citizenship, including the zoe–bios distinction as the ‘fundamental categorial pair of Western politics’ and citizenship (see Agamben [1998] 2005, 11). The performance of democratic deliberation – including its activists cultures – within HE however served to obscure the underlying contradiction that attended it. Indeed the paradox of sovereignty was itself central to the historical making of HE, as was the bios-zoes distinction as the nucleus of soverign power.

Michel Foucault’s observations of Tunisian student politics in the 1960s are instructive here. Whilst teaching at the University of Tunis in 1966, he argued that the student and academic uprisings in HE represented a significant example of HE as a laboratory of political understanding and a radical space for challenging ‘intolerable power’ (see Medien 2020). In such cases, one could witness both the promise and limits of both liberal and Marxist political expressions of modern power and violence – a ‘problem space’ for the expression of conflicted bio-political positions and distinctions and associated imperial histories. He writes:

In Tunisia, everyone was drawn into Marxism with radical violence and intensity […]. For those young people, Marxism did not represent merely a way of analyzing reality; it was also a kind of moral force, an existential act that left one stupefied. (Foucault 1966 cited in Defert 2013, 34: see also [Medien 2020, 495])

Here Foucault, drawing extensively upon the Tunisian post-imperial context, invoked HE as representing the divergent demands of modern nation-state building, imperial legacies, and the changing characteristics of modern state authority and power. Foucault expressed this problem space in terms of moral force, political thrust and radical intensity to energise the New Left student politics of ‘68 and their radical immanence. This was an institutional space where post-war liberalism afforded the freedom to act and to name oppression through new forms of political liberation, including the nucleation of left populism. For Foucault, the ‘problem space’ of post-war HE catalysed radical potential but simultaneously also highlighted the authorial characteristics of HE as a technology with bio-political functions, represented as an elite knowledge-making space operating in the name of the modern state whilst masking its biopolitical and juridico-institutional logics (see Foucault 1976). Within this space, we witness the contradictions of immanent radicalism alongside an emergent rational order and authority born of the same post-war liberal democratic aspiration – both the promise and the paradox.

The radical immanence of the 60s was also driven by an aspirational response to the complicities associated with the violent bureaucratic machineries (including the acceleration of technological development) and racial biopolitics of twentieth-century nation-building (Carr 2019; Yaqoob 2014). The most important manifestation of this was World War II itself, with all its accelerating machineries of dehumanisation, along with the Vietnam War, the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez invasion, the Six Day War, and the brutalities of Stalinism (Hall 1979, 1985). As perceived by Fanon, Foucault and others (see Boltanski and Thevanot 1987), the university represented at least a partial space for agonising over cultural conflicts within liberal democracy, and for energising anti-imperialist resistance movements.

Yet for all the radical immanence that Fanon, Foucault and others experienced in the New University with which it was associated, the New Left could not prevail against an emergent New Right³ (Bonnet et al. 1984). The economic crisis of the 1970s was the opportunity seized by the New Right to challenge post-war social democracies, welfarism and universalism, and to undermine the ambitions of the New Left scholar-activists. This moment put universities under sustained pressure to become the servants of the national economy and an instrument of the state in the task of nation-building⁴ (Churcher and Talbot 2020; Yaqoob 2014).

Alongside the problematic nature of deliberation, these challenges also revealed something about HE’s difficult and haunted place in the history of colonial exploitation, particularly in the period before World War II. For example, there were those who identified the university as a space of ‘civilising’ or coloniality – HE institutions represented ideals of the bourgeois settler public that transmitted legacies of imperial power and ‘empire as a way of life’ (Mbembe 2016a, 2016b; Swartz and Kallaway 2018). As Arendt (1958) argued in The Human Condition, at the heart of imperialism stood elite knowledge-shaping bureaucracies through which the colonial landscape of modern progress and its liberal myths came to suffuse the university itself. In the post-war years and most particularly in the decades after ‘68, both communist and democratic nation spaces – to varying degrees – prioritised modern bureaucratic and scientific developments and economic growth in HE whilst ‘rejecting the need to sustain public spaces for political action, the only bulwark, in Arendt’s view, against totalitarianism’ (Yaqoob 2014, 31). Here we see beyond the radical immanence of ‘68 to the rational bureaucratic technologies that were deployed to manage institutions and its bare life, sovereignty and empire in the post-war years. And here we clearly see the contradictions for HE of radical egalitarian and democratic promise set against the legacies of empire.

