Outsides

The concept of the political outside is derived from Jean-François Lyotard’s (Reference Lyotard1988 [1983]) critical perspective on the state, representation and politics. Lyotard’s insight revolves around the persistent danger of universalizing structures – particularly the modern capitalist and bureaucratic state – and their tendency to internalize conflict, absorb opposition and present themselves as the only legitimate horizon of political life. Although Lyotard did not use or deploy the notion of political outsides, we have crafted it from his attempts to ‘find a way to think against the state that has no outside’ (Readings Reference Readings1993: xx). The initial conceptual work, upon which we now build, was discussed in ‘Spectacle and spectators: higher education and the “disappearance” of democracy’ (Keet Reference Keet2014).

There are logical connections between the outsides derived from Lyotard and similar work done by Malabou (Reference Malabou2022). Whereas Lyotard agitates for the need to think beyond the state, Malabou frames an outside as a critique to western philosophy in the case of deconstruction and then reads decolonial thinking as the ‘outside of the outside’ (Malabou Reference Malabou2022: 184). That is, decolonial thinking takes up the first outside, the first critique, and subjects it to a second critique through experiences and epistemologies of those historically excluded by the western canon, as a method for generating new forms of critical resistance. A further strand can be found in Moten and Harney’s (Reference Moten and Harney2004; Harney and Moten Reference Harney and Moten2014) notion of the undercommons and Moten’s work on Black studies (Moten Reference Moten2017; Reference Moten2018a; Reference Moten2018b), which can be similarly regarded as an example of the ‘outside of the outside’. Whereas Moten’s work does not feature in Malabou’s treatment of outsides, we hope to bring these disparate writings together by suggesting that Moten’s undercommons can be considered as a key instance of the outside of the university.

A central argument in this article begins with the observation that higher education tends to present the state as the ultimate authority in political life. This is the canvas of most of our discussions on higher education and the crises it faces, and we suggest that universities can mobilize in unprecedented ways to challenge dominant ways of political thinking: to create political outsides – spaces and ideas that exist beyond the state’s imagination and that challenge the state’s monopoly on political meaning. Political outsides, so we argue in line with Keet, ‘are those forms of thought and actions that refuse to see the state as the celestial pole of political thought; rebel against politics as “the site of secular redemption” (Readings Reference Readings1993: xix); work towards an “authoritatively legitimate” (Readings Reference Readings1993) political critique; and explore ways by which “the [higher education] project can henceforth express itself, organize itself, and fight (Lyotard Reference Lyotard1993: 276)”’ (Keet Reference Keet2014: 852–853).

The crucial distinction lies in the following logic: although the state remains the most important political actor, it does not automatically follow that it should be regarded as the terminal point of our political consciousness.

The present status quo, in which the state is the final word in politics, is incredibly powerful. It shapes how we organize society, universities, ourselves and our practices in higher education in both the global north and south; and it steers the formation of our social, academic and professional identities and practices. Critiques levelled against this powerful discursive formation are routinely absorbed and neutralized within this system, rather than remaining ‘outside’ and apart from it. Yet, we suspect that our university knowledges, curricula and arrangements of engagement, research, learning and teaching, as well as the angles of our academic souls themselves, more often than not frame the state as a kind of procedure or technology for all political thought. This is what we refer to with our claim that the state has no political outsides. And this is our challenge, in a moment when the dominant notions of both public good and social legitimacy acquire their meanings largely from state-structured discourses and the state’s imagination of politics. The current attacks on universities that are aimed at eroding the social legitimacy and credibility of higher education can thus be read as being manufactured by a form of statist politics that does not (and cannot) cognize an outside beyond itself.

Keet (Reference Keet2014) uses this framework to launch a meta-critique of South African and global higher education, arguing that universities, through their inertia and their alignment with both state and market imperatives, have abandoned their role as generators of political outsides. Rather than cultivating spaces for alternative forms of politics, universities have come to produce professionals and citizens who are channelled, by university programming, through normative pathways sanctioned by the state. They also validate and centre political discourse on the state as the ultimate horizon for representation, thereby narrowing the scope of political imagination to what is permissible within state-defined terms. Although one may argue that the plethora of ways in which we think civil society and the private sector positions them as extra-state formations, because they are generally referred to in reference to the state, they continue to reinscribe the state as the essence of our politics. In opposition to this assimilation, we theorize political outsides as conceptual, practical and organizational efforts to exist, act and think in spaces and ways that are not pre-scripted by the state’s logic or legitimated by its structures. They are the efforts required for a truly radical politics – freed from state capture.

