Where Is the University Worth Fighting for?

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) (hereafter HE4G) has been more than a book. It has been a public event, a gathering, a diversely peopled conversation within and beyond its pages: the desperate throw of a lifeline or the hopeful throw of a dream, beyond the really existing universities of the present towards better alternatives. If, somehow, readers of Postdigital Science and Education have managed to avoid this conversation, I urge you to join it now, wherever your scholarly social media and reading habits find it.

The ‘open education community’ is not the explicit source of HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) (naming creates boundaries after all), but the word ‘open’ appears in the text almost as often as the word ‘future’ (about 500 times each), and almost always as a necessary condition for the ‘good’ university to emerge. From behind the broad question that the book puts forward—what is the ‘good’ that higher education can do in the world?—a sharper, and more implicating question gnaws away. What ‘good’ has open education done, in particular? What good might it still do? Where next for open education as a project and a community (this one, here, now, ‘ours’)?

In circling around both questions, the outward-looking and the more reflexive, the mood is defiantly one of ‘hope’ (more than 200 appearances). But hope is ‘fragile’ and ‘vulnerable’ as well as vibrant and generous. So it is worth asking why the ‘goods’ that the editors hope for in their Introduction—‘justice, equity … sustainability, pluriversality, mutuality, generosity, creativity and collectivism’ (Cronin and Czerniewicz 2023: 43–4), goods that many universities profess in their missions and measure in their impact statements—are so elusive. Why do the authors find them only in ‘pockets of freedom’ (Jansen 2023: 28) and ‘cracks of light’, in ‘fractures’, ‘crevices’, and ‘ruptures’ in the neoliberal edifice? How long is it going to take to build the socially just institutions these writers so powerfully imagine when it takes so much intellectual hope and pedagogic care just to hold open the space of possibility?

Kate Bowles (2023: 366) asks: ‘Do we still have time for universities to achieve change at small scale, become good at this slow pace, and having sorted out their own houses make a just contribution to a good future?’ The question is freighted with anxiety about the environmental crisis, but also—as Bowles and others emphasise—with awareness of the linked crises of democracy and social inequality, particularly as they are refracted through the global higher education system. More than half of adults have some tertiary education in the USA, UK, Australia, Israel, Canada, and much of Europe (Academic Ranking of World Universities 2024), where the rift between university haves and have-nots aligns with other social exclusions, driving a politics of nativist resentment at educated ‘elites’ (Barnett 2019; Robertson and Nestore 2021). Meanwhile, in some central and east African nations, higher education reaches barely 1% of the population (Statista 2024a). Here, the life chances of the vast majority are determined by exclusions that operate far beyond the capacity of local politics or educational initiatives to address.

Faced with these global inequities, the World Bank and OECD promote higher education as a form of personal capital: the same monetizable ‘good’ everywhere, and for everyone. Under this regime, the standard is set by the ‘top twenty global universities’—fifteen of them in the USA and three of the rest in the UK (Academic Ranking of World Universities 2024). But the ‘good’ that HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) hopes for is not the quantifiable ‘good’ of access to a culturally homogenised curriculum. To be a source of social resilience (Lowe and Yasuhara 2017), higher education must instead reflect the planet’s diverse intellectual cultures and provide a space for them to meet and enrich each other. Contrary to the World Bank and OECD’s hegemonic projects, this is a vision of higher education for the wellbeing of all on a finite planet: ‘grounded in human rights and based on principles of non-discrimination, social justice, respect for life, human dignity, and cultural diversity’ (UNESCO 2021 in Kuhn et al. 2023: 496). Not surprisingly, this kind of good university appears as a ‘dreamscape’ in HE4G (Chan et al. 2023: 129), glimpsed through the windows of the neoliberal edifice.

