Revaluing and devaluing higher education beyond neoliberalism: Elitist,productivist,and populist policy and rhetoric in a field of conflict

Conventions, compromises and threats to autonomy

This article follows the central concerns of this Special Issue by integrating themes of value and worth from the sociology of convention into the analysis and diagnosis of major interventions, even attacks, on higher education. Centrally, we argue these emerging realities make the task of finding compromises for HE governance more difficult to strike. One context for this observation are new policy measures, often combined with strong political rhetoric, that have challenged the legitimacy of universities’ current operations and aim at reducing their autonomy, particularly targeting the humanities and social sciences. The European University Association (EUA, 2021) has identified institutional autonomy as crucial for the sector. Globally, academic freedom has been judged under threat, with episodes of decline in recent years (Kinzelbach et al., 2024). Institutional autonomy in HE has been conceived as consisting of four dimensions: organisational, financial, staffing and academic (Orosz, 2018; see also, Olsen and Maassen, 2007; Piironen, 2013). Key choices in autonomous practices include wide and discrimination-free access to opportunities to study, free student choice regarding qualification or profession, and free debate and choice of research inquiry within institutions. Autonomy should not be interpreted as total decision-making freedom for HE leaders nor solely in terms of academic freedom in teaching and research; rather, we present autonomy in terms of a sociology of conventions framework that recognises the ability of key actors to reach sustainable compromises that accommodate multiple values and commitments. As Wagner highlights, the main achievement of Boltanski’s (2014) approach to action is a ‘critical capacity’ of ‘the actors themselves to determine which order of justification is the appropriate one in the situation in which they find themselves immersed and, if necessary, to interact with the other participants in the situation to resolve a possible dispute over justifications’ (p. 238; see also Boltanski and Thevénot, 1999). This view of sector autonomy therefore makes no assumptions of a prior world in which universities were entirely autonomous from either state or market (see Collini, 2012). Rather, we view the politics of HE autonomy as a historically variable, relational dynamic between universities and other major social institutions.

Neoliberalism and new justificatory challenges to the worth of higher education

For a long time, discourse about universities has centred on a certain distortion of the autonomy created by the growing education ‘marketplace’, which reduces all value to financial considerations. Neoliberal values retain a key presence in sector policy debates in many countries: concerns have been expressed that neoliberal marketisation in European HE has reduced its value to commodity status and constrained university operations within a business model (Jones, 2022; Lynch, 2006). Critical HE approaches (Brown and Carasso, 2013; Clarke et al, 2022; Jones, 2022; Lynch, 2006; Marginson and Considine, 2000; Molesworth et al., 2011) have thoroughly categorised the effect of marketisation reforms under the general banner of advancing neoliberalism and the Neoliberal Market Model (NLMM), alongside New Public Management (NPM) driving internal efficiencies via performance management and quasi-market arrangements (Marginson, 2013).

However, as Marginson (2013) points out, neoliberalism today is more about how HE policy is justified, rather than actual practice. Although neoliberalism retains its hegemonic power, the NLMM has run up against firm limits, to the point of being impossible to implement in reality; for instance, tuition fees and other measures aimed at instituting market efficiencies are driven not by the profit motive, but by administered competition only (Marginson, 2013). Furthermore, neoliberal market discipline has certainly not had the effect of containing the HE sector, as some pro-market reformers hoped. Policy promoting marketisation implicitly commits budget-maximising managers to expanding markets rather than focusing solely on efficiency gains. Incentives drive education leaders to demand state support; for example, ever-greater public subsidisation of market-driven initiatives, from funds supporting low-income students to the commercialisation of research (i.e. Adams, 2022; Randall, 2023), and even influencing reforms outside its own sphere, such as temporary migration visas for international students (Morgan, 2019). Perhaps overlooked in critical debates, this rising HE ‘market power’ means that universities have retained significant autonomy in their relationship with the state and in some respects have increased it. Market expansion, however, has contributed to a form of ‘mass’ education, in turn unsettling traditionalists, who decry the loss of elite status attached to higher study. Increased conflict and contestation over HE means that rhetoric has inevitably taken a sharply negative turn. Conservative critics have attacked the use value of some degree programmes while right-wing populists deride an apparently unstated subversive aim of promoting a limited set of values in the form of ‘woke’ politics, or even ‘cultural Marxism’, created by an excessively liberal system that needs reining in.

Thus, we argue that, in recent years, HE politics has discernibly shifted, partly in response to the failures of neoliberalism to fully transform the sector. Right-wing critics wishing to tame HE have raised new value questions related to its size, purpose and operations. We aim to pick apart these different argumentative and political strategies, drawing on insights from the ‘worlds of worth’ approach to demonstrate a wide range of positional struggles over how the meaning, value and proper purpose of universities is justified, and impacts upon university autonomy. We pursue these themes through case studies of HE policy and rhetoric from four countries, two within Europe compared with two non-European; Hungary and the United Kingdom, Brazil and Australia.

Conceptualising new higher education conflicts: Three worlds of worth

The work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) provides a lens for understanding how compromises and conflicts over policy and practice in HE are constituted, according to appeals to different higher common principles of worth. New conflicts in HE can therefore also be understood as pulling apart such value compromises, which in turn impinges on university autonomy. Normative compromises also reflect political settlements between universities, the state and other interested actors. When HE is politicised, existing value compromises are set back into conflict on the terms of the higher common principles underpinning them. The autonomy of universities from other institutions is consequently also put into question as the legitimate role and practices of universities are challenged. Rather than viewing HE as a semi-autonomous ‘sub-system’ that repels outside influences, this framework allows us to explain the constant interchange between HE and the state and to identify how interests are pursued and justified through value claims. Large-scale intrusions from politicians and policymakers suggest that the negotiation of worth and value is a highly unstable process as the dual influences of established neoliberal marketisation and increasing political interference in the sector become normalised and sometimes even alarming (see Jones, 2022).