Fifty years on, Arendt’s predictive insights about the instrumental manipulation of the institutions of HE – and the humans who laboured within them as elite knowledge makers – seem percipient. The wartime synergies between industry and university development also facilitated the insidious acceleration of research within the university in the name of geopolitics, serving to carve out spaces wherein populism could live as a geopolitical frontier space (see Hall 1988). HE was moving beyond its liberal myths of technical progress toward a new language of symbolic violence at the heart of modern sovereignty – what Mbembe (2019) refers to as the ‘global present’.

Mbembe’s (2019) concept of the ‘global present’ resonates with Arendt’s (1958, 1973) post-war reflections on the problematic workings of modern institutions in the interwar years of populist authoritarian ascendency. Arendt was writing at a time when the dangers and atrocities associated with right-wing and left-wing populism were particularly apparent. These dangers reflected the logics – the liberal rationalities and bureaucracies – of modern nation-building in diminishing the capacity for ‘thinking without bannisters’ and, in so doing, obfuscating the promise of politics. Arendt’s contention was that authoritarian statecraft energised a national language of bureaucratisation that took particular hold in German and wider European political cultures, creating a minion class of bureaucrats who were no longer touched by the reality of their own ‘administrative massacre’. The outcome for many was that they remained separated from the political realities of their complicity. Arendt referred to this political language – expressed through the speaking voice of the nationalist ‘puppet’, Adolph Eichmann as ‘officialese’ and ‘bureaulese’ ⁵ (see Felman 2001). Arendt argued that this banal political language was one way in which the authoritarian state sought to govern citizens towards a collective state of political docility, creating a bureaucratic class that remained untouched by the atrocities of its time.

Although rarely acknowledged in work on Arendt (see Yaqoob 2014) the roots of this banality grew from the impact of ‘science’ (especially of scientism and raciology, see Gilroy 2004) and elite knowledge-making on state practices of sanctioned expulsion and extermination (see also Dragos 2020), together with the growth of novel forms of technocratic rationalities which drove prevailing geo-political anxieties, including the alignment of universities with military interests. The authority of a reductive science – including the behavioural sciences – together with the cultural legacies of the imperial episteme, also supported the management of the state and thereby, according to Arendt (2005), undermined a political hermeneutics of action. From this perspective, the liberal university – through its glorification of reason over hermeneutics – constituted an assault on politics (Carr 2019). This did not signal ‘progress’ but rather the death of the public in political institutions in the name of expertise (Nietzsche 1968, 2004, 2016). For Arendt, ‘officialese’ was emblematic of the political techniques and governing rationales of the modern state whereby the polity ‘gradually falls asleep’ and bare life finds its home in the polity as an ‘objective’ totalisation of power.

Following the moment of ‘68, the bureaucratic and scientific logics of the state were again appropriated into a new form of state experiment and political economy, an accelerated and encroaching ‘neo-liberalisation’, premised on rational choice, competitive individualism and opposition to collectivism. Wendy Brown’s (2015) account of the university as exemplifying this experiment is the ‘death of the demos’, by which highly advanced neo-liberal rationalities do much more than frame national and transnational political consciousness. Universities, she argues, are now master institutions facilitating ‘democracy’s conceptual unmooring and substantive disembowelment’. Brown’s (2015, 9) concern over the ‘death’ of the demos is also marked in current debates about the capacity of violent nationalist modernities to both undermine and narrow the political scope of knowledge-making exercises in the university. Recent egregious cases include the forced move, under populist and nationalist pressures, of the Central European University from Budapest to Vienna, and the detainment and dismissal of Turkish academics who were signatories to anti-war protests (see Bose 2021). Bruff and Tansel (2019) and Jessop (2017a, 2017b) have each also spoken of the diminishing influence of HE in international arenas as a consequence of the transnational spread of authoritarian political and economic rationales, sometimes referred to as authoritarian neoliberalism.

A different kind of threat has come from the ways in which the ‘soft power’ of neo-liberal institutionalism has undermined HE’s integrity and the narrowing of its democratic mandate (Hartmann 2019). Recent literature in the sociology of HE has repeatedly drawn attention to the state of crisis and precarity that HE is currently experiencing worldwide (e.g. Dillabough et al. 2018; Robertson 2019; Dillabough et al. 2019). Cumulatively, such work demonstrates that the public dimensions of HE – its role in supporting national and regional cohesion and stability and its ability to confront politically contentious forms of civic engagement – are under unprecedented transnational threat (Adekoya, Kaufmann, and Simpson 2020).