The idea of the university re-imagined, for Barnett (Reference Barnett2006, Reference Barnett2013, Reference Barnett2014), does not foreground the ‘stunted imagination’ (Lǎzǎroiu Reference Lǎzǎroiu2013: 172) of the university as a function of state as the endpoint of politics. Yet, for us, the ownership of the state of our political imaginations is precisely linked to the current crises the higher education sector is facing, both private and public. The contested and contradictory discourses on the contemporary university that oscillate between the market logics of ‘excellence’ (which also enfolds the ideology of the Sustainable Development Goals) on the one hand, and decolonial, anti-racist transformation on the other, function as a stalemate by which the reproductive impulses of higher education are facilitated and advanced. This includes the hegemonic positioning of the corporatist, neoliberal university, the convergence of white and black conservatisms and the incorporation and disciplining of decolonial critiques of the sector. This matrix derives its power from both the material ideology of capital and our own affective investment in the reproduction of the system, irrespective of our own beliefs and delusions in the transformative and social-justice potential of our work. This impasse, so we suggest, can be attributed to statist, and by extension, market conceptions of politics. It is both given to and produced by us, the university agents, and options for thinking otherwise are severely constrained.

We therefore extend our argument to include the need for university outsides, as we believe that political and university outsides share the same logical architecture. We recently explored the concept of university outsides through the idea of ‘fires on the margin’ as an instance of university, and thus, political outsides (Keet and Rafaely Reference Keet, Rafaely, Keet and van der Merweforthcoming). Fires on the margin are a particular form of counter-imaginary spaces at the boundaries of higher education, spaces which invite moments deliberately and relationally set up not only to advance a decolonial, abolitionist or refusal-driven counter-imaginary and programme, but also to animate a radical institutional change project mobilized by alienation, rage and, ultimately, hope. This ‘allows us to think through different modalities of generating counter-practices, from mass mobilisation to work that is, at one and the same time, institutionalised and marginal within localised university spaces’ (Keet and Rafaely Reference Keet, Rafaely, Keet and van der Merweforthcoming: 9). Our thoughts are informed by la paperson’s (2017) notion of the ‘third university’: a university within a university within a university – here the first university is the one that accumulates, in the manner of traditional university structures, and represents the dominant, colonial, capitalist institution. The second university critiques the first but remains embedded within its structures. The third exists within and alongside the first and second and is not a separate institution but a set of decolonial practices, interventions and agents. La paperson’s contribution lies in the conceptualization of the ‘third university’, a ‘decolonizing university’ which ‘assembles decolonising machines out of scrap parts from colonial technology’, metaphorically speaking (la paperson 2017: 53).

Perhaps we should settle on this formulation and regard the university as inevitably being an incoherent institution, in the productive sense of the word, where important work is acknowledged across a wide spectrum within the institution. The university is thus not a monolithic entity, but an assemblage of practices (la paperson 2017) that makes possible the existence of different universities within a university: the activist, mainstream, traditional, approved, entrepreneurial and decolonial university are already present and expressed in one university.

The idea of the third university mobilizes insights from alternative spaces of making life, art, connections, science, innovation and economies that go against the grain. This unorthodoxy is fugitive in the sense of how Moten (Reference Moten2018a) developed the idea, which provides us with another way to engage our arguments. Reflecting on Kant’s conception of the lawlessness of the imagination, and at the same time critiquing Kant’s anti-Black racism, Moten argues for a ‘lawless imaginary against a white supremacist legislation of thought’, and one may connect this legislation of thought to knowledges and their colonial imprisonment within the disciplines (Moten Reference Moten2018a: 89). The outside, for Moten, can come into being as ‘a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed’ (Moten Reference Moten2018a: 131). That is, to transgress, for the purposes of our argument, the proper of politics vis-à-vis higher education, in the direction of a ‘politics of fugitive refusal’ (Moufawad-Paul Reference Moufawad-Paul2019: para. 8). Or to escape and transgress the university proper.

Moten’s deployment of the concepts of fugitivity and refusal suggests that the university itself has no outside; hence the idea, developed with Harney, of the undercommons; a relational formation of the university that is itself not the university. ‘As an “unregulated wildness” the undercommons is the space outside of and abandoned by institutional [university] arrangements and the logics of the social order’ (Halberstam Reference Halberstam, Harney and Moten2014: 7). In a sense, the undercommons can be read as a university outside.