Following Telling (2023), we emphasise that a plurality of different logics of action are already at work in contemporary HE, where multiple values and critiques of those same values co-exist, overlap and interact. However, we contend that, over the past decade, negotiation between multiple value positions has become politicised to such an extent that value contestation is now central to HE public policy and public sphere debates. We identify a contemporary political dynamic of critical revaluation of existing compromises in order to understand how universities are being questioned in the new politics of HE. Right-wing populists – and now more than occasionally, mainstream politicians – enter these debates with the aim of challenging existing value compromises to promote interventionist policy that diverges from neoliberal ideology by resort to conflictual justificatory principles. Two positions stand out. The first asserts intervention into the HE sector in order to recentre it on the productivity crisis: a new workforce is needed to lift productivity (and profit) and universities must play the central knowledge role in advancing technological frontiers. The second draws on the populist elites-versus-people trope (Bonikowski and Gidron, 2016; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017), a justificatory strategy derived from the ‘civic’ world. In order to challenge HE value compromises, populists pragmatically embed value conflicts around HE in political, economic and cultural relations, thereby increasing the pool of available justificatory tools for intervening in the sector.

Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘worlds of worth’ is a theory of normative principles built inductively from practice, that is, as found in situations, thus assuming no quasi-universal principle. Taking their framework as our main theoretical point of reference, we claim that the three worlds at work in the new HE politics are grounded in the higher common principles of ‘market’, ‘industrial’ and ‘civic’ worlds. ¹ We contend that these principles can be located in new right-wing and liberal elite value claims; moreover, their assertion into HE represents a new stage in HE politics above and beyond the dominant market neoliberalism. One consequence of these efforts to ‘revalue’ HE has also been to publicly devalue the aims and operations of universities. Today, HE policy is increasingly drawn into ‘culture war’ politics.

This article proceeds as follows. Section Two sets out how we use the worlds of worth framework of higher common principles. In particular, we distinguish within neoliberal ideology the market and ‘industrial’ or ‘productivist’ principles of worth, arguing that their previous reconciliation is being increasingly revoked. We identify revaluation strategies on this basis – that is, systematic efforts to demand justifications of universities for their value, by a conflicting set of higher common principles – as well as on nationalistic grounds of ‘civic’ worth, as the means of political contestation in HE policy and rhetoric. We conclude that these contestations have varying implications for university autonomy. Section Three distinguishes the new politics of HE by outlining efforts at revaluation and their construction of university autonomy, identifying three types of arguments distinct from neoliberal market rationality: (i) industrial ‘productivist’ arguments based on use value, advocating new state regulatory intervention; (ii) elite rejections of ‘mass education’ to protect existing social class differences; and (iii) populist attacks on universities for promoting subversive and elite liberal values against nationalistic, civic values, in order to promote bids for power. We point to the public sphere devaluation effects upon HE of such argumentation. We conclude by arguing that HE is now so central to modernisation processes that argumentative battles in this field of conflict have greater portent for the sociology of education and for the social sciences more generally.

Worlds of worth framework

The conventions perspective is a theory of worlds of justification upon which value claims are made in practice. These conceptual tools apply in any circumstance, referring to an implicit set of higher common principles through which pragmatic agreement on a problem might be attained. Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1991) framework does not attach worlds of worth to specific social actors; instead, actors can argue across multiple worlds without relativisation of values to achieve pragmatic and stable compromises. This is useful for understanding the practical dynamics of value conflicts, as they arise in situations, which are rarely settled by normative standards or procedural consensus, but by pragmatic compromises through amenable intersections. Hence, conflicts do not represent opposed value positions as one finds in political philosophy, but rather more shifting sands of justification that allow ideas to serve as a link between different justificatory worlds of worth. We use this framework to understand how existing settlements can be put into conflict by revaluation strategies, that is, shifting the basis of justification from one world to another. Disruptive actors pull apart prevailing compromises and make claims that heighten conflicts between justificatory worlds. The primary aim is to make new incursions on university autonomy and justify interventions for political gain.

Our perspective on the politics of HE is that the autonomy of the sector is put under pressure through arguments based on conflicting worlds of justification. This supplements the worlds of worth perspective by reference to structural considerations of power relations prevailing across whole societies. For HE policy problems, the underlying question at stake is the relationship between the state and intellectuals (and their institutions). This has always been a mediated relationship, with universities more-or-less distant and more-or-less autonomous from state power, whether in terms of funding, regulation of operations or symbolic support. While it is easy to demonstrate alternate sources of value (and their justification), a battle-scarred sector like contemporary HE requires an approach that balances the realities of conflict as well as the ‘critical capacity’ for compromise: such an approach must apprehend non-consensual strategies of critical revaluation in argumentation over universities’ proper roles and operations. This is because some protagonists seek not to unify and rationalise but to politically restrict the autonomy of higher education institutions through various means of control and intervention.

The worlds of worth framework differs from traditional ideological critique, allowing social actors to subscribe to multiple justificatory principles at once, rather than supposing a coherent ideology that directs, uniformly, their interpretations and actions. A leading application of the framework in the sphere of education, the French school system, has been undertaken by Derouet (2017) who sees the outcomes of education reforms as compromises between competing justifications – for example, equality versus performance versus diversity. Understanding the tensions and compromises within an apparently monolithically ‘neoliberal’ HE can be developed on similar foundations. As HE scholar Marginson (2013) points out, the NLMM and NPM aspects of neoliberalism are symbiotic, but not the same. We argue that their compatibility within neoliberalism expresses just such a compromise between the market and industrial worlds of worth, informing not only market principles but also managerialism within university education and research production. Boltanski and Thévenot (1991: 333) point to the ambiguity of the product as the basis of the tension between the market and industrial worlds in scholarly controversies within economics. Based in conceptions of value, the former are grounded in price versus the latter, grounded in ‘use’. Products represent the compromise between these two worlds in business, between the flexibility necessary for market responsiveness and the systematic predictability of industrial production required to mass produce goods. In a neoliberal system, efficiently produced products, including university degree programmes and research outputs, are the source of compromise between industrial production values and quality market goods. The industrial world effects a compromise with the market world by promoting efficient production and performance management through NPM, while simultaneously dovetailing with external applications of market and quasi-market mechanisms of the NLMM to promote supply and demand efficiencies in competition for students and research funding. Thus, the HE sector, as a system of mass education, has achieved its own ‘Fordist’-like compromise between these worlds of worth, supporting new managerial processes in complex operations by huge institutions but not being overly restrictive of increasing marketisation in the context of sector expansion. Managerialist ideas of industrial worth do have an impact on free choice where cost-saving rationalities, for example, prevent the free proliferation of small or unusual courses of study – or even niche research areas.