To address these threats we should return to the fundamental questions facing us: what is the mark of a public university and its populist potential (Loher and Strasser 2019; Wright and Shore 2019)? In seeking to respond to this question, I point to HE in terms of a modern site of profound paradox: a space for the rise of democratic political action and radical immanence; a free-market space for modernisation, scientism and ‘progress’; a space of tension between too much ‘liberalism’ and an unreflective ‘Promethean endeavour’ (see Yaqoob 2014) of scientism and bureaucracy, and the consequent struggles over elite knowledge-making practices.⁶ I focus in particular on how HE represents variously a nucleus, a catalyst and a field of struggle for populist imaginaries.

Modern paradoxes, HE and populist ruptures

Paradoxes inherent in the social, economic and political dimensions of the modern state are also represented in their institutions, such as HE, providing an institutional opportunity for populist political currents to emerge. This is both a consequence of the contradictory logics of liberalism and democracy (Mouffe 2000a), wider political and economic crises and also of the influence of transnational populist political imaginaries (Browne and Diehl 2019). Arendt, Honig, Balibar, and Mbembe, all make the case, in different ways, that these paradoxes constitute a bio-political feature of modern sovereign violence which emerged from, and existed alongside, the state making project from which HE in its modern form was itself born.

As these thinkers variously argue, the conceptual interface between populism and HE is best perceived in terms of a set of paradoxical conditions: stretching between the transnational pressures emerging from economic trade liberalism; to a border politics of struggle over political identities, state governing rationales and particular understandings of freedom, power and authority (Foucault 1982); and to a linguistic and philosophical encounter within HE between thought and reality and reason and affect (Arendt 1958; da Silva and Vieira 2019). For example, the contestation over ‘free speech’ is, on the face of it, concerned with freedom of expression and could be seen as reflecting the inclusive spirit of ‘68’ and its radical immanence in the post-war HE context. On the other hand, it comprises a wedge issue in HE with right wing attacks on no-platforming and political correctness, and an emphasis on the free market regulation of HE.

At the same time, political contestation over freedom of expression becomes readily appropriated within the rational logics of the state, its own emergency politics and the associated administrative missions of liberal HE. The familiar consequence is that only a bureaucratic remnant of the original agonistic aspiration is left, leaving many HE actors feeling powerless to challenge its normative precepts. At the same time HE is vulnerable to a new generation of ‘free speech on campus’ activists resting on the conservative right of the political spectrum. The state of non-politics that results can, in turn, prompt a populist backlash, whether from the right or the centre, against ‘liberal elites’ in the name of tradition or nation (Watson 2020). This furthers the development of an interior border politics (Laclau 2005; Balibar 2004) and an ontology of identity politics within HE (Lukacs 1920; Fraser 2017), effectively driving apart groups that are struggling over the challenges of too much freedom and too much bureaucracy. As Honig (2017) writes:

democracy’s regulative fiction affirms the sovereignty of the people but also limits or shapes its actual manifestations by requiring that it aim toward a collective good. The regulative fiction motivates the quest for a ‘moral standpoint’ to guide or assess popular willing. (Honig 2007, 1–2)

Let us imagine this historically. What happens from the point at which we claim the democratic (and potentially agonistic) university in the spirit of ‘68? There is the promise: we suppose that we have countered elitism; we have countered authoritarian cultures; we have countered bureaucracy; we have countered war. But thereafter the relationship between the voice of the liberal academic loses its relationship with the ‘public good’ or what it was imagined to be (Bose 2021). Here the ‘good’ itself becomes an empty signifier and performative feature of university life rather than an actualisation (see Marginson and Yang 2020). In this way, the hauntings of ‘68 and its aspirations are appropriated, bureaucratised, and fictionalised. As Neitszche (1910, 1968) argued, these elements of the good life as fictionalisation found substantive life in the modern university through the medium of scientific language and moralising norms, thereby subordinating the ‘good’ life to the service of the state and its elite members.