Outsides are thus, for us, a concept that can hold various counter-institutional praxes, including fires on the margin (Keet and Rafaely Reference Keet, Rafaely, Keet and van der Merweforthcoming), the undercommons (Harney and Moten Reference Harney and Moten2014), outsides of the outsides (Malabou Reference Malabou2022) and la paperson’s third university (la paperson 2017). In this dominant scheme, outsides may invite formations that cultivate spaces of refusal, fugitivity and radical study that operate with, against and beyond established, statist governance regimes and the ‘university-as-such’ (Undercommoning Collective 2016).

Both the undercommons and fires on the margin operate from an ontological position of fugitivity; a condition that rebels against institutional capture whilst working the university materially. They reject the agreed-upon categories of academic professionalism and eschew the rules by which academic work is credentialized and legitimated; yet they work with, against and beyond these rules at one and the same time, much as we do in this article. As we demonstrate in our writing on fires on the margin, the knowledge and social projects of the university can be considered a series of relational practices akin to the ‘being together in homelessness’ of the undercommons (Harney and Moten Reference Harney and Moten2014: 96). In both instances, refusal of the university suggests the active creation of alternative forms of intellectual and social life.

Whereas the undercommons consists of a relationality rejected by the university and works on the discarded parts of the university-as-is, fires on the margin are conceptualized on the recognition that transformation requires not just critique or alternative spaces. It also needs holding environments that can protect and nurture radical possibilities while remaining porous enough to engage with the broader university’s struggles, so that ‘fires’ are thus simultaneously marginal and central. Both of these examples, despite their distinct ontologies, emerge as outsides that may point the way by which the possibilities of non-statist conceptions of the social legitimacy of the university can take shape. It is outsides that steer us to the abyss of state-centred and market-driven models of higher education, where, at these limits, we empty out all redemptive possibilities, to produce a gap for an alternative to emerge (see Benjamin in Martel Reference Martel2011). And, in this gap, we can reimagine both the public good and the social legitimacy of the university.

Social Legitimacy and the Public Good

The conditions that make the current higher-education crises appear as synchronized across the globe are linked to the formulation of the social legitimacy of the university within statist politics. Because the state dominates political imagination, it shapes how public good, institutional autonomy and accountability are understood and enacted. This facilitates the ease with which state overreach within universities plays itself out globally. Outsides, we propose, is the ‘place’ from which to resist state-centric framings of these key concepts. Because outsides produce a gap for an alternative to emerge, a key proposition of our argument is that it is also the ‘space’ from which to imagine a new legitimacy ecosystem where universities function as a ‘fifth estate’ (Little Reference Little1924) – an independent institution within democratic architectures that fosters critical discourse.

We read the multiplicity of higher-education crises as constituted by a range of political, cultural and socio-economic factors that shape the framing of the public and social legitimacy of the university. These framings are tied into our conception of the public good and the institutional autonomy and public accountability of its higher-education institutions. Public good is a contested notion that refers to collective societal value, whilst institutional autonomy touches on the degree of self-governance with a concomitant obligation of being accountable to and in the public interest. Social legitimacy designates the extent to which a general agreement exists on the value and acceptance of an institution.

Exploring these notions is key to making sense of the cluster of higher education crises we are currently experiencing. However, the state’s presence as the ‘celestial pole’ of our political thought, its steering of our political imaginations and horizons, plays a dominant role in how these ideas are understood and actualized. By using our conceptualization of ‘outsides’ to re-think the social legitimacy of the university, we examine the higher-education landscape both globally and within the South African context, identifying historical trajectories of governance that have shaped – and compromised – the purpose and integrity of the university.

As an initial step, rather than assuming the university is a public good, we ask: what does it entail for the university to be a public good, and whose interests would this serve? We argue that ‘public good’ is not, and cannot be, a universally defined term, but is rather one that is emergent and continually redefined in each moment and environment. The mechanisms of public accountability and institutional autonomy are well-placed to ensure the ongoing integrity of the university with regard to its mission. These mechanisms, however, are dependent on the robust political and university spaces that we term outsides.