It is ideas and policies grounded in the industrial world of worth that question the value of HE products, moving away from compromise and into conflict with market rationality. At the same time, this moves them further away from other common values, such as the pursuit of knowledge as a good in itself (the inspired world). Strongly focused on notions of human performance and efficiency, productivity and responsiveness to industrial needs (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991: 204), these ideas and policies are designed to bend the university to the needs of industry and an ever-more productive society. ² The main industrial challenge to the market world lies in ‘critiques of the conspicuous consumption of “luxury” articles, which are expensive but not very useful, as they do not satisfy real needs’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991: 271). For business critics, many humanities degree programmes are exactly such luxuries, with little use value, regardless of whether they produce market outcomes desired by the graduate. Challenges to the cost of such degrees represent attacks based on a ‘fair price’, which free market libertarians reject as interventionist and distorting (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991: 267–269). In themselves, such arguments might be taken to constitute strong criticisms of market failure. However, they are not framed as such, because they allow market discipline to continue while basing attacks in an entirely different order of worth.

From the perspective of the market world, any bureaucratically determined restriction of choice is condemned for its imposition of rigidities. Such regulations leave ‘no place for the interaction of subjective desires: industrial capacities (of machines and experts alike) are only impediments to deal making’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991: 267). In theory, then, the market world has little to say about HE production mechanisms per se, that is, the kinds of ideas and debates that happen within university walls. Other critics have mobilised against processes internal to universities by drawing on values from the ‘civic world’. Boltanski and Thévenot (1991) refer to Rousseau to explain this world or polity as claiming justification based on the general will, distanced from private interests. Right-wing criticisms of universities from the civic world imply that liberal-left intellectuals are acting according to their own partial worldview and particular interests, against conventional values. In the case of populists, nationalism is usually invoked to present intellectuals and their supporters as aloof elites, out-of-touch with the common citizen and accepted norms (Brubaker, 2020; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). The introduction of such a critical perspective runs against the freedom of the market and its indifference to public values, but also against industrial world claims, which are specifically interest-based, linked to elite uses. New right-wing, civic world claims introduce a new demand of HE to support the common good – previously lamented as lacking by pro-university critics who value HE as a social good per se – on behalf of the public, nation and humanity itself, but this time in favour of a conservative view. Such claims set these new critics against established university interests and generate the conditions for a new, more conflictual HE politics.

Making comparisons

Applying a ‘worlds of worth’ framework empirically requires selection of cases and identifying grounds for comparison. This selection has not focused on tensions over individual policies in a particular jurisdiction. As do Amaral (2022) points out, the impact of globalisation on the education sphere makes cross-national comparisons particularly methodologically suitable for advancing understanding. We centre our comparative case analysis mostly on ‘horizontal’ comparisons (do Amaral, 2022) between contrasting national HE policy decisions in recent years, set against the globalisation of HE and its unexpected featuring in the populist backlash. These comparisons highlight not only differences in local ‘context’ (do Amaral, 2022), but they also are designed to draw out different aspects of the value conflicts outlined below.

Anglosphere countries, particularly Australia and the UK, are essential to this comparison because of the particular role that marketisation has played in the revaluation of the HE sector. As we shall demonstrate, the prioritisation of economic value of HE in those countries has led to the evolution of productivist discourses in recent times. By contrast, the recent experiences of Brazil and Hungary with right-wing populist governments targeting HE are prominent examples of elite-driven efforts to repurpose the sector to fit state ideologies. Although our illustration of key policy reforms emphasises national distinctions, we recognise that HE is influenced by global migration and money flows as well as ideological networks and, following do Amaral (2022), try to avoid ‘the common problem that comparison of cases (oftentimes countries) usually overemphasises boundaries and treats them as separated or as self-sustaining containers, when, in reality, actors and institutions at other levels/scales significantly impact policymaking’ (for a transnational theory of academic freedom, see Kiwan, 2024).

Industrial-productivist revaluations of neoliberal HE

One influential challenge to the market justification of HE policies has not come from the political left but from the liberal state and its newfound preoccupation with productive industrial development (Rodrik, 2023). Contemporary rhetoric advancing industry-focused universities involves revaluation that is categorically different from supply and demand market logic, particularly the criticism of failure to adapt to contemporary business needs and conditions and to skill graduates accordingly. Here, we highlight how critics have detached the compromise between market and industrial worlds to stridently argue for interventionist policy for industrial goals. Even though language surrounding these attacks on university operations uses ‘value’ and refers to market outcomes, the implication is always that the ‘use’ conception of worth is in play, such that free choice and the rationality of actors in calculating their own labour market outcomes must be challenged.