Historians of science and modernity have substantiated this claim through a reconstruction of the conceptual histories of scientific idealism and other branches of natural science, pointing to forms of scientific absolutism (including behaviourism) which shaped ideals about modern progress (Carr 2019). Such absolutism was naturalised and used to further the political causes of the nation-state. If the ‘plausible’ was intrinsic to scientific thought, in whatever forms fit the science of a time, then we seem to have had, at different historical stages, models and reasoned images of our world which contain ‘mere’ appearances (see Arendt 1958): regulative fictions, reductivity, artificial simplifications, and intellectual scaffolding. For the state, fictions must exist throughout the sciences and in political institutions in order to locate the gravity of political power in nation-building, which are deemed both advantageous and necessary, heuristic and regulative. In such a context, liberalism, territorialism, biological life as a feature of sovereignty and modern nation-building are conflated, energising new power formations.

Within such a context, HE can be seen to be dominated by at least two paradoxical trends. The first is an elite drive for the maximal expansion of education through science and progress; the other is the tendency to undermine the value of HE by way of the state’s growing presence within it. The first allows elitism to flourish and the second demands that HE surrenders its claim to autonomy and submits to market imperatives and moral norms pressed forward in the name of competition.

Herein lies the central ‘problem space’, the fundamental paradoxes that are apparent within the polity, but which are played out within the universities as one of its sites. We are therefore driven to ask again, ‘who is the sovereign subject of the university and whose public goods and public things are we fighting over’? Here academic freedom and autonomy threatens to become a regulative fiction or a conscious illusion (Honig 2007, 2011, 2017), narrated in terms of both the potential of the university to evade the ideological hegemony of the state and for nurturing a populist imaginary of state protectionism. In the UK, for example, as the state restates and reclaims an ethno-nationalist populism in terms of the war on terror, counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation become enshrined in institutional duties (e.g. Prevent) legislated to inform state authorities about groups that are potentially radicalised into extreme fundamental mobilisations. Foucault’s juridico-institutional governance and Mbembe’s self-instituaionalsim seem apt theoretical reflections here. Academics have been compelled to accept the terms of the programme’s conditions (as a legal duty outside the realm of political critique), consequently failing to protect HE’s autonomy, whilst creating a regulative fiction about academic freedom itself (Galnoor 2009: Human Rights Watch 2018).

Such fictions become even more significant when we consider the growing security and risk defences erected by the nominally liberal democratic HE space and state, against the backdrop of the rise in far-right populist formations globally. Here a convergence of state narratives of threat (e.g. the death of multiculturalism), enmity and danger collide with the freedoms of state institutions as they are conscripted to their own emergency politics. As Mbembe (2016b, 23) writes: ‘liberal democracies, already ground down by the forces of capital, technology and militarism – are now being drawn into a colossal process of inversion’. In taking a historical view on the history of democratic paradoxes, Honig (2011) argues that modern democratic institutions must resist crisis calls to focus on what liberal institutions characterise as life’s necessities (e.g. security, risk, protection) because these tend to privatise, individualise and depoliticise citizens through states of exception. Instead Honig (2011) argues that the emergency politics deployed by states demand that we attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: the need to create thinking, acting subjects with ‘radical ideals to make good politics' and an agonistic politics to infuse and energise citizens with both meaningful ideals and aspirational aims. Without this, an emphasis on Agamben’s ([1998] 2005) bare life, mere life and homo sacer, alongside the paradoxical language of protection, duties, and risks as logics of practice in HE, provide the political and cultural grounds for populist imaginaries to suffuse institutional cultures.

As the late David Graeber (2014) argued, until relatively recent history, universities have not been seen as standing at the epicentre of these political paradoxes, even if HE autonomy has always been compromised in some form. They have been, he argues, sheltered by associated academic fantasies and political ideals of mobility, including the role played by the public intellectual in shaping such futures. Yet an illusory frontier space is now presented in the form of the heartland university. Scholars are enlisted to advocate for moral duties in relation to wider geo-political conflicts rather than to stand as critics or dissenters – an irony illuminating the paradox further. Honig (2011, 2017; Gustafson 2007), following Arendt, suggests that this paradox rests on a recognition that there may well be a language of the ‘public’ or democracy, but in geo-political terms conflict emerges as central and only the ‘emptied out shell’ (Brown 2015) of democracy remains.

