Universities were once the bedrock of human progress. They were established to challenge traditions, dismantle orthodoxies, and create new knowledge to address the deepest needs of humanity. Their mission was to emancipate people from illiteracy, prejudice, and all forms of illiberal forces—empowering individuals and democratising society through scientific and secular learning.
In its place, we have a marketplace. Education has been repackaged as a commodity, sold to the highest bidder. Curricula are designed not to inspire critical thought, but to serve corporate demands under the guise of “employability.” Research is no longer a pursuit of truth but a transaction, shaped by the interests of funding agencies and industry partners. The corporatisation, marketisation, and managerialism of our universities have destroyed their emancipatory purpose and betrayed the common good.
Universities are no longer independent centres of inquiry. They have become servants of the ruling class and corporate power—complicit in their profit-making, not questioning their hierarchies. Teaching has been reduced to job training; research, to grant-chasing. The goal is no longer to create citizens capable of interrogating power or expanding equality, but to produce compliant employees.
In this transformation, universities have become factories of obedient minds. The liberating aspect of education—the very essence of learning—has been killed. Measurable targets like student satisfaction, research outputs, and funding success have replaced intellectual integrity. In pursuit of profit, universities have traded the creativity of their students and the autonomy of their scholars for a culture of bureaucratic productivism.
This rent-seeking culture has hollowed out education. From the religious missionaries of the past to the market forces of the present, external powers have repeatedly subverted the university’s mission. Today, academia offers broken promises—degrees saddled with debt and disillusionment. Universities have become corporates in all but name, sacrificing students, staff, and society at the altar of profit.
What little idealism remains is now crushed by a new breed of managers—unqualified, unaccountable, and indifferent to teaching and learning. These figures are worse than street criminals. At least criminals have a certain loyalty and morality toward their own. University leaders and their lumpen managers have no moral compass. They produce only a toxic culture of managerialism, turning students and staff into mere numbers on a spreadsheet. Their motto is simple: profit over people, education for sale.
The so-called intellectuals who remain in these institutions have surrendered their freedom and their souls—trapped in routine, surviving rather than thriving. They neither produce nor disseminate knowledge that liberates. They have abandoned the social purpose of education and the emancipatory logic of knowledge.
Even trade unions have failed. They do not protect jobs, fight for fair wages, or lead movements for radical change. Instead, their bureaucrats function as shock absorbers for a regressive system. University leadership, managers, and unionists all hide behind policies that harm students and staff, suffering from a collective and conscious amnesia about what education should be.
Nothing good comes from the commodification of education. A market-led system that breeds debt and delusion can never be true education. As the Vishnu Purana reminds us: “Sa Vidya Ya Vimuktaye”—knowledge is that which liberates.
It is time to reclaim that vision. We must dismantle the profit-driven university system and build public universities for a public purpose—institutions where education emancipates individuals, realises human potential, and serves the collective good. Not for profit. For liberation.
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*Academic based in UK
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