In the UK, for example, HE has become the locus of stringent critical discourses (see Jones, 2022). This conflict is marked by the period bounded by the highwater of marketisation, the Browne Report (2010), which recommended full fees for undergraduates and the recent Augar Review (2019), which rowed back from pure market mechanisms in favour of greater intervention, promoting industrial value as a guide to the next reform wave. The industry approach dismisses public investments that appear to be wasted on ‘low-value’ (Department for Education, 2019) or even ‘useless’ degrees (in their eyes). Indeed, as evidence, educational leaders point to the market failure in falling ‘return on investment’ for HE degrees (Wingard, 2022). For instance, UK Prime Ministerial candidate Rishi Sunak signalled an interventionist regulatory approach on market grounds, saying he would ‘take a tougher approach to university degrees that saddle students with debt, without improving their earning potential’ (Wingate, 2022). Later, as Prime Minister, this became a ‘crackdown on rip-off university degrees’ (Department for Education, 2023), including a quotation from Philip Augar who is critical of courses that are ‘not in students’ best interests’. Sunak’s justification rests on the historical conflation of the higher principles of the market and industry worlds, exemplified by the interchangeability of (labour) market-value and (industrial) use-value present in his argument. By using the terms ‘low value’ or ‘useless’, he promotes public devaluation rhetoric, invoking the rhetorical trope of ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees initiated by Margaret Hodge, the Labour government’s 2003 Minister of Universities, when she questioned the labour market value of several university degree programmes. The dysphemism or negative value judgement deployed by Sunak, however, does not differentiate between market- and use-values, instead appealing to an overall sense of devaluing ‘uselessness’, rejecting the value of such degrees altogether. This is conjoined with arguments about efficient production, supported by interventionist regulatory measures in the form of minimum retention rates and requirements to achieve minimum levels of graduate professional employment (Office for Students, 2022).

To wit, reformist actors who previously subscribed to market principles can now be found espousing the industrial justification. Contrary to neoliberal principles, leaders from the bureaucracy, politics and the HE sector itself now regularly and heavily intervene in the ‘free choice’ of students – either by tilting the market through selective pricing to favour courses with high use-value (e.g., technology or medical sciences) or by shutting-down areas of the university inconsistent with productivity and job-skilling initiatives. Outcomes might be popular with industry and, at best, beneficial for the training of professional and skilled staff and more broadly, national development.

At worst, the drive for an industry-focus is illiberally interventionist, especially where money is thrown at problems or is blatantly political, distorting independent development of university programmes. Our point is that these decisions are not strictly ‘market-based’ – understood as the ‘student-as-consumer’ making a relatively unconstrained choice – but rather they are driven by business pressure on government for skilled workers of a ‘fit-for-purpose’ higher education (Tarlea, 2017). University leaderships have been more than willing to accept regulatory restrictions and to seek funding under this banner, for instance, under the Australian Job-ready Graduates Package (Department of Education, 2020) or UK government demands for evidence of ‘employability’ (Department for Education, 2021). The conceptual significance of the worlds of worth framework is that it teases out these justificatory shifts within what otherwise falls under ‘neoliberalism’ to identify conflicting values within policy, in turn expressed within elites, a new conflict – between neoliberals and industrial interventionists – thereby marking a new stage in the mode of argumentation around HE and to restrict universities’ autonomy. The productivist discourse goes beyond the ethos of personal charisma and flexibility enshrined in Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2018) projective world in the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ – the value system emblematic of networked, high neoliberalism. ⁴ Despite this shift in worth regarding the networked world of work, state and corporate rhetoric and policy demands around HE and employability usually embody implicit industrial world values, justifying the worth of education in brutally concrete terms: through the mapping, codifying and benchmarking of industry-determined skills, that is, use value.

Interventionism to promote the use values of productivism attracts attention from the Labourist left where it justifies education spending on industrial skills, as well as from conservative elites seeking a halt to the ‘anything goes’ expansion of neoliberal HE. In the Australian case, the emphasis on productivism has justified expansionist policies – that is, the Australian (Labour) Government’s (2024) Universities Accord – and efforts at discouraging study by the former conservative Morrison government (2019–2022). The latter government directly distorted the market by significantly increasing fees for various social science (and other) degrees, arguing these were no longer valued by employers. Then federal Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, claimed that humanities and social sciences graduates had among the worst outcomes for full-time employment – a claim he later clarified and corrected (Karp, 2020).

Given long-standing conservative disregard for the humanities, some doubted that the only motivation of the Government’s Job Ready Graduates package (Department of Education, 2020) was based in neoliberal ideology, that is, sending a price signal to students to move into more productive areas of study (Barnes, 2020). In fact, the policy reflects a more fundamental revaluation; an interventionist government price-fixing increase in fees for humanities degrees intended to signal a decrease in their value under market logic, through an artificially fixed price above the market rate. The policy was unsuccessful, as student demand remained strong (White, 2022). A similar situation arose in the UK where the first round of student tuition fees introduced under the New Labour government was subsequently almost trebled to a maximum of £9250 per annum (Office for Students, 2023), following the Browne Report (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, 2010). Commissioned by a Labour government and implemented by the newly-elected Conservative-led Coalition government, the full-fee structure did not reduce demand for university places. In fact, student demand only increased.

The not-yet-fully-implemented Augar Review (Department for Education, 2019) highlights both the success and failure of the market-driven expansion of the sector. While policy did successfully implement quasi-market mechanisms, universities responded by making no further NPM-driven internal efficiencies nor rationalising degree programmes to accommodate restricted demand. Instead, they significantly expanded their markets to attract more students, particularly international students. Universities, and the sector, grew as applicants increased to record numbers (Bolton, 2023) eventually leading in 2024 to a harsh policy over-correction by the government in restricting student family visas (Havergal, 2024).

Nonetheless, expanding markets rather than aiming for production efficiencies had been logical business practice. What the subsequent volte-face on ‘low value’ courses reveals is that beneath the surface rhetoric of neoliberal supply-demand rationality lies a more conservative judgement that students should not want to take degree programmes that conservatives themselves think are low value because they have low industrial use. Hence, Augar’s advocacy for new intervention to control for this failure of market ideology (it is not market failure according to market principles per se), explicitly targeting ‘low value’ courses on the grounds of sub-optimal labour market outcomes. Such an argument sits across market and industrial worlds, attacking some university courses on new common principles while not attacking the market mechanism itself. It also aimed to impose new regulatory reporting mechanisms on UK universities, demanding stronger justifications of efficient operations. Augar thus represents a ‘new interventionism’. It also represents the explication of hidden elite value assumptions about HE.