In its place comes the transnational institutionalisation of forms of technocracy, evaluation, risk assessment, risk aversion, constrained debate, and heightened practices of market infiltration. It is also an institution that provides a sounding board not only for identity wars to thrive in language, but also as a logic of resentment between different political groups, resulting in conflicts that facilitate the emergence of a novel border politics to emerge. Importantly, some of the most extreme of these examples have always existed outside of liberal democractic spaces in the pre and post war periods of the twentieth century (see Pinto 2009). For example, Pinto (2009) argues that the drive for both corporatism and ‘liberalism’ in HE was a twentieth-century Portuguese ideal and was manifested in the modern idea of the ‘new state’ and the ‘new universities’ in the early 30’s. In Portugal, for example, ‘new’ state ministers governing HE represented a very small, exclusive political and bureaucratic elite emerging from the senior administration of the armed forces, signalling a transformation from military dictatorship (1926–1933) to what was conceptualised in Western Europe as the New Modern State (1933–1974, see Pinto 2009). Whilst the new universities were launched, an obsession with its bureaucratic, administrative features remained a stalwart characteristic of its military history. Pinto (2009) named this phenomenon in universities as the ‘The Empire of Professor’ in post-war dictatorships and argued that such forms of HE governance histories fuelled wider border politics existing beyond the European frontier in other spaces (e.g. Brazil).

Etienne Balibar’s (2006) work, for example, on the place of the university and its disciplines as a kind of border agency, or even as an outsider space of surveillance and monitoring (what he refers to as a political conjunction) is also helpful here. Balibar (2016) characterises this conjunction as a university border politic whose function is to energise the ideals of ‘security, territory and populations’ within institutions and to embrace a novel articulation of economic, political, and legally sanctioned shifts in governance that conjointly operate to shape a wider political consciousness. He suggests that as a bordered space, HE has directed the production of objective (reasoned thinkers) and subjective communities (non-reasoned outcasts living in ambivalent border zones), a growth in the instrumentalisation of human and social relations and their mutual interdependency on figures of enmity, non-citizens and disturbing objects (Balibar 2004; Mbembe 2016b). These are communities that compete for power and, in so doing, redistribute ‘civility and violence’, articulate citizenship and authority and parole human mobility (Balibar 2004). In other words, the politics of populism can be presented in HE as a cultural modality of articulation that seeks to reimagine the people, security and control.

A second and related issue concerns the manner in which the politics of freedom in universities has developed over time in ways that have allowed populist currents to flow more freely. This invites us to return to the birth of the modern university as a political project and its role in the political evolution of the West (Davis 2020). As Pinto (2009) argues, the modern university as part of a ‘new states’ project has been premised on forms of Westernisation underpinned by colonial administrative ideals that are, in the present, cloaked in the language of internationalisation and liberal exchange (see Mignola and Walsh 2018). Simultaneously, the liberal language of internationalisation can serve to relegate the contradictions and pluralities that must inhere in a public agonistic space, and ultimately may come to deny them, supressing diversity and ignoring complexity whilst celebrating western freedoms through sovereign exchanges. Here again we see the potential for a populist rupture to inhere in the language of internationalisation, as a politics of free exchange whilst creating an illusive modality of governance. Indeed, as we speak, the populist turn in European politics is creating new geopolitical imaginaries of transnationalism, as the conjoint politics of Brexit and security create new forms of internationalisation through HE. A noteworthy example is the recent death of the HE Erasmus exchange project and the recent withdrawal of already contracted UKRI Overseas Development Agency funding in the UK HE sector. This withdrawal aligns with enhanced HE funding policies linked to tackling geopolitical threats from Russia whilst also paradoxically enhancing UK-Russian scientific collaboration (see British Council 2020; Wallace 2021).

Here another expression of political paradox becomes apparent: it is not possible to maintain institutional sovereignty or even international trustworthiness in such institutions without a frontier which operates to ultimately divide its institutional members both within UK HE and globally. As Mouffe (2000a) has argued, this has always been the case in democratic institutions as a consequence of the substantial tensions between market liberals, democratic socialists and the technocratic ‘soft left’ who are increasingly inclined to draw lines of interiority within the institution, without the possibility of meaningful reconciliation. These divisions also emerge when state governing bodies make centralised decisions to redirect HE imperatives and international affiliations in line with their own geopolitical policy perspectives on national security. In other words, within the institution there is an operative internal division between those who have already accommodated to bureaucratisation (to the market and its governing rationales over defence) and those who seek to challenge market-driven HE and the western idealism that informs it.