Throughout many parts of the world, however, these spaces have become increasingly compromised: politics has been collapsed into the state, while the university has aligned itself with a neoliberal programme. Because of this, we argue, the university’s role as a public-good institution is not one that we can simply take for granted, but rather one that must be constantly revisited to ensure that it remains accountable to society as well as safeguards its knowledge production project.

Like other imaginaries, the university exists in the interplay between material apparatuses and the practices of social actors (Kamola Reference Kamola2012). Without the public’s ongoing investment in the importance and credibility of this institution, its power disintegrates, and it foregoes its centrality to the functioning of the society in which it is embedded. Because of this, social legitimacy underwrites the very existence of the university, ensuring that it remains a public good worthy of protection and advancement (Dewey Reference Dewey1917). Because of the overtly productive functions of the university – specifically the production and consumption of knowledge in pursuit of social advancement (Calhoun Reference Calhoun2006) – the idea that universities are a public good has long been treated as self-evident. More recently, however, the university’s public-good contribution has begun to be measured in economic and utilitarian terms (Cross and Ndofirepi Reference Cross and Ndofirepi2016) so that ‘understandings of the public good(s) created by higher education have become ideologically “frozen”’ (Marginson Reference Marginson, Gibbs and Barnett2011: 412) in many ways. Problematically, in moments where the university’s legitimacy is being challenged, the ‘public good’-ness of the university is too often left unexamined and simply assumed, despite these assumptions being ideologically embedded and always reproductive of dominant discourses.

Historically, the notion of public good can be traced to the late nineteenth century, a period of time during which the monarchy was required to provide for the welfare of its human subjects. During this time, a public good was defined by the fact that its non-provision would lead to ‘externalities’, or significant negative consequences (Desai Reference Desai, Kaul, Conceição, Le Goulven and Mendoza2003). Examples include sanitation, a justice system and similar requirements for governing a population. In this way, a public good can be defined as something that is universally beneficial, or beneficial to a large group of people. Today, we understand that ‘the provision of public goods is a political process’ (Desai Reference Desai, Kaul, Conceição, Le Goulven and Mendoza2003: 63); but it is important to keep in mind the ways in which this normative ideal emerged.

From a pure economics perspective, Samuelson’s (Reference Samuelson1954: 387) ‘collective consumption good’ founded the modern theory of public goods, which describes the necessary conditions of a public good as non-rivalrous (giving it to someone does not take it away from anyone else) and non-excludable (that it is equally available to everyone). Margolis (Reference Margolis1955), however, points out that it is exceedingly difficult to meet these two conditions for most material goods and thus there are no tangible examples of ‘pure’ public goods. Different ‘versions’ of public good often meet one or both of these criteria to some degree, but never fully. In this way the idea of public good remains ambiguous, theoretical and inaccessible.

A further complexity relates to the nature of ‘publicness’ itself. Habermas (Reference Habermas1989 [1962]) described the public sphere as the place of critical public debate – an ‘interlocking set of institutions, networks, and activities’ that form part of civil society and intersect with the state and the market (Pusser et al. Reference Pusser, Kempner, Marginson and Ordorika2012: 2). Publicness is thus necessarily a social formation made up of different groups that operate independently of the state and the economic sector while sharing some of its aims. An important aspect of the public sphere is its independence from the state, which allows it to critique and challenge government and introduce institutional checks for power. But, as Pusser et al. (Reference Pusser, Kempner, Marginson and Ordorika2012: 3) note, ‘Above all, [the public sphere] was a forum for critical intelligence and creative discussion about the issues of the day and, alongside family, community, market, and nation-state, it was one of the media in which social solidarity was formed’. Universities today embody some aspects of publicness; for example, they promote critical social engagement, they are (technically) autonomous and they are important for social solidarity.

Morrell (Reference Morrell2009) explores the question ‘What counts as good?’ by reference to Aristotle, who described the ultimate good for mankind as activities where we pursue those things that make us distinctively human. Morell notes Aristotle’s point from The Nichomachean Ethics that ‘though it is worthwhile to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer … to attain it for a nation or for city states’ (Morell Reference Morrell2009: 547). This is the rationale for the government’s role in providing public goods, that ‘political administrations exist to create the conditions within which citizens can live the good life’ (Morell Reference Morrell2009: 547). While the state provides and/or regulates the provision of public goods, the ultimate role of the state is to create an environment in which its citizens can ‘flourish’.