In Hungary, both market and industrial arguments have been employed in revaluing HE. To meet Maastricht criteria targets (Bartha, 2017), the second Orbán government (2010–2014) had to introduce austerity measures, which, coupled with their insistence on a new reindustrialisation strategy, exerted conflicting demands on higher education policy. The government dramatically reduced state funding for universities from 2010 to 2013 and the number of state-funded places for many undergraduate programmes (Kováts, 2015). To justify withdrawing fiscal support for universities, the government used neoliberal valuation strategies. It emphasised the decreasing competitiveness of universities and their fiscal burden (Hungarian Government [HG], 2011: 22), while also arguing for financial sustainability and increased HE performance via expanding market-values into staff-student relations and degree choices (Orbán, 2012). However, this did not directly address the government’s priority of long-term reindustrialisation. To remedy HE’s inability to respond to industry’s demands, evident in its “distorted structure” (HG, 2011: 25), the government also actively constrained market choice in favour of industrial interests. To push prospective students toward degrees with immediate industrial applicability, that is, vocational and natural science degrees, the reduction in places disproportionately targeted degrees in social sciences and humanities (Neumann and Mészaros, 2019), while entry requirements were also significantly raised (Kovát et al., 2017). The government also promoted partnerships between industry and HEIs through state aid, lower corporate taxes and investment in HE courses tailored to meet the needs of multi-national companies (HG, 2016; Tarlea, 2017). In other words, while the Hungarian government opted for neoliberal restructuring of HE to justify its austerity measures, it also questioned market wisdom by actively pursuing interventionist policies prioritising particular industrial interests and further subjecting HE to competing principles of worth.

Elite criticisms of ‘mass’ higher education as a conservative revaluation strategy

An unambiguous line of conservative revaluation of contemporary higher education emerges from social elites. Elite revaluation, we claim, fixates on restricting universities’ autonomy by criticising the idea of universal access to higher education for its permissive consequences. These are the strongest defenders of hierarchical social structures for obvious reasons, maintaining the long-held view that higher education’s role is limited, to promote social stability and national elite control. Jones (2022) puts it well: ‘Enlargement of the sector is referred to as massification, carrying connotations of unwieldiness and threat, as though hordes of commoners are rampaging over college lawns’ (p. 145). Although the cultural reference point of elite education in popular culture tends to draw on UK and US examples, the importance of French elite values in HE has also been well-examined (Bourdieu, 1996; Deer, 2003; van Zanten and Maxwell, 2015).

Elite actors either belong to traditional hierarchies (somewhat opaque in the 21st century but including members of the top professions, private schools, churches, clubs, etc.) or a more contemporary concentration of networked power and resources in so-called meritocracy-supporting, liberal elites consistent with the world described in The New Spirit of Capitalism. First, we address traditional elites who reject mass education to defend their already-obtained status and rank, holding onto all kinds of prejudiced beliefs to justify elite control. Elite criticism reflects a view of mass education as a threat to the natural order of things; that is, a deliberately asymmetric power relationship between the governors and governed. These worldviews likewise lampoon HE as dominated by imperatives of the totalitarian visions from the industrial world. Education bureaucracies are presented as communist-like organisations, manipulating university administration with the aim of ‘levelling’ society or ‘dumbing down’ (see, e.g. Ahmed, 2022). HE management is said to be fundamentally misguided, lowering standards to increase admissions revenue (a critique of market values).

However, elite rhetoric similarly makes use of industrial ‘use value’ arguments against the unworthiness of certain degree programmes, reinforcing portrayals of the unworthiness of those students who take them. Traditionalists follow-up with an old-world paternalism aimed at protecting the working classes from exploitation by ‘university bureaucrats’, supposing that they would be better employed performing functionary, skills-based labour (see Goodhart, 2020 who argues that technical as well as care work should enjoy the same societal valuation – both morally and financially – as employment requiring HE qualification). Attacks on mass higher education have set its expansion against technical and further education, less as complementary parts of the sector and more as opposed in use value for graduates (e.g. The Critic, 2022; De Quetteville, 2023). Then UK Education Secretary, Williamson (2020), rejected as ‘an absurd mantra’ the Blair Government’s aim to have 50% of young people in university education. HE is explicitly criticised on use value grounds, as ‘training people for jobs that don’t exist’ and ‘qualifications for qualifications sake’ (Williamson, 2020). The tone of the speech reflects a culture war or ‘wedge politics’ strategy to appeal to working class voters, setting the university educated against his own ‘stand for the forgotten 50%’ (Williamson, 2020) of other young people who would be supported through new further education programmes. These young people are presented as having been betrayed by a university system that promises value but does not deliver; ‘what could be more dispiriting for a young person to think that the only way they can succeed is if they undertake a degree – only to find that it doesn’t open the doors that they dreamed of?’ (Williamson, 2020).

The post-2010 Orbán government’s HE policy also includes elements of a traditional, albeit tacit, elitism. Policy change over the last decade – that is, reduced university places, increased tuition fees, reduced state scholarships, the requirement for all students to have taken advanced-level examinations in at least in one subject – have led to not only a marked decrease in the overall number of HE applicants (Oktatói Hálózat, 2020), they have most acutely impacted socio-economically disadvantaged students (Polónyi, 2020). Since there has been no attempt to offset this outcome through widening participation measures or incentives (Berács et al., 2017), the chances of a university place for students from the most disadvantaged regions has dramatically decreased, freezing social mobility (Polónyi, 2022). While this move to reproduce and intensify existing social hierarchies fits the Orbán government’s broader policy aim of prioritising the middle and upper-middle classes (Mózer et al., 2015; Scheiring, 2020), it risks losing a sizeable share of prospective voters from disadvantaged backgrounds. To pre-empt the potential grievance of working-class voters over restricted access to HE, the government has, like UK conservative critics, questioned both its market and intrinsic value by opposing it to vocational education. Orbán (2014) argued that vocational training offers a better pathway than university to a successful life. To increase the number of students pursuing vocational qualifications and thus elevating its social value, the government cut the compulsory secondary school leaving age from 18 to 16 years-old (Matthews, 2017). These policy changes support the social goals of the government’s reindustrialisation strategy. Instead of increasing the number of highly skilled graduates needed for developing value-added industries, the reforms created a larger pool of semi- or unskilled workers suitable for mid-range industrial productivity. In other words, these revaluation strategies have achieved a double purpose: increasing economic activity within every social class, while also reproducing asymmetric relations of power between them. However, the elitist element of this HE policy remains implicit, cloaked by the government’s vocational revaluation strategy.