The dream comes closest to being realised in transformed classroom relationships, where pedagogies of openness, justice, and care can be enacted and (through projects like HE4G) articulated and shared. But HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) also speaks of radical movements that have struggled for the ‘good university’ on a world historical scale. The neoliberal phantom that looms so darkly (121 appearances) emerged from these movements: from their radical ambitions, their partial gains, their compromises, and defeats. In these pages, it is possible to trace three distinct movements of democratic expansion and more equitable realisation of the university. All of them are incomplete or in reverse. All remain contested in the university of the present time. The term ‘post’ (post-colonial, post-democratic, postdigital) arguably does different work in relation to each one.

Three Movements Towards the Good University

Post-Colonial Reconfigurations

Higher education became a core demand and a site of struggle for the independence movements that arose in defiance of empire. It was, perhaps, this first wave of decolonisation that gave rise to the idea of the socially useful university, a university that produced a particular, situated intellectual culture rather than transmitting (what were meant to be) universal truths (Fabian et al. 2023; see also de Sousa Santos 2018: Chap 12, Vaditya 2018; Harle 2020). The Radhakrishnan Commission (1948–1949) recommended that dozens of new universities should be established ‘to promote equality and social justice’ in the newly independent state of India, and from new African universities such as Makerere, Nairobi, and Dar-es-Salaam, the figure of the public intellectual appeared as the ‘flag-bearer of anti-colonial nationalism’ (Mamdani 2019: 18).

Vital as these movements were, the post-colonial university continued many of the forms of the European institution. It was elite, hierarchical, masculine, enclosed. It would teach and publish (typically) in the language of the colonising power, with academics often preferentially recruited from the colonial centre (Makoe 2023: 305). And it would continue to be based around disciplinary knowledges inherited from the European enlightenment.

Today, although the balance of numbers has tilted towards the Global South (Higher Education Strategy Associates 2022), universities remain symbols and sources of geopolitical power, cornerstones of what Henri Giroux (2007) has termed the ‘military-industrial-academic’ complex, and this power remains distributed along colonial lines. HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) does not shy away from these legacies. Belluigi (2023) and Makoe (2023) describe how universities continue to produce, value, and authorise knowledge in ways that sustain geopolitical as well as epistemic injustices. DeRosa draws attention to the fact that ‘Bridge International, an American company, has more than four hundred “innovative” schools in Kenya and Uganda’ (DeRosa 2023: 57). From Brazil, Amiel and do Rozário Diniz (2023: 422) note how the adoption of EdTech platforms, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, has led to ‘an unprecedented concentration of power in a handful of organisations offering “free” platforms to educational institutions around the world’.

So, decolonisation cannot be pursued only in the historical universities of empire. It has to confront the global systems that perpetuate the norms and privileges of those institutions: academic journals and their citation indices; international university rankings; standardised curricula leading to ‘internationally recognised’ qualifications; and ‘international’ conferences that price out academics from all but the wealthiest institutions. And as Chan et al. (2023: 121ff) point out, these systems are also technologies. The wealthiest states and corporations—especially US tech giants—produce the software and platforms, algorithms, and data flows, which constitute today’s academic territories. A small number of Anglophone publishing houses control the journals that define scholarly agendas and determine academic careers. In partnership with the wealthiest research labs, Big Tech increasingly controls the scientific data and computational resources required for cutting edge research.

The post-colonial university is thus a deeply paradoxical institution. It projects hard and soft power on behalf of the nation state while extolling the virtues of ‘internationalism’ and global cooperation. In the name of universal access, it reproduces culturally specific and historically oppressive forms of knowledge. It renounces the most violent erasures and occupations of the colonial era, while sustaining global systems of production and exchange that reiterate the exploitation of the majority by the minority, this time with intellectual and data capital in the driving seat. But in its own paradoxical efforts to decolonise, the idea of a university worth fighting for remains alive (Belluigi 2023; Bowles 2023; Macgilchrist and Costello 2023).