However, as Mouffe (2000a) avers, if democracy is about the will of the people, its survival depends on the acknowledgement that the people’s will can never be fully enacted in spaces governed by western logics, because the very conception of the west as an ideal represents an interior bordering in an ‘ever receding imaginary horizon of democracy’ under the guise of political crises. The consequence is that within the university conflicts emerge, or re-emerge, not only on the basis of tensions between liberal and democratic sensibilities but as a consequence of interior ruptures and bordering spaces in HE itself and between the state, transnational geopolitical pressures and HE (Robertson and Nestore 2021). Ultimately this resolves into a freedom to engage with right-wing populists on campus, or to compete for limited research funds, for a state to mandate its research priorities in HE or to value progressive neo-liberals or the professional managerial class more highly (see Graeber 2014, Fraser 2017), but not into a freedom to think. To put this differently, in the ‘liberal institution’ even the knowledge-making project itself rests on a highly complex privatised set of positions and claims that can obfuscate critique (Bavevic 2019). This renders ‘freedom’ an empty signifier and new modalities of power and authority emerge (see Rose 2017). In this respect it is, as Mouffe (2000a) suggests, ‘democracy itself, and not just liberalism, that is being denied’.⁷

In creating degrees of political enmity within HE whilst continuing to narrate and celebrate freedoms, diversity and ‘public missions’, the labour process of academic work can or may translate into a modality of apolitical articulation, making it superfluous to the needs of wider society and simultaneously vulnerable to the potential dangers of populist political strains. What follows is a sustained incapacity for institutions either to absorb or to confront the political requirements of plurality, resulting in the rupturing of the agonistic aspirations of HE.

Achilles Mbembe, the necropolitical death of the university and the ‘Global Present’

A final paradox associated with HE as a space where populism may flourish draws on the work of Mbembe (2019) and his concern with late modern rationalities that shape the knowledge, power and politics of the university from the vantage point of the ‘global present’, whence HE is rendered a necropolitical space. Rather than having autonomy from the state, Mbembe (2016a) argues that the university as a modern institution emerges as a problem space of the sovereign. It is always in potential thraldom to the state and its transnational influences and interests, rather than attending solely, or in reality, to its own critical ecological demos of deliberation (De Souza Santos 2014). This aspect of the problem space involves that other border where conditions of global uncertainty and disorder (such as in conditions of a pandemic) become potential sources of profit. Here we might remind ourselves of Rose’s (2017, 308) example of ‘ethical technologies of entrepreneurial selves’ as a way of understanding how HE became, in a continuing trajectory, a site for state intervention, a site for investing in political warfare, and a site for investing in the language of militarisation and security.

This transnational legacy – with its associated post-imperial rights and freedoms – points us once more in the direction of violent modernities. As Rose (2017) argues, sovereign bodies characteristically seek to influence other sovereign bodies and their governmentalities, which routinely claim that citizens in their sovereign spaces are beings who are free – a claim that is supposed to differentiate public HE from any expressions of conflict that could be associated with populism. Mbembe (2003, 22; 2016a, 2016b, 2019), however, challenges us: ‘who is the subject of this right and how are they inscribed in the order of power’? He argues that the university has routinely privileged normative theories of democracy as an expression of a rational language of neutralisation. Here, concerns over the death of the political can now be perceived as outdated, foreign, and as an affront to the university. The telos of democracy and the university is therefore articulated in terms of modern logics of rationalisation and regulative liberal fictions inherited from the paradox of an earlier liberalism fixated on reason.

For Mbembe (2016a), this means that we experience and sanction recurring and reproductive inequalities seemingly composed of ‘free and equal men and women’ as if such freedoms represented the world. These are moral logics that are wittingly drawn upon to present very particular ideals of the political, the social and the community, the subject, and of a good politic and good social order. For Mbembe, however, it is these very logics that call for substantial deconstruction in terms of their historical formations within civil society, or more specifically, in terms of the link between coloniality, capitalism and the failed promise of liberal instutionalisms because they are by definition ‘self-limiting’. In so doing, the university emerges as a constituent of an imposing modern framework of historical social formations and frontier spaces and as a political and institutional representative carrying the authority to exercise reason in the name of the public. The governing rationale of reason over and against non-reason – above all else – becomes characteristic of the disintegration of HE communities under the relentless challenge of free markets, competition, and transnational technocratic rationales of operation. The consequence is the manipulation of the ostensibly thinking, ‘reasoning’ actor in HE within a subordinated ‘problem space’ of dependence on new rationalities of reason. Here, we make the move beyond freedom to reason.