Contrasting with their traditional elite rivals, liberal meritocratic elites have left behind the ‘old world’ in occupying top decision-making roles in the corporate sector, media and government. Like conservatives, they share a top-down vision of society, but this form of elitism is even more influential because it steers close to an ‘official justification’ (Boltanski, 2011: 124) of inequality consistent with a mass education model. Liberal elites permit modifications to educational inequality by allowing individualised entry to elite institutions, to recruit the ‘best and brightest’ who will command resources for greater profits, innovation, and technological and social change executed from above. Such revaluation strategies implicitly commit to stratification across the HE sector, dividing elite groupings of students from middle-ranking and technical strata. (In this respect, liberal elites are comfortable with aspects of productivist discourse where it is consistent with stratification). And, unlike conservatives, meritocratic elites are comfortable with social diversity and inclusion goals even as they promote ‘enrichment’ strategies through the enhancement of elite schooling and conceive of the rest of the sector in more ‘functional terms’ – that is, something for experimentation, testing and efficient organisation. Mijs and Savage (2020: 399) identify the inevitability of elitism in the rhetoric of the liberal meritocratic model: ‘the conception that people can be arrayed according to their “merit” can itself only be determined by a testing apparatus which will inherently require an elite infrastructure to determine it (for, as Marx put it, “who will educate the educators?”)’. The maintenance of inequality is compensated for in the form of equality of opportunity programmes, for instance UK ‘widening participation’ measures (Connell-Smith and Hubble, 2018) that aim to increase the visibility of, and access to, universities for minority students. But Jones (2022) points out that this scheme cherry-picks a small group of specifically talented students rather than addressing the systematic exclusions performed by meritocratic admissions. This serves as a parallel revaluation strategy of increasing symbolic equality, but which does not undermine the elite hegemony over HE, justifying the continuation of existing means of social reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Sandel, 2020).

Populist criticisms of value in higher education

So far, we have drawn out modes of justification for reforming HE that break away from neoliberal market worth but can be – and are being – accommodated through sector-wide compromises. A more dramatic challenge, and one less compatible with compromise, comes from the political sphere. Factions of the global political right made targeting universities central to their efforts at mobilising ‘cultural backlash’ movements. We conceive of key features of this targeting as a revaluation strategy aimed at reducing the symbolic capital of intellectuals and the campus as a culturally influential institution. Populist attacks on universities single out intellectuals for pursuing partisan, highly liberal values, implicitly at odds with public conventions, or even nationalistic conceptions of the common good. Critical rhetoric assumes that intellectuals’ professed values are, in fact, self-interested, falling outside the general interest supposed in a ‘civic world’ justification of acting for the common good (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). Such attacks are highly rhetorical insofar as they work by implicit devaluation: they cast liberal intellectuals as radical and threatening elites, without defining exactly what values constitute the common good (or the national interest). This makes for an aggressive, often sarcastic, tone, appealing to elite cynicism about intellectuals and to members of the public who feel disenfranchised by social and economic inequality. Populist reasoning operates by drawing sharp distinctions between ‘the people’ and elites, effected by a strong anti-intellectual rhetoric (Merkley, 2020; Wodak, 2017). It aims to appeal electorally to a wider group of non-elite voters and is equally part of an intra-elite conflict. Right-wing activism implicates universities in an all-encompassing cultural critique of trends in western institutions, particularly those subject to (what they see as) the long-term transformative impact of new social movements on family, sexuality, media, public behaviour and education (see, for instance, Goodwin, 2023). We claim further that the targeting of universities by populist elements of the right has become an inevitability given the growing size and cultural power of education systems in shaping the course of modernisation itself, and therefore the conflicts that define it (see also Dillabough, 2022). The leaderships of universities are themselves part of the cultural and policy elite and thus in competition with traditional conservative rivals for influence. At the same time, the transformation of higher education into a consumer good, with its unequal outcomes justified by neoliberal values, has itself contributed to the rise of populist politics, as the meritocratic ideal humiliates the losers from social transformation (Robertson and Nestore, 2022).

The populist right regularly satirises the ‘woke’ politics of education (Douglass, 2021; Paternotte and Verlo, 2021). The most aggressive expression of this populist critique involves sustained rhetoric about the rising impact of ‘cultural Marxism’ (Jamin 2014; Paternotte and Verloo, 2021; Sharpe, 2020). This ‘culture war’ strategy captures several themes simultaneously, namely paranoia about the creeping return of intellectual Marxists who, having failed to win an economic and class struggle to ‘level’ society through authoritarian socialism, have camouflaged their agenda in cultural struggles aimed at overcoming the oppression of the most marginal citizens (e.g. Cremen, 2022; Peterson, 2017). Campaigns focus on the critical social sciences (critical race theory, gender studies) and the apparent refusal of university administrations to maintain ‘genuine’ free speech given the power of identity issue activism (Cammaerts, 2022). Cultural Marxism rhetoric is not only associated with far-right activism, embittered traditional elites, or populists; it also draws in the mainstream political right and some elements of the left (Cammaerts, 2022).