Post-War Democratisation

By the mid-twentieth century, demands for a ‘good’, socially just academic system were loudest from democratic movements within nation states. The ‘new universities’ that sprang up during the 1960s presented an explicit challenge to the elitism of earlier models, helping to extend access to women, people of colour, non-citizens, students from diverse class backgrounds, and people of the global South. In their Introduction to Utopian Universities, Pellow and Taylor argue that the 200 global universities founded between 1961 and 1970:

belong to a unique historical moment … as different national cultures around the world shook off the legacy of the past … Never before nor since has higher education been such a priority for public spending … And perhaps at no other time have universities shaped wider political and social developments [more]. (Pellow and Taylor 2020: 2)

In the Global South, as well as in the capital cities of Europe (Datta and Sharma 2020), students agitated for new curricula, more democratic governance, and more equitable admission policies. Radical pedagogies spread from South America [Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968/1970) was published at the end of this decade] and from the global civil rights movement. The first Black Panther’s ‘Liberation Schools’ were established in 1969, and the demands of the South African Students Organisation were formulated in 1971.

The occupation of university buildings was common and became associated with wider protests that were not directly linked to university matters. ‘Teach-ins’ on matters of political significance, the Vietnam War in particular, were common. Some proposed the end of examinations or the abolition of the distinction between academics and students. (Vinen 2018)

Su-Ming Khoo (2023: 97) celebrates the era’s ‘sense of political freedom and equality’ that in its most radical forms could be considered public intellectual commons, deeply connected with the concerns of their wider communities. Chapters by Jim Luke (2023) and Andreas Wittel (2023) emphasise instead the gains that were made for more equitable participation in mainstream universities. ‘We should consider the increased access to HE as most definitely good because it corrected a flaw in the elite knowledge commons imaginary. Increased access enables improved opportunities, quality of life, and democratic participation’ (Luke 2023: 172).

All three authors suggest that the lasting achievements of the era were liberal democratic rather than radical ones, ‘more’ participation rather than different forms of it. The ‘public’ universities, including the new ‘open’ universities, remained closely tied to the nation state. Founding the UK Open University in 1969, its first Dean announced that ‘higher education is the democratic right of anyone who can profit by it and it is in the nation’s interests to make maximum use of human resources’ (Weinbren 2015: 77). In this way, the liberal goal of self-actualisation was kept fully in line with the national interest in building a strong, globally-competitive professional and technical class.

Wittel (2023: 188) counters any nostalgia for this era with the reminder that ‘[n]early half a century ago, Bourdieu (1986) argued convincingly that class and social distinctions are predominantly upheld through education and the public university’. And Khoo (2023:101) reminds us that what count as ‘public’ goods within the boundaries of the nation state, ‘including those of higher education, have been and continue to be accumulated through racialised processes of exploitation, accumulation, and extraction, in much the same way as “private” goods’.

The democratic university, then, was a distinctly liberal democratic achievement, torn between widening access and extending class privilege, between open knowledge and private intellectual properties, progressive curricula, and the established international order. Like other symbols of liberal progress, it was highly vulnerable to the neoliberal turn when it came. Neoliberalism looms over the pages of HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) (121 appearances), the implacable enemy of the good, democratic, and socially just university. Under its shadow, public funds have been clawed back, and private debt loaded onto students and their families, making it harder for poor students to get through the gate. Indebted nations in the Global South, meanwhile, can provide higher education only on terms approved by the IMF and World Bank: 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt repayment than education and health combined (UN Global Crisis Response Group 2023). In a new twist of the old colonial story, students from the growing middle classes of the Global South are now subsidising the universities of the Global North in exchange for accreditation from those same universities and the cultural advantages they still confer (Arora 2023: 629; Chan et al. 2023: 119–20).

DeRosa (2023: 59) sees all this as a continuation of post-war capitalism and its ‘organising logic’. Costs may have been pared back and funding streams privatised, but the system for valuing what can be measured, and ‘measuring what matters’ was already in place. Like other public services, higher education has slipped rather easily from mass participation to mass customisation, replacing the state with the student as the responsible investor in their own human capital. Jonathan Jansen’s Foreword to HE4G (2023: 27) identifies the neoliberal doxa thus:

Students are clients. Teaching is inputs. Publications are outputs. Curriculum is (unit) standards. Measurement is accountability. Assessment is performance. Scholarship is metrics. Graduates (ovenready) are for the labour market. Leadership is management. (Jansen 2023: 27)

But managerialism was an aspect of the mass university from the start. And it is hardly news that economic reaction should be accompanied by a ‘culture war’ against non-metricised, non-marketizable forms of knowledge such as the humanities and critical social sciences: that ‘“woke” indoctrinating curriculum’ (DeRosa 2023: 70). The EduFactory Collective (in Wittel 2023: 188) puts the situation in starker terms: ‘The state university is in ruins, the mass university is in ruins, and the university as a privileged place of national culture … is in ruins’.