What defines ‘flourishing’ or ‘the good life’, or what makes us ‘distinctively human’, is something that is not settled within these definitions, we think purposefully. Marquand (Reference Marquand2004: 32–33) shares a list of examples of public good items, such as safe food, clean water, a judiciary system, etc., but similarly avoids explicit definitions. The use of examples and subjective formulations coupled with the absence of a material definition suggests to us that these writers and thinkers understood that it is simply not possible to describe a public good in universal or settled terms, since it changes in any given context. Thus, the idea of a public good is necessarily embedded in its contextual environment, from which an understanding of ‘flourishing’ and ‘distinctive humanness’ becomes available. This is perhaps why the use of examples is helpful too – they gesture toward the ‘aim’ of the good rather than defining what actually counts as it, allowing others in different contexts to find parallel types of goods that achieve similar ends. Emirbayer and Mische (Reference Emirbayer and Mische1998: 995) note that ‘a concern for situated judgments supplants any simple belief in the unproblematic application of universal norms’ in Aristotle’s writings on ethics and practical wisdom.

This concern with situated accounts emphasizes that context is crucial to determinations of virtue. An important example to consider here is the human-centredness of our current conception of the public good. Our investment in human flourishing has so far precluded considerations of planetary health and climate stability, likely because these systems were not as threatened in previous eras. The present context requires a non-Anthropocene conceptualization of the public good, not only in terms of human wellbeing but also the wellbeing of Earth itself.

Universities have long been considered a public good, although their nature and mission have changed significantly over time. The first universities were scholarly and theological institutions, with Christianity considered central to their mission. Indeed, as Hazelkorn and Gibson (Reference Hazelkorn and Gibson2019: 260) argue, ‘the “good” was specific to the sociopolitical and theological context, rather than a disembodied, cosmopolitan ideal as it is often deployed in arguments today’. During that time, when religion formed the horizon of thought for most of the world, the university’s alignment with Christianity was a given, and was effectively a public good of that time. As the modern nation-state came to define social formations, the university’s role expanded to nation building and the development of a civil society. The Enlightenment, in Europe, was yet another significant historical moment that influenced the direction of the university to represent, as well as new democratic principles, an allegiance to the scientific method (Hazelkorn and Gibson Reference Hazelkorn and Gibson2019).

Today’s university is very different from its previous iterations, due to developments such as the knowledge economy, competition and rankings and the disaggregation of knowledge into disciplines and schools, among others. However, some of its key functions remain the same: Simon Marginson describes them as

He further notes that universities ‘contribute to government, innovation capacity, and the formation and reproduction of both knowledge and relational human society’ (Marginson Reference Marginson, Gibbs and Barnett2014: 54). Craig Calhoun offers further observations on the ‘public missions’ of the university:

Mahmood Mamdani describes higher education as the place

Even more importantly, ‘in its role as a public sphere the university offers an essential site for analysis and critique of the State and State functions’ (Pusser et al. Reference Pusser, Kempner, Marginson and Ordorika2012: 3). In fact, the university has been described as ‘the paradigmatic institution of the public sphere and of modernity more generally’ (Delanty Reference Delanty2005: 530; see also Kerr Reference Kerr2001). Thus, by all these standards, the university is considered a public good: an institution that contributes to the ‘flourishing’ of society, driven by what makes us ‘distinctively human’. As Bergan et al. (Reference Bergan, Harkavy and van’t Land2013) argue, the shared commitment to public good fundamentally links higher education and democratic society.

The relationship between the university and the state is thus profoundly complex: providing public goods is ‘one of the main rationales for the existence of the State’ (Desai Reference Desai, Kaul, Conceição, Le Goulven and Mendoza2003: 63), meaning that the state depends on the university to reproduce its own legitimacy. The university develops professional capacity for the state and reproduces core functions of its society. At the same time, it relies on the state for funding and for the reproduction of social and economic systems within which it operates. It acts as a critic for the state but simultaneously is accountable to government for its activities. Because of this interdependence the state and the university have long been understood to be mutually reliant on one another to fulfil their roles.