Despite the common discussion of ‘culture war’ wedge politics strategies, it is, however, difficult to believe that, with universities and primary schools the targets of this critique, a large audience of citizens is motivated to vote on these issues. Indeed, in Brazil, where former President Bolsonaro’s administration reduced HE funding and targeted the teaching of philosophy and sociology, the university sector remained a source of pride for the public (Baiocchi and Silva, 2020). Moreover, the cost of living, health care, immigration and other social concerns almost always lead opinion polls that survey the most salient issues at elections, with universities rarely a central theme (Office for National Statistics, 2023). Attacks on universities still serve important electoral functions; for example, they mobilise conservative activists and allow right-wing parties to generate conflicts within rival liberal or social-democratic parties. They also provide public justifications for interventions into HE that are part of intense intra-elite conflicts that seek to weaken the growing impact of universities on cultural modernisation. Critical rhetoric on HE unifies conservative elites and populist insurgents who both resent the loss of influence over national power structures produced by the development of public infrastructure and expansive welfare states. Weakening the sector is therefore as seen as weakening the new cultural infrastructure that undermines traditional hierarchies.

In the UK, right-wing concerns reflect populist tactics by the traditional Conservative Party, which has targeted intellectual elites, raising concerns about radical ideological programmes and biases promoted in universities, most prominently expressed in ‘no-platforming’ efforts by student unions (despite little evidence; Jones, 2022). This provided the impetus for the Conservative government’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (2023). The legislation impinges upon university autonomy by codifying and forcing them to do what they already do; ‘6(a) to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions’, protected via a complaints mechanism (2023). This builds upon the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 that instituted the regulatory authority, the Office for Students. Under this law, the ‘autonomy’ of universities is specifically protected, but also explicitly balanced against other mitigating factors, including promoting quality and choice for students, competition between providers, and ‘value for money’ (2017; S2(1)). The clear tensions between autonomy and counter-balancing factors situate the state regulator as the judge of how well universities meet both productive efficiency goals and market outcomes, and consequently how much autonomy universities are to be allowed. With the core function of free speech and inquiry now also regulated, however ‘light touch’ in practice, the sector has lost significant autonomy over university operations. This institutionalises the populist approach of singling out intellectuals as acting outside the national interest, such that state intervention becomes necessary.

In the cases of both Brazil and Hungary, political elites have mobilised populist right-wing activism against HE, stifling and co-opting the sector’s socially productive capacities in the service of ‘national’ values. Brazil’s Bolsonaro-led far-right government deployed legal, financial and administrative methods against academics and federal universities, intending to curb their capacity as autonomous societal actors (Balbachevsky and Albuquerque, 2021). Bolsonaro relied on the Brazilian new right’s authoritarian imagination of cultural and moral corruption and degeneration in the form of ‘cultural Marxism’, identified as the product of the federal university system (Fiori and Fiori Arantes, 2023). In a multi-angled attack, the government positioned universities as far from accepted national values, carrying out campaigns against ‘lefty’ academics’ ‘ideological indoctrination’ and proposing a 30% funding cut to public universities, while concurrently disrupting convention by directly appointing rectors and intervening in administration appointments (Baiocchi and Silva, 2020). Bolsonaro’s second minister of education, Abraham Weintraub, deployed both industrialist use-value and civic-value populist arguments to revalue the social standing of universities in the public eye. Discussing sociology, gender studies and philosophy, Weintraub threatened to fund only courses with ‘immediate return to taxpayers’ (De Andrade Antunes, 2019), a claim he complemented by referring to federal universities as ‘dens for communists and perverts’ (Balbachevsky and Albuquerque, 2021). By generating rhetorical distance in terms of civic values between these disciplines and the public, the Bolsonaro Government specifically targeted the humanities and social sciences, but the wider effect of populist anti-intellectualism also posed a threat to the scientific infrastructure of Brazil. Natural scientists and entire research institutions that questioned the government’s policy position on climate change, for instance, were subjected to interference or even government purges (Balbachevsky and Albuquerque, 2021). By opposing established knowledge and science as manifestations of left cultural hegemony (Fiori and Fiori Arantes, 2023), the government attempted to politicise and rhetorically devalue HE as the source of factional leftist ideas and interests, such as equal rights.

Despite Bolsonaro government efforts to decrease the socially productive capacities of Brazilian HE, most of its actions failed. Here, we see the limitations of populist governments, which have a poor track record of governing capacity (Bellodi et al., 2024; Schularick et al., 2021). The government could not shift public values nor force institutional reforms of the federal university system, which, over many decades, has built a broad alliance of societal actors and amassed wide support and respect from the public, federal agencies, Congress and the Supreme Court (Baiocchi and Silva, 2020; Balbachevsky and Albuquerque, 2021). Lacking an understanding of parliamentary protocols and the operations and decision-making process of research bodies as well as misunderstanding public sentiment towards universities as institutions promoting socioeconomic mobility, Bolsonaro’s government could only instil symbolic criticism without stifling institutional capacity. The leading role Brazilian universities played during the COVID-19 pandemic further increased their public value (Balbachevsky and Albuquerque 2021). The main outcome was soured relations between universities and the state, observed in ‘distrust and estrangement between epistemic communities and policy makers, . . . [which] severely damaged the morale of the research community’ (Balbachevsky and Albuquerque, 2021). We note that Bolsonaro’s attacks on HE were only one facet of a larger concerted intervention in education policy, including efforts to deliberalize school curricula (De Azevedo and Robertson, 2022).