The Digital Revolution

How might democracy, diversity, cooperation, and social justice still be realised in the ‘ruins’ of the public university? The answer to that question arrived in the 1990s not as a revolutionary politics but as the disruptive technologies of the Internet age. It is easy to be cynical about this period of cyber-optimism, as though its transmutation into EdTech hyperbole or Trump-funding, flag-waving libertarianism was inevitable. The ‘Californian Ideology’ certainly offered no barriers to neoliberalism, as Barbrook and Cameron (1996) identified in their essay of that name. But in the self-organised online community, a more egalitarian knowledge practice was not only promised; it seemed inevitable. The Network Society, edited by Manuel Castells, included a chapter on higher education by Betty Collis. She described students being accredited on the basis of their participation in a global community of ideas, ‘communities of practice [realising] knowledge sharing and co-construction as the richest form of e-learning’ (Collis 2005: 220). The ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) was in fact already giving place to the ‘network of practice’ (Seely Brown and Duguid 2000; Hoadley and Kilner 2005; Scardamalia and Bereiter 2006) as the exemplary context for learning beyond school.

The contemporary open education movement arose from this era of hopeful dynamism and took inspiration from the networked learning ethos. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration begins:

[Open] educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go. (Cape Town Open Education Declaration 2008/2024)

Digital systems have certainly allowed universities to innovate as institutions, led by the established open universities of the post-war expansionist period. Centralised services (now streamlined by data systems), well-designed content (now cheaply produced and distributed), and casually employed teaching staff (now managed, essentially, as gig workers), all meant that the ‘open and distance learning’ model was extraordinarily scalable and cost-efficient (Daniel 1998). More than 200 million learners signed up for an online course in 2022 (Devlin Pack 2024), though completion rates remain low (Kizilcec 2020, Xavier and Meneses 2020). Beyond the elite estates of the university and the narrow interests of the nation state, networked technology has ‘opened paths to access and tapped into opportunities, especially for scholars in developing countries’ (Arora 2023: 631).

But while open universities have flourished, and campus universities now routinely offer open learning on a similar model, the technical and organisational innovations that have allowed existing universities to build out have allowed new private providers to build in. Vast ‘platform’ universities such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX dominate the online market, currently worth around $185billion (Statista 2024b). A similar oligopoly of Online Programme Management companies has emerged to help mainstream universities reach the same online students. These students ‘sometimes enrol in courses at public universities … and never realise that none of the curriculum or instruction is coming from the school listed at the top of their course website’ (DeRosa 2023: 67–68). While the cheaper players have produced more scams and scandals (Hall 2022; Lynes et al. 2024), the mainstream providers have produced many more legal forms of student indebtedness and exploitation (Cottom 2022; Hamilton et al. 2023).

The colonisation of the open network by the proprietary platform represents a third reversal in the struggle for the ‘good university’. The ‘world wide web’ of convivial communities has become a single attention economy, where participation is driven not by shared interests but by private compulsions, monetised to keep services running. Platforms have colonised the once open network (Srnicek 2017), monopolising data rents while reducing the actual use value of online information (Doctorow 2024). The underlying code of the Internet has been copyrighted; access has been rerouted through intermediary providers such as Facebook (Meta), X and Google (and, increasingly, through ‘generative AI’ models); and instead of being distributed among user devices, services are now run ‘in the cloud’—a euphemism for the data farms of the world’s biggest corporations (Rikap 2021). Largely thanks to rent-maximising algorithms, the ‘network’ has become socially divisive and psychologically distressing, so that few educators are bold enough to engage in public pedagogies or to invite their students beyond the walled gardens of the university and its platform partners.

