ACADEMIA IS UNDER SIEGE. The knowledge ecosystem of public universities in India, which fostered critical and free thought, is being dismantled and converted into a breeding ground for neoliberal authoritarianism.
As an academician teaching at a public university in India, I struggle to locate myself in this new structure, threatened by the idea of knowledge as a public good. Policymakers, which unfortunately include academics who were themselves beneficiaries of an education system that resisted market interventions, are spearheading the march to integrate public universities into a neoliberal knowledge economy that wants to exploit the intellectual labour of teachers and students to generate capital. This integration is being driven by the commodification of knowledge through rules and regulations that impacts all aspects of academic conduct. It influences what and how academics teach and research, what form of scholarship is valued, and how they are positioned in their institutes.
The commodification of research
The neoliberal economy views intellectual labour as a product that can be owned and monetized. This world view is in stark contrast to the idea of knowledge as collective good, as something that is shared.
Hence, it’s not surprising that today, the market dictates how academia engages with research. Publications have become a defining feature of academic life. Academicians are supposed to continuously publish so that they may fulfill the job eligibility and be promoted. Publish or perish has become the motto of this profession. The market not only decides how much to publish, but also insists on where to publish. Academicians write, so that their research can be quantified appropriately and help their institutes climb the rankings ladder, as if research were an account ledger.
It is disappointing how easily the academia has given up the responsibility to question and interrogate, and has embraced the world of metrics, where everything is reduced to numbers. Hence, it publishes in Scopus-indexed journals, and chases impact factors. Knowledge has been intentionally privatized through tools like article processing fees (APC), that charges authors to make their research open to all. The market ensures that anyone who resists private ownership of knowledge, and wants to reclaim it as a shared resource, would have to monetarily compensate the bourgeois publishing houses. Under capital, intellectual unfreedom is cheap, and freedom needs to be purchased.
One of the consequences of this culture is that our academic worthiness is determined by the quantity of research that we produce and not the quality. The academia (at least a large section of it) no longer writes because it has something to say; it merely writes to consciously or unconsciously fuel the profit-making objective of the publishing industry. Hence, people produce mediocre works, that merely compile and replicate arguments and ideas, in order to climb the hierarchical academic ladder.
This is the opposite of the tradition that argues that an academician should write because she believes that every written word can change the world, that writing one revolutionary work has more value than producing several unremarkable ones. The commodification of the practice of research and writing, does not encourage this world view, because it confuses productivity with thought. A thinker like Gramsci’s ‘permanent persuader’ would sit with a thought and write when she has something to say, but a researcher performing and producing for a market does not have the material conditions for doing so, and neither the intent. The success of this neoliberal politics depends on creating market-servile researchers who chase numbers, metrics and rankings, and do not insist that ‘thinking’ is a crucial academic practice.
Neoliberalism and the cultural right
Today, the neoliberal order is aggressively trying to mask its catastrophic failures by relying on cultural right wing. The coupling of the economic right with the cultural right is also being witnessed in academic spaces. This alliance facilitates the neoliberal agenda by obscuring the economic fault lines of the system beneath the rhetoric of cultural revivalism, militant nationalism and, in the case of India, distorted postcolonialism narratives.
It thereby, prevents the students and teachers from forging solidarity against the exploitative practices of the system, by dividing them along the lines of pre-existing social hierarchies like caste, class, gender, and religion. By creating alienated individuals, the system successfully breeds conformists, and normalises a culture that frowns upon anyone who believes in using classroom and research to articulate interventions and resist the realities of our time.
'The Universities are the Enemy'
Freedom under capitalism was always an illusion. Today even the pretence of academic freedom has been dropped, and neoliberalism, in all its naked glory, now names universities as the threat. Consider JD Vance, now Vice President of the United States, the country that spearheaded the neoliberal world order. In a 2021 speech titled 'the Universities are the enemy,' he declared, '[w]e have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.' The 'we' here signifies the entire right-wing ecosystem of politicians, think tanks, donors and media that have been systematically turning this rhetoric into policy. And, the same playbook is being replicated across globe, including India.
In September, 2026, an anonymous post on ‘X’ branded anti-caste and feminist readings ‘poison’, and referred to, including works of B.R. Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule, E.V. Ramasamy Periyar, Gail Omvedt and Uma Chakravarti, as problematic.
This post was enough to trigger an enquiry from India’s Prime Minister's Office, after which the Higher Education Department urgently asked all central universities for comments and for enrolment figures in the courses that teach them. These anxieties reflect the hostility of this ecosystem towards critical thinking.