Mbembe (2019) also identifies a further concern that resonates powerfully with the thinking of Arendt, Honig and Weber about the particularities of modernity that account for the contradictions in HE that generate spaces of rupture from which populist imaginaries may emerge. Following Weber and Arendt, Mbembe’s (2019) concern centres on rationalisation, calculation and abstraction as they are exercised in HE through both formal knowledge-making systems and policy formulation. Here, reason and scientific expertise constitute the groundswell upon which populist strains may gain momentum within and from the university. For example, Mbembe tells us that the split between reason and unreason has been used as a justification for the university to create cultures of moral learning based on settler mentalities, articulating a particular political epistemological imaginary – ‘or what the good life is all about’. As the centrepiece of HE, ‘reason’ becomes the truth of the sovereign subject who also represents the public sphere or indeed the state. Within HE, being ‘free’ is achieved through the dual process of what Mbembe (2019) refers to as self-institution and self-limitation (‘fixing the limits of oneself’). Here self-institutionalisation is the cardinal problem space because its language is grounded in self-limiting practices that undermine active critical freedoms and, as Weber would put it, the thinker becomes ‘thingified’.

Human relations are no longer agonistic but are instead subordinated to forms of human interaction that lead to an estrangement of the scholar from human activity. Part of this process, Mbembe (2003; Fanon 1963) argues, involves the deactivisation of individual and/or collective worth in judging ‘what this good life is’. Such a claim finds an association with Lukacs’ (1920) early twentieth-century argument that the identification of narrow technical specialisation is a feature of reification and commodification that extends to bureaucracy, to new national forms of governing rationality, and thence to the contemporary organisation of knowledge. Having accepted the passive apolitical character of this process and the association of the limited concept of the specialised worker with the ‘reification’ of a passive consciousness, they are also able to conflate the specialised narrowness and character of the anti-philosophical human and natural sciences under the auspices of operative non-politics, civic death or necropolitical death (Lukacs 1920) – the university as ‘spectacle’. Populist strains emerge precisely because the fetish with a growing rationalised private apolitical sphere of thinking is the illusive dynamic evolving in the HE problem space, emerging as a rationalisation of all of its spheres. Part of this process involves the deactivisation of individual and/or collective worth in judging ‘what this good life is’. Foucault’s argument concerning HE as a modern institution is also instructive here. As he argued, as part of the modern sovereign state, the functions of biopower are inscribed throughout the institutions of HE, with all knowledge-making politics constitutive of all elements of state power. It is significant that in authoritarian states we see that elements of HE can come to deputise for highly centralised state power formations, as well as in increasingly illiberal political spaces such as the UK.

Mbembe (2016a) argues that the outcome of these kinds of civic deaths in HE in the here and now represents a site where manifold culture wars may emerge, where the sense of letting certain identities live or die might also be understood as a border space for populism to live in universities. He writes that

today [universities] are large systems of authoritative control, standardization, classification, credits and penalties […]. We need to decolonize the systems of access and management insofar as they have turned higher education into a marketable product, rated, bought and sold by standard units […] and reduced to states of equivalence by impersonal mechanical texts […] and deterring students from the free pursuit of knowledge. (Mbembe 2016a, 30)

Conclusion

What kind of thinking and knowledge making should the university engage in, and with what notion of the ‘people’? Who is the university for, especially in turbulent political times of manifold ‘crises’? Is there a set of ideas that we may turn to in helping us to recognise Higher Education and its future within the context of the wider political transformations and populist strains that we have discussed?

I have suggested that one productive response to these questions is to assess the role that theoretical critiques of the modern state can play in better understanding the dilemmas raised by, for example, Honig’s reimagined yet ruptured public, Balibar’s notion of populist state institutions as border spaces, Arendt’s anxieties over modern scientism, and Mbembe’s concern with HE and necopolitics. In place of the stark choices to which this powerful assembly of theoretical work may appear to lead us – democratic or illiberal; modern or imperialist; free or authoritarian – we might instead seek to develop new lines of thinking by subverting the question. We might resist the question ‘how shall we solve the paradox of democratic legitimation in HE? (see Honig 2017; Arendt 2010)’, and instead ask ‘what problems might the focus on these paradoxes involve for reimagining the challenges and risks posed generally by populism and within HE in particular?’