Neoliberalism has been more than an unfortunate historical context for the digital revolution. It has been its ideological double, extending private interests into higher education along the digital networks, data flows, and algorithmic modes of governance that are now endemic. At the same time, universities are vital to digital capital. As Misra and Mishra (2023: 578) record in their chapter on prospects for Indian higher education, in a global ‘knowledge economy’, the outputs of universities are ‘a commodity indispensable to productive power’. At the intersection of epistemological, technological and geopolitical power, EdTech has thus become a major site of capital intensification (Komljenovic 2022).

The platform university now serves more students, in more diverse geographies and cultural settings than ever before. Anyone can access some kind of higher education, at least so long as they have credit, connectivity, and the rudiments of a ‘global’ language. But has higher education redistributed opportunity or advanced global justice? Is it any ‘good’?

Where Is the Good University Now?

Without unwinding its complex relationship with the nation state, higher education has entered into another set of relationships with technology corporations, entities that are moving in to occupy many of the state functions and services that have been hollowed out by neoliberal austerity. Relations with these new patrons are less transparent and accountable than relations with national governments. Distributed among terms and conditions, procurement contracts, data flows, and data sharing arrangements, the terms of platform capital invisibly shape how universities relate to their staff and students and how members carry out their roles (Williamson et al. 2020). Key knowledge resources, research capabilities, and curriculum content are amassed in the corporate servers of the Global North in ways that the colonial printing presses of the nineteenth century could only have envied.

Unsurprisingly, under these conditions, the promised new pedagogies of post-colonialism, of democratic co-production and networked interest groups, have proved difficult to realise. Here, HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) comes into its own as a resource, offering a range of collaborative, open pedagogies that against the odds still ‘manage to build non-instrumental, responsive, and transformative relationships’ (Wittel 2023: 192). Macgilchrist and Costello (2023: 448) use strategies from hooks, Chavez, and Afro-futurist fiction to support ‘anti-racist, anti-classist, generous workshopping’. Kuhn et al. (2023: 500) report on a project to track the local effects of climate change that has allowed students to experience connection and solidarity beyond the classroom. There are many others. But all demand commitment from educators and trust from students, demands that conflict with a business model that monetises every moment of teachers’ time, while treating students’ time as a private investment.

How can space (time) be secured in the neoliberal university for such pedagogies to flourish and make a difference? When Wittel (2023: 187) asks this question—how a ‘political economy of higher education can … foster the gift’ of transformational pedagogy—his answer is not an immediately hopeful one: ‘only … in a post-capitalist world’ (196). Pending such a transformation, ‘good’ education can be fostered by projects like HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) itself, in open education conferences and communities and with modest funding streams. But it is telling that the ‘networks’ that appear here (all 91 of them) are interpersonal rather than infrastructural. It suggests a retreat from the global Internet (‘every [connected] person on earth’) and from projects of organisational transformation, towards more limited and perhaps even defensive networks that are resourced mainly through personal commitments.

In open education, the word open ‘denotes that one’s policies, practices, resources, and achievements are visible to or immediately known to others’ (Misra and Mishra 2023: 575). Making practice visible, particularly in a hostile organisational environment, requires a surplus of time and resources and goodwill, a sense of belonging that extends beyond contractual relationships and an expectation of ‘good’ reciprocity. Open education is thus a hopeful practice towards a ‘good’ university that is only possible if the ‘good’ university is already here, at least for some practitioners, in some places (those cracks and fissures again). And these places of ‘good’ are themselves inequitably distributed. It is always an act of generosity to turn a personal surplus into a ‘gift’, but it is still a privilege, one that requires constant tending of the margins if it is not to be inscribed in new forms of power.