How does the university manage this enormously challenging, often contradictory, task? Two central mechanisms exist to ensure that it remains a public good: public accountability and institutional autonomy. Accountability may be described as an awareness of the needs of society and a willingness and ability to be responsive to them. Its aims are the betterment of society, social and economic redress (Mamdani Reference Mamdani2008) and the explicit politicization of the knowledge project. Autonomy on the other hand refers to the institution’s capacity for academic professional self-regulation (Rowland Reference Rowland2002: 248). University autonomy was affirmed in the Bologna Declaration (Hazelkorn and Gibson Reference Hazelkorn and Gibson2019), allowing universities to set their own research agendas independently from market interests, to avoid commodification and to act as an institutional check for government. Ideally, these two central institutional mechanisms exist in tension to produce an institution that is public in the true sense of the word, embedded in its context, sensitive to its environment and committed to the development of meaningful and rigorous knowledge (Department of Education 1997).

Throughout the world, however, these mechanisms have been severely weakened and now operate in brittle and non-responsive ways. Because of this, the university today is under siege (Darian-Smith Reference Darian-Smith2025), with its relevance called into question on a daily basis (UNESCO 2001; Flemming Reference Flemming2021) and its autonomy increasingly limited. This is evidenced by increasing opposition to academic freedom in countries such as Hungary, India and, more recently, the United States, where the assault on higher education, which began under the Biden administration (Scholars at Risk 2024), is today accelerated by Trumpism and the use of federal funding as a weapon of compliance (Kinzelbach et al. Reference Kinzelbach, Lindberg, Lott and Panaro2025).

In addition to governments’ interference in university operations for ideological and political purposes, there is an anti-intellectualism taking hold in many parts of the world. Universities are portrayed as elitist institutions disconnected from ordinary people’s concerns and spaces that breed ‘woke’ ideology (Kisker and Romano Reference Kisker and Romano2025). Academic freedom is thus positioned as a threat to the university’s relevance and legitimacy by allowing an intellectual elite to continue to operate with no accountability to the public.

The weaponization of funding, the rise of anti-intellectualism and the interference of political actors in the university system present growing evidence that it is not merely universities that are in crisis, but democracy itself (see Scholars at Risk (SAR) 2024; Waghid Reference Waghid2025). That these attacks are taking place in countries that have long served as foundational examples of democracy is even more disturbing, since it encourages these restrictions to be exported to the rest of the world (Repucci and Slipowitz Reference Repucci and Slipowitz2022; SAR 2024).

In South Africa, a country with strong commitments to democracy in the aftermath of fascist Apartheid rule, academic freedom has always been championed and protected. A central task of the first democratic government was to restructure the higher education landscape to ensure that all tertiary institutions were capacitated, inclusive and accessible to all. Thirty years on, the systems are in crisis (Jansen Reference Jansen2023) due to multiple and intersecting factors. For example, massification and juniorization of higher education have resulted in larger numbers of students than ever before, taught by increasingly younger, less experienced adjunct or contract lecturers.

At the same time, managerialism and corporatization have changed the face of higher education, and its embeddedness within a modern/colonial/neoliberal imaginary disciplines its radical and transformative possibilities. The ranking–ratings–hierarchy frenzy and matrix produced by public agencies within the sector and steered by global higher-education forces have generated a competition-driven academy that views knowledge production in commodified terms. These threats are complicated even further by the introduction of generative artificial intelligence and the rise of techno-rationality, which is reshaping our economic, political and cultural worlds (Keet et al. Reference Keet, Staphorst, Penkler and Phuza2023) in unprecedented ways that force us to rethink ‘the notion of “the human”’ itself (Fataar et al. Reference Fataar, Motala, Keet, Lalu, Nuttall, Menon and Staphorst2022: 3). The ‘hyper-technological enframing of the life-world’ (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2012: 11) has generated an uneasiness within higher education about its core functions of teaching, academic citizenship and research. More recently, universities have been captured by discursive framings calling for alignment with ‘decolonization’ and ‘transformation’ that claim to move the university toward greater freedom and equality yet often do so in unproductive ways that entrench the status quo (Essop Reference Essop2020; Keet and Muthwa Reference Keet, Muthwa and Brink2021).

Because the state is deeply implicated in the university, it is no surprise that South Africa’s approach to higher education shifted with the economic transition from apartheid to neoliberalism, creating ‘a particular relationship with higher education based on the state’s orientation toward the global economy’ (Baatjes et al. Reference Baatjes, Spreen, Vally, Pusser, Kempner, Marginson and Ordorika2012: 143). As noted above, the state’s existence is largely justified by its provision of public goods; in this case, paradoxically, the university as a public good is largely justified by its alignment with state interests.