Rise of Authoritarian Tendencies and Universities
The demands of the market and the rise of authoritarian tendencies across the globe are felt keenly by academicians, who view them as spaces of resistance and not as enablers of domination. I have witnessed several instances where interventions that challenge existing patterns of behaviour have been called juvenile and unpragmatic. At an academic event I recently attended, a participant countered the speaker's argument with evidence, but her point was dismissed on the grounds that she hadn’t experienced the world sufficiently because she is younger than the speaker. This aversion to critical thinking is gradually being normalized as a legitimate response.
What irks me is that such responses to critical interventions are almost never accompanied by explanations. Their dismissal is not aimed at starting an academic discourse rather in silencing it. It is infantilizing, hegemonic and exclusionary. This approach is also hierarchical and ensures that the existing power structures are not ruffled. It works on the presumption that age, experience and hierarchy determine the worthiness and quality of a person’s argument.
When this attitude becomes a part of our academic discourses and dialogues, academia itself becomes status quoist, conformist, static, and mediocre. The spirit of academia lies in resisting and questioning, and this challenge has to be first conceived in the world of ideas, for it is through ideas that we make sense of our actions. An intellectually impoverished academia is however more compliant and less capable of challenging the twin assault of the market and cultural conservatism.
The artificiality of theory-praxis divide, and the politics of ‘apolitical’
Another feature of this culture is to create an artificial barrier between academics and practice. Thus, many teachers proudly proclaim that they are ‘apolitical’ and that anyone who brings activism to academic spaces is somehow violating its sanctity. They would argue for objectivity and neutrality and define a ‘true’ researcher as someone who religiously upholds this wall. In my view, these ‘apolitical’ teachers are enablers of authoritarianism. For them, teaching and researching happen in isolation. But can it?
Our classrooms spill over to the outside, and the outside enters our classroom. If human violations are happening outside the classroom, will a teacher be truly able to talk of human dignity without addressing those violations? Can learning not happen on the streets, through protests, through policy interventions?
Teaching and writing have always been, and will always be, political acts. This is precisely the reason why every authoritarian regime targets academicians for their political beliefs and convictions. To think is the most political act and to think collectively is the ultimate act of resistance. This strange belief that theory and praxis operate in separate world is bewildering. Our thoughts are shaped by our realities; what I think is always a response to my social conditions. Anyone who says otherwise, is either naïve or hallucinating.
Teaching in a public university in global south has reinforced my belief that classrooms and educational institutes are political spaces. The social and the political reveals itself in our classroom and writings. We do not just teach about social and political hierarchies, we experience it unfolding in our classrooms, in the way the teacher perceives a student and a student views a teacher. Our privileges and marginalisations are lived on an everyday basis like elsewhere, in our classrooms. Our arguments, amongst other things, are also judged on the basis of assumptions about our identities and politics. My identity gets carried in the classroom, and with it, certain presumptions. My thoughts, my words and my actions are first viewed through the lens of these presumptions and thereafter they are either reinforced or demolished in the consciousness of the students. Thus, the teacher-taught interaction becomes a politically charged space and new identities and ideas are forged and demolished on an everyday basis. In such spaces, ‘activism’ is a requirement, not a choice. Our academic practices cannot be manicured to make them palatable to the market; they have to make people think, even if they offend and disrupt.
I guess sometimes, educational spaces are intentionally constructed as sanitized spaces of knowledge production, so that its hegemonic nature is invisibilised, so that we believe that what we see is the reality and not an illusion. The comfort of air-conditioned classrooms, manicured lawns, state-of-the-art infrastructure, the linguistic prowess of students and teachers, and the visual aesthetics of the institute makes it easier to carry this delusion. Fortunately, public universities generally cannot afford it and therefore do not offer such visual splendour. Thus, it is easier to be conscious of the political nature of education in such places, as compared to private educational institutes.
A few days back, some students asked me a question - why did I choose academics? Academics, as Upendra Baxi would say, is a provocation. I teach and write to provoke and be provoked, to resist and challenge, to find and forge solidarities, to build a community of learners who can engage with our times as thinkers and not as a mob. We have to view academics as an extension of ourselves. Our relations with our students and colleagues transcend the limitations of institutional hierarchy and formalities. We can never forge consciousness and solidarities through impersonal interactions. Hence, teaching and writing are meant to be intimate, personal and political. We can’t be academicians if we do not pursue it with empathy, passion, and political commitment. And we definitely can’t be ‘true’ academicians if we do not have the courage to resist the onslaught of authoritarianism by imagining new ways of being and giving form to these imaginations.
The author would like to thank Haris Jamil, for his careful reading and insightful comments on the draft of this article.