And now these fragile spaces are even more vulnerable. Since this diverse, generous and generative book was first conceived, higher education has undergone a further capitulation to platform capital in its fawning adoption of ‘generative AI’ and associated narratives about the inevitable ‘AI future’ of learning and work. Ekaterina Pechenkina (2023) exposes many the harms of ‘artificial intelligence’ in education, including the surveillance of students, racial and gender biases, regressive approaches to learning, and threats to the quality of teaching jobs, But since her chapter was written, it has become clear that ‘generative AI’ is also destroying every motive for educators to share and collectively develop their resources, by scraping the generous work of open educators and serving it up to subscribers in the form of instant new materials. Having privatised the ‘sharing’ of content, and closed down the possibility of any transformational, or even genuinely new pedagogies emerging, generative AI is the exact antithesis of the open learning community (see also Beetham 2024).

In the same timeframe, universities in the USA and its allied states have colluded with acts of educide in Gaza, where an entire educational culture, its students and scholars and institutions, are being deliberately targeted and destroyed. Students and academics who protest these actions are harshly disciplined (Lennard 2024) in ways that portend further use of political surveillance and repression. The ‘AI wars’ that are taking place currently in Gaza, and also in Ukraine and Russia, Yemen, and Syria, are based less on ‘intelligent’ algorithms than on absolute knowledge of the ‘other’ through surveillance data. ‘Generative AI’ is also based on brute force of data, alongside nakedly exploitative labour practices and the theft of cultural assets. In both forms of colonisation, the geopolitical and the epistemic, we are commanded to see the most powerful actors as ‘the most moral’, the only ones possessed of true knowledge, and the only ones qualified to evaluate their actions. Universities—in the global North at least—have utterly failed to assert any alternative moral or epistemological order.

There may be worse spectres than the neoliberal university. Ruinous though free market economics have been for the capacity of universities to realise equitable outcomes, they have not required a disavowal of progressive values. The new forces of nationalism may do so. Turning away from globalisation and its knowledge/capital flows (and broadly liberal/neo-liberal politics), techno-capital now leans into protectionism, military-industrial contracts, black box data models, and directly controlled (data) labour. The utopian network has been reterritorialized as data centres and fabs, mineral mines and private satellite networks, cheap labour outposts and glitzy offices, situated where they can rinse the most out of local tax regimes. The demand for AI infrastructure threatens a war between the USA and China over the future of Taiwan, where the fabrication of chips is powered by coal, while the demand for rare earths, clean water, and electricity to power data centres is accelerating climate change. Along with war, border control and surveillance are the sectors where the latest technologies are being tested and where the latest start-ups are competing for contracts. Silicon Valley politics have moved decisively into line (Jeans 2024).

The end of neoliberalism may not be a revival of hopeful movements towards public good but a retrenchment to geopolitical power blocs, organised around key data platforms and regulatory regimes, and maintained by nativist myths (perhaps supercharged by the fear or reality of climate refugees). As neoliberal organisations, universities could still deliver enlightenment-as-a-service within structures of indebtedness and exclusion. But as extensions of the state-as-platform, universities will find themselves complicit in regimes of border control and internal discipline. Signs of this are found around the world: in attacks on the humanities and critical social sciences (Thomas 2022; Maitra 2021); in threats to academic freedom (Darian-Smith 2024; Altbach and Blanco 2024); in the disciplining of academics, students and university leaders (Gersen 2023; Walawalkar et al. 2024); and in ever more overt attempts by corporate funders to control the contents of university curricula (DeRosa 2023: 68–9).

What Is to Be Done?