On a global scale, universities themselves contributed to a broader social shift in which the idea of a public good is situated within a strongly utilitarian approach, by contrast to its ‘traditional and “cultural” lineage, which emphasized education’s broader and intrinsic societal contribution’ (Hazelkorn and Gibson Reference Hazelkorn and Gibson2019: 261). Indeed, as Hazelkorn and Gibson (Reference Hazelkorn and Gibson2019: 267) have noted, ‘Massification has altered underlying assumptions of the university’s and the academy’s commitment to the public good, or at the very least brought them into question’. The introduction of techno-rationality and the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence have further blurred the lines between the university and the corporate sector, with an increased focus on production, commodification and profit (Slaughter and Leslie Reference Slaughter and Leslie1997).

As a recent example, in the United States, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has openly challenged what it views as ‘unprecedented government overreach and political interference’ (AAC&U 2025: para. 1), despite the threat this poses to receiving government funding, claiming that these demands interfere with the institutional autonomy granted by the First Amendment of the American Constitution. In the administration’s demand for governmental oversight of university procedures, institutional autonomy is being explicitly threatened by the state, which is demanding ‘accountability’ to a broader ‘society’ that is not represented by multiple communities at all, but rather aligned with the political and economic interests of the powerful.

These concerns are echoed in a South African context by Muthwa et al. (Reference Muthwa, Bawa and Keetforthcoming: 3) who note that ‘it has also become increasingly difficult to grasp the intellectual and social project of the university system, at a national level’ and that there is at present no ‘discernible leadership cohort for universities and higher education public agencies in play or in the making’ (Muthwa et al. Reference Muthwa, Bawa and Keetforthcoming: 3). A generous description of the current cohort of university leaders in South Africa, with rare exceptions, is that of maintenance executives whose focus is the location of the corporatist university in the global matrix of ratings and rankings. For these reasons, we suggest that the South African university sector currently lacks a collective vision at the interplay between the academic and social project. The absence of leadership, the lack of clarity about what universities are for, the insidious incursions into academic freedom, all suggest an urgent need to reclaim the social legitimacy of the university and to strengthen its mechanisms of accountability and autonomy.

Indeed, in a global society devoid of political outsides, accountability ceases to pertain to its context and is responsive only to state imperatives. This generates a precarity in the functioning of the university; no longer able to speak ‘truth to power’ (Dutton et al. Reference Dutton, Huan and Shen2015: 8) it becomes simply another expression of the state and its desires. Because the legitimacy of the academy derives in part from its role as a ‘fifth estate’ (Little Reference Little1924; Hidri Reference Hidri2012) it is critical that it is viewed as an independent institution within democratic architectures. The original framing derives from Little’s (Reference Little1924) definition of the fifth estate as the community of thinkers, scientists and practitioners who preserve and advance organized knowledge in the ways that universities function. The evolution of the concept developed a focus on new media and citizen journalism, framing the fifth estate as a monitoring force over traditional media and institutions and a space for ethical communication and public discourse (Hidri Reference Hidri2012).

The fifth estate, in a role similar to outsides, is an apparatus aimed at resisting hegemonic and dominant narratives and promoting pluralism and relationality though critical pedagogies and public scholarship (Hidri Reference Hidri2012). The university can be thought of as a key constituent and constitutive member of the fifth estate, a location that underscores the university’s function as an autonomous entity (amongst others) that contributes to democratic governance by generating independent analysis and critical discourse and promoting transparency. In a society of checks and balances, universities should be considered as part of the fifth estate in global governance (Edelman Reference Edelman2016), joining the legislative, judicial, executive and media institutions that drive societal progress.

However, in the current absence of a truly independent fifth estate (media, academia and others) that works to monitor the boundaries of social discourse, universities are, of course, eroded by the weakened mechanisms of accountability and autonomy. Accountability is compromised because there is no active polity that comprises grassroots movements, civil society, activist groups and other organizations that contribute to a robust politics. Since the aim of accountability is relevance and responsiveness to the public and its needs, a central aim of research should be to understand and support disadvantaged communities and find ways to better the society within which the university is embedded.