In seeking to confront these questions, I have engaged in an exploratory inquiry into HE, starting with its inherent paradoxes; that is, with HE as a ‘problem space’. I have also sought to distinguish between political populism and political ruptures within HE which have opened doors to strains of populist practice, and to alienating political subjectivities which are highly fragmented, conflicted and paradoxical. Lefebvre’s (2020) perspective on Hegel’s theorisation of the state and forms of political consciousness seems particularly apt here:

The […] definitive character of the state, conservative and even counter-revolutionary (whatever the official ideology, even ‘revolutionary’) is confirmed in the political consciousness it imposes. […] the state encompasses and subordinates to itself the reality that Hegel called ‘civil society’, that is, social relations. It claims to contain and define civilization. (Lefebvre 2020, 1–2)

Consequently, HE can sometimes be absorbed into the political philosophy of the state whether that be (liberal) democratic or whether it be authoritarian. Not only does this precipitate the paradoxes and contradictions that inhere in liberal democracy, and which attract resolution by way of authoritarian populism. It also reveals the contradictions between statecraft and the knowledge-making rationalities that are the promise and aspiration of the contemporary university.

In assessing these contradictions, we may recognise a series of political ruptures and chains of equivalence crystallising as common elements of public HE missions: accountability, state protectionism, defence, moral duties, reason and economic governing rationalities, demand regimes operating at varied scales; new subjects and objects of power; different understandings and ontologies of identity; and the loss of deliberation and novel territorial imaginaries of freedom, protection, risk and security. These are features of modern institutions that Arendt saw as representing calculative norms about what is best for the nation. They are meant to bind us to the ‘people’ and the ‘good life’ yet our relationship with this ‘good’ or that ‘people’ does not exist in the forms that Arendt would have hoped. Rather than pursuing a phantom ‘good’ in HE, we need a re-examination of the roots of modern life where the bond between thought and reality has been fractured, with reality becoming alien, hostile, and exclusive, segregating authority from criticism.

While I recognise that populism is widely characterised as a rupture between unjust liberal elites and a just people, I have here sought a more oblique turn, emphasising that populist strains of HE are energised in terms of political and cultural modalities of articulation through which populist ruptures can emerge. This is important because HE, representing the prime locus of knowledge production, can catalyse these articulations and ruptures yet simultaneously be complicit within them or ignorant of them. The Prevent duty in UK universities, for example, typifies the ambivalence, indifference and ignorance of a populist state intervention that designates scholars as a species of state monitor. I have also sought to illustrate the problem space of HE, its political precarity, and symptoms of its crises. In the officalese of performative knowledge production and administration, a necropolitical reading of HE perceives only the thinnest veneer of expressed liberty by way of individualised competition, scholarly entrepreneurship and free-market logics (Boukalas 2020; De Souza Santos 2014). The espousal of freedom and inclusivity in HE is ubiquitous, but whilst the populist moment pivots on the state, we must continue to ask: ‘But freedom for whom?’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/T015519/1].

Notes

1 This paper benefited substantially from critical discussions with Lakshmi Bose, Simina Dragos and Steve Watson.

2 I am not universalising liberal forms of HE. I am instead drawing upon wider debates about the birth of post-war HE as a modern liberal institution within political theory.

3 This New Right is the coalition between social conservatives and free market libertarians. This New Right mobilised a hegemonic project transnationally to build a power base and share strategies and thinking against the left.

4 See the UK’s Labour Prime Minister, James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College in 1976.

5 Officialese is the word used by Eichmann during his testimony claiming that this was the only language he knew how to speak. It was the rationalising language of the violent modern state against that of a thinking and acting human.

6 The paradox is as follows: the disciplining potential of liberal democracy rests on the idea that you are a radical outsider to HE if you wish to be free of it (i.e. capitalist realism). Yet simultaneously rejecting liberalism means that you have to agonise over other governing rationales as the new right garners greater popular support. Agonism embraces the contradictions (paradoxes) and their affects. Bureaucratisation (liberal rationalism) asserts one side of the paradox and suppresses the other side. The state mandates individual entrepreneurship and endeavour as an expression of freedom and autonomy, yet sometimes has a centralised nationalism exerting its power over this autonomy.

7 On these cardinal points, the late David Graeber’s (2014, 78) words in 2014 about financialisation and the rise of the professional managerial classes in the university are telling:

when people spoke of ‘the university,’ […] they were referring to the faculty; nowadays, […] they are referring to the administration. Universities are no longer corporations in the medieval sense; they are corporations in the capitalist sense, bureaucratic institutions organised around the pursuit of profit […] it can be said that the university, in the original conception of the term, is dead.