The Brazilian populist intervention was weak because values rhetoric that makes direct and derogatory attacks on opponents runs up against existing interests and promotes strong opposition. Rhetoric must be institutionalised in policy to achieve a transformative effect. The Hungary case, alternatively, demonstrates how populist mobilisation can go beyond symbolic attacks by co-opting existing HE institutions, repurposing them in the name of the ultimate civic value, the ‘nation’. Establishing political hegemony, according to Orbán (2018), requires exerting political power over cultural practices, that is, influencing and, if possible, defining cultural trends, collective beliefs and social customs. Orbán did not launch a direct broadside at established institutions, but more strategically reconfigured existing ones, subjecting HE to new value demands in terms of national culture. The first strategy to institutionalise the revaluation has been to squeeze the institutional autonomy of HEIs (Kováts et al., 2017). The government introduced multiple forms of managerial oversight into public education, primarily to exert political control over universities. This intervention first involved the direct government appointment of chancellors, followed by the introduction of a supervisory body (Antonowicz et al., 2022), and most recently, the establishment of foundation-universities (EUA, 2023). Of these policies, the third offers the greatest opportunity for the government to exert political and cultural control over HE. Legislation grants the Prime Minister political power to appoint the Board of Trustees, with complete oversight over internal and external university matters (EUA, 2023) for an indefinite period. Consequently, teaching and research can be exposed to the ideological, political and economic interests of the governing elite. This is evidenced by Orbán’s (2021) insistence of appointing only trustees who hold a ‘national outlook’, among whom many are ex-government politicians and government-friendly elites. The government’s control over Boards inherently carries conflict of interest risks. Without adequate means to sanction the former, in 2023, the European Commission (EC, 2023) opted for sanctioning the latter by suspending foundation-universities from the Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe mobility programmes to protect the Union budget and ensure its transparent use. ⁵

The Orbán government’s second strategy to establish political hegemony involved liberal conventions of scientific and political pluralism, which has simultaneously contributed to the revaluation of HE around political loyalty goals. In 2017, the Hungarian Government revoked accreditation and funding for gender studies and soon afterwards created a legal environment in which the teaching and research activities of Central European University (CEU) became untenable within Hungary. Although market-based and legal arguments were mobilised by the government to justify its policies, it was evident that these were politically motivated (Bárd, 2020; Pető, 2018). The Government not only rejected ‘socially-constructed’ views of gender (Pető, 2018), it also opposed multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism (Geva, 2017; Reuters, 2015), values championed by CEU (Enyedi, 2018). The removal of gender studies and CEU from Hungary represented a step towards the government’s institutionalisation of illiberal and anti-pluralistic values (Enyedi, 2018).

Populism, however, does not necessarily entail full-scale anti-intellectualism. The Hungarian populist right has combined attacks on some intellectuals on the grounds of civic values while simultaneously nurturing universities and research institutions, but only those that are less critical or, indeed, supportive of the Government’s ideological positions. One example is the Government’s flagship higher education project, Matthias Corvinus College (MCC), which received generous resources from the Hungarian state in the form of shares, cash and real estate (Kalan, 2020). The alignment of MCC’s values with nationalist ideology is evident in its mission statement: it cultivates the ‘cultural, economic, and social elite’ of the future by nurturing ‘a patriotic generation . . . who can confidently represent Hungary in global competition and participate in national and international decisions’. Through the MCC, the Government can reposition the national interest as the highest value of academic training. In sum, Orbán’s Governments have not been hostile towards academia per se, but to liberal universities emphasising value pluralism and social critique. They pursued revaluation through entrenching a nationalistic and politically loyal model of HE.

Disruption to settlements, domination and new compromises

As noted, these new conflicts are already disrupting HE conventions, posing a major challenge to university administrators, staff and students alike, with some disputes involving increasingly difficult-to-mediate value positions. Our comparison of national policy priorities in four countries identifies differing sectoral pressures at work without ignoring the multiple forms of HE contestation operating in each. In Australia and the UK, we demonstrate how this challenge is moving the sector beyond a predominantly neoliberal compromise informed by the ‘laws of the market’ and NPM in the direction of productivism and skills. Even so, in both countries traditional elites and populists have influenced the policy discussion, seeking containment of a burgeoning market-driven sector on the bases of multiple and sometimes contrasting justifications. In Hungary and Brazil, populist influences on state-HE relations have been even more dominant – in both cases, outright retrenchment policies have featured. However, the outcomes highlight variability and ongoing contest: in one case, Brazil, such an attack failed at least in the medium term; in the case of Hungary, they have succeeded.

Given its changing scale and role, increasing politicisation of higher education is now unavoidable – politics will further tax the sector’s ‘critical capacities’ (Wagner, 2014; also, Browne, 2014) for new compromises across rhetorical worlds. Speculatively, these conflicts will potentially inform HE policy shifts by other European governments in the near future, posing further challenges to European university autonomy. In more extreme cases, the HE sector will bend to the incursions of political and/or administrative power. Such ‘domination’ in the words of Boltanski (2011) will ‘restrict . . . the field of critique’ (p. 117) that makes compromises meaningful, thereby exaggerating the status of ‘official justifications’ that are merely ‘empty words’ (p. 125). In others, universities will continue to assert the form of autonomy that we describe here: even in the presence of more competition for sectoral control, higher education actors will still mediate contrary demands for industry relevance, fiscal constraint, market value, liberal progress and conservative visions of free speech. In the latter case, this task has long exceeded the possibility of ‘unifying’ values: the sector will likely continue to attempt accommodations, in increasingly diffuse ways, of the competing demands produced by complexity, marketisation and agonistic politics. That task overlaps with efforts to preserve autonomy over its functions and operations. However, continual accommodations may well strengthen aspects of ‘change-driven’ managerialism that is self-justifying in its own momentum, intentionally functioning ‘without (any) ascription of worth’ (Boltanski, 2011: 134).

In any case, new compromises are already taking shape, evident in the sector’s responsiveness to industrial productivity where public and private funds for skilling the workforce further incentivise restructuring of the learning environment. One ‘hybrid’ response combining compatible aspects of neoliberal and productivist worth looms as a likely compromise with global purchase. However, to avoid politically motivated retrenchment, sector leaders and administrators may increasingly disestablish traditional subject areas in favour of a narrower training focus. That compromise would combine the civic patriotism asserted by populists that also reinforces productivist claims to promote the industrial worth of higher study. Perhaps, then, the ‘force’ that is needed most in the sector’s changing compromises is the re-assertion of the civic worth of free inquiry in flourishing democracies.