Universities were established to create new knowledge by challenging existing traditions and rejecting dominant orthodoxies, aiming to address the needs and desires of human beings while offering the knowledge and skills necessary to overcome societal crises. Universities were designed to amplify and disseminate scientific and secular knowledge, generating mass consciousness to emancipate people from illiteracy, ignorance, prejudice, and all other forms of illiberal forces. Human emancipation was central to this knowledge production and dissemination. Universities were supposed to question all forms of power and dominance, thereby humanising and democratising knowledge, and liberating people from all forces that undermine both individuals and the planet.
However, these educational ideals have been destroyed in the pursuit of profit through the commodification of education, now sold as a product in the marketplace. Universities have become marketplaces of degree mills, where curricula are designed according to corporate needs in the name of employability and industry-academia collaboration for research and development funding. The growth of corporatisation, marketisation, and managerialism has destroyed the mission of education, subverting its essentialist and emancipatory roles for the greater common good. In this process, universities have betrayed their students, staff, and societies.
Universities are no longer independent of the ruling class and the dominant forces of the corporate world, which now control them for their own profit-making processes. Social goals and individual freedoms are undermined within knowledge production and dissemination. Universities are becoming servants of corporates and governments, rather than questioning these hierarchies to create an egalitarian, liberal, scientific, and secular world. Teaching has become little more than job training for employability, rather than a means to create critical minds capable of interrogating power and ensuring accountability to expand egalitarian citizenship. Research is tied to funding agencies and corporate bodies, where independent inquiry is compromised to uphold the interests of the funders.
In this way, universities have been transformed into mass-producing factories of compliant minds, whose hands will work as employees under the needs and desires of their employers. In such an environment, the liberating aspect of education has been killed by corporate funders, accelerated by state policies. This has destroyed the very purpose of education: liberation from all forces of domination, domestication, and destruction. Education for emancipation is central to upholding the essentialist aspects of learning. The measurable targets of student satisfaction, research outputs, and funding success have created an environment where universities have surrendered and traded the intellectual abilities of students, staff, and researchers to a productivist culture of managerialism in pursuit of profit.
Such a rent-seeking culture within the university system has destroyed education and the very purpose of teaching and learning. From the religious missionaries of the past to the market forces of the present, external powers have destroyed universities, betraying societies and individuals in their processes of knowledge production—now aligned with the requirements of the ruling class and corporates. In this way, academia has abandoned its own scholars, offering broken promises of degrees that come with debts and disillusionments. Universities have started working like corporates in pursuit of profit at the cost of students, staff, society, and education itself.
Whatever little idealism remains within universities today is further destroyed by unqualified and underqualified, compliant managers who have nothing to do with teaching and learning. Yet they manage universities and provide leadership to higher education—only to ensure that no educational idealism is left in their rent-seeking approach to profit.
These managers are worse than failed street criminals and lumpens. Street criminals are far better than contemporary university leadership, street criminals possess a certain level of morality and fellow feelings—they are committed to their gang members—whereas university leadership and their lumpen managers lack any form of moral compass. These managers produce only a toxic culture of managerialism within universities, destroying everything that is called education.
Knowledge production and dissemination have become secondary to universities under these managers. Students and staff are mere numbers in the amoral spreadsheet of immoral managers. ‘Profit not education or education for sale for profit’ is their motto—one that plunders the pockets of students, staff, and their families. The present universities and higher education systems stand as the antithesis of their original intent.
The so-called teachers and intellectuals working in universities have surrendered their lives, blood, souls, time and freedom merely to survive, trapped in routine activities for the sake of getting by. They neither produce nor disseminate knowledge that emancipates themselves, their students, or their universities—knowledge capable of reclaiming the social purpose of education and the emancipatory logic of knowledge.
Trade unions in universities neither protect jobs nor bargain for higher wages, nor do they create or participate in radical liberation movements. The trade union bureaucracy and its leadership function as shock absorbers for a managerial system of education and university campus life that is fundamentally regressive in its attitude, approach, and actions. University leadership, managers, and trade unionists all hide behind policies and processes that are detrimental to students and staff. It looks as if there is collective and conscious amnesia among university leadership, managers, and trade unions about reviving an educational culture in universities that is fit for the purpose of education.
There is nothing good comes out of commodification and marketisation of education. The market-led university knowledge system, which breeds bondage of debts and delusions, can never be true education. As the Vishnu Purana (Part 1, Chapter 19, Verse 41) states: “Sa Vidya Ya Vimuktaye” (सा विद्या या विमुक्तये), which means “knowledge is that which liberates.” It is time to reclaim the emancipatory logic of scientific and secular education and liberal universities for a public purpose, and not for profit. In this context, the current profit-driven university education system, led by markets and managers, needs to be dismantled to create public universities for a public purpose—where education emancipates individuals and their societies, realises the creativity of all individuals and human potential, and serves the collective foundations of knowledge production, purpose, and collective prosperity.