The term ‘critical’ appears 286 times in HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023), always with hopeful connotations, and 17 times coupled with ‘pedagogy’. ‘In this [neoliberal] higher education context’, notes Gentles (2023: 480), ‘a critical pedagogy of caring [is] actually a form of subversion’. Belluigi (2023) uses Freire’s (1968/1070) term ‘conscientisation’ to describe the development of students’ ‘operative criticism’, and claims that:

In dialogue with students in the micro-curriculum and colleagues in the meso-curriculum, such praxis holds potential to destabilise prevailing mythologies and doxa, and to recognise the contradictions and oppressions enacted through knowledge formation. (Belluigi 2023: 151)

Critical pedagogy informs other ‘pedagogies of care’, of gender and race justice and of (inter)cultural ‘recognition’ that are foregrounded in HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023). At the micro-level of classroom dialogue, such practices subvert the demand to treat students as human capital to be optimised, foregrounding the contradictions in this demand while supporting students to recognise contradictions for themselves. But connecting these ‘micro’ practices of recognition with the ‘meso’ community of the university and the ‘macro’ prospects for change in the world is surely the point of critical pedagogy, and the task before us. And as all the reversals of recent history suggest, the university has immense powers to reappropriate any surplus of attention and care to its own balance sheet.

Between the micro-curriculum of the classroom and the macro forces of global political change, the ‘good’ needs to take up organisational space. There are signs of this happening. We are in a new era of student protest, not unlike the one that accompanied the first wave of democratisation. Rather than the compromised network, we might consider the encampment and the organising committee as agile, meso-level spaces for good organising. The encampment makes demands that are incommensurate with the existing use of university resources: from Occupy! and Rhodes Must Fall to the protests against student fees and for justice in Palestine, encampments enact self-organised forms of learning on university land. At the same time, communities around universities are organising in response to crises and to secure the basic means of life on a fragile planet. Students and academics are part of these communities and can be part of their search for socially useful knowledge.

Amiel and do Rozário Diniz (2023) provide a practical manual of such strategies at work. Alongside critical approaches in the classroom, they have engaged with students in solidarity actions: producing a manifesto; establishing an Observatory to track the spread of platformisation in Brazilian education; and ‘leverag[ing] forms of collective decision making’ to interrupt the adoption of mainstream platforms by university administrations (Amiel and do Rozário Diniz 2023: 440). Scott and Gray (2023) echo the value of stakeholder working groups in the design of edtech platforms. The ‘successful co-design of technology requires an investment of time into building trust and levelling out power relations’ (Scott and Gray 2023: 610), an investment in structures that will last longer than a focus group. Fabian et al. (2023) describe an extended project of ‘reimagining learning and teaching’ across seven universities in East Africa, which created enduring committees (Joint Advisory Groups) for student-university-community engagement, as well as significant changes to classroom practice.

The book also poses the question of wider alliances and resources for change. Belluigi’s (2023: 151) chapter identifies transformational strength in ‘the knowledge workforce’, casualised but not defeated, and still able to turn universities into ‘active sites of cultural contestation; in the ‘open-access movement’ and its challenge to commodified knowledge; and in ‘the production of knowledge in social movements’ for racial, gender, and climate justice. The editors of HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023), in a recent keynote, urge open educators to prioritise: ‘conscious alliances, sharing strategies for influencing decisions and altering directions, and strengthening movements towards justice and sustainability’ (Cronin and Czerniewicz 2024: 5). We need, perhaps, an intersectional ‘movement of movements’ to replace the depoliticised ‘network of networks’ that was promised by the digital revolution (Beetham and Wainwright 2025 forthcoming).

There are certainly ‘good’ forms of intellectuality being realised outside the neoliberal citadel, which may provide theories and practices we need to survive on a fragile planet at war (some are explored in Hall and Winn 2017). The lessons preferred by HE4G (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) begin inside, in the cracks and contradictions of the university we have—the post-colonial, postdigital, becoming-post-democratic one—and especially in the space of the rights-respecting classroom. But for these cracks to remain open, they must be energised by wider social movements and values. Open educators must organise for their own survival. Simply to carry on teaching and believing in students is indeed a subversive act, and the small rewards of equity and justice for each one still weigh on the side of good. But it isn’t enough, in the face of the anti-democratic, anti-educational forces at work in the world.

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) is an indispensable, perhaps inexhaustible resource for organising, at every scale. It proclaims itself an exercise in ‘hope’, but it does just as much good, in my view, when it speaks of ruin. Every transformational movement needs to learn from its history, and if it is a history of defeats, we need it all the more urgently.