Autonomy, on the other hand, is weakened by a professoriate in thrall to rankings, ratings and competition. Over time, research agendas have become tied to global initiatives rather than local needs. The insertion of grand discourses such as the Sustainable Development Goals into research programmes aligns institutional aims with economic interests, generating a matrix where knowledge production legitimizes neoliberalism while being reciprocally funded by it. Scholars working on such research have access to grants, resources and prestige, meaning that indeed it is neoliberal interests driving the university’s research programme. Henry Giroux describes this as higher education ‘surrender[ing] to the logic of the bottom line’ (Giroux Reference Giroux2003: 8). Because of this, pure knowledge production, scholarly depth and quality of research are dismissed at the expense of quantity of publications, alignment with capital interests, corporatization, managerialism and commodification. In this way, the university simply reproduces the market interests of a small group of powerful people. By failing to engage the ‘structure of production and distribution of knowledge’ (Cross and Ndofirepi Reference Cross and Ndofirepi2016), universities implicitly align with the profit motive so that knowledge, rather than being a public good (Stiglitz Reference Stiglitz, Kaul, Grunberg and Stern1999), is reduced to simply another commodity.

Mamdani (Reference Mamdani1993), in his exploration of the history of higher education on the African continent, notes that two universities embodied these twin institutional principles: Dar-Es-Salaam, in Tanzania, focused on accountability, redress and an orientation to the public’s needs. Makerere, in Uganda, by contrast, emphasized institutional autonomy, focusing on scholarship, excellence and universality. In most cases, universities are required to walk a delicate balancing act between the two; remaining accountable to the public and the state by producing graduates who can engage meaningfully in their society; while still remaining autonomous to safeguard the production of knowledge, foreground scholarly engagement and ensure the academy remains independent.

Prioritizing one at the expense of the other results in either a university divorced from the needs of its society or one that is unable to ensure independent and rigorous knowledge production. Clearly, the need is for universities to constantly work in the space produced by these countervailing expectations to sustain a knowledge agenda that is scholarly yet grounded in the needs of its society. As an example of this imbalance, the focus on autonomy at the expense of accountability produces what Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1962) describes as a ‘Republic of Science’ in which research is viewed as apolitical, and external input in shaping its agenda is seen as compromising. Unfortunately, the lack of accountability and the reification of institutional autonomy have contributed to a view of universities as elite spaces that reproduce inequality rather than working to reduce it.

On the other hand, if a university driven by autonomy produces research that is not for its society, would a preferable alternative be an institution governed by accountability? Many examples in Africa’s recent history suggest that when the state dictates the university’s research agenda and focuses primarily on redress and equality, a different set of issues arises. An obvious concern is that the university was conceptualized as independent from the state and thus able to act as a critic for the state’s authoritarian tendencies; and thus the ‘interference’ of the state in the university’s aim and functioning represents a profound conflict of interest. Indeed, it is crucial to society, and to the ‘public good’ status of the university, that its work is not dictated by the state. However, without the presence of political outsides, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attend to the needs of a society without recourse to a state agenda. In these cases, public accountability then becomes accountability to the state rather than serving the needs of the people, and the conception of the public good and relevance remains framed by statist conceptions of social legitimacy.

By contrast, political and university outsides, in sharing a logical architecture and interconnection of refusal, fugitivity and radical study within the context of solidaristic relationality, invite and cultivate spaces that operate with, against and beyond established governance regimes and the university-as-such. The social legitimacy of the university that is attached to the notion of the public good here emerges as relational and networked praxes that derive their quality from a commitment to collective flourishing with the capacity to create spaces where different forms of life become possible. Legitimacy, as an ongoing practice rather than static and taken-for-granted status, is seen to be embedded in an all-inclusive network of social actors and institutions; draws on multiple sources for authority; generates fugitive spaces of work; and advances autonomy as interdependence, a living process, and not simply a fixed legal status. As the university draws its legitimacy from an ecology of publics, it pluralizes the public good, furthers its responsiveness, counters knowledge foreclosures and resists state capture.

Imagining this particular ecosystem can best be pursued by the radical possibilities resident in outsides, where state-centred frameworks that determine the meanings and interconnectedness between public good, social legitimacy, accountability and autonomy are continuously challenged. New meanings and connections may emerge that are located at the interface between public universities, private universities, society, industry, private sector, environment, social movements, civil society-driven publics, the state and other commons and publics. In essence, we argue that the university will be better ‘protected’ at this interface, because its social legitimacy is derived from a multi-dimensional conception of accountability and autonomy. The university’s legitimacy cannot solely and simply be conditional on state approval but must rather be a function of its demonstrating the autonomy–accountability balance in ways that advance human and planetary flourishing.