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The study investigates the process of creating evaluative homogeneity within a performance-based research funding system. It does so in reference to the experience of creating a national journal ranking in Poland in 2019. It refers to the cases of two disciplines: biology and history. The use of this case is justified by its unique character, that is creating the ranking through means of both bibliometric indicators and expert panels. We therefore asked: What guided the actors who participated in the process of creating the ranking through the use of bibliometric indicators when introducing changes to its initial form? To answer this question, a mixed-methods approach was used. First, we conducted a quantitative analysis of changes made to the ranking during the consecutive steps of its creation. Second, we conducted a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews regarding actors’ motivations. By reflecting on the qualitative analysis along with the results of the quantitative part, this study reveals the extent to which actors impacted the form evaluative homogeneity took within the system. It further argues that this is dictated by how actors position themselves in relation to two opposing forces: those favouring the homogenization of research and those maintaining its heterogeneity. As these forces remain imbalanced, the study concludes with a call for further exploration of the interplay between the forces of homogenization and heterogenization and how the tensions between them are mediated within a performance-based research funding system.

Our study examines the discursive construction of academic subjectivity within the context of the current reforms of academia, driven by the forces of economization and metricization. We focus in p...

This paper contributes to the debate on the varieties of national manifestations of the public good(s) in higher education. Drawing on a set of 33 semi-structured interviews (with politicians, univ...

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists’ demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of instituent praxis; that is, an open process of co-becoming of an institution and its actors through the continuous co-production of rules that drive their actions. Contrary to the view of the university as something instituted, the activist university that we propose emphasises the possibility of sustaining the process of acting and its underlying rules, rather than the result of the act. The activist university is understood here as a crack that leaves the instituted university open every time the self-production of its subject emerges by the self-transformation of the actors in the very course of their activities. We observe a chance for grounding instituent praxis in the ontological shift in thinking the activist university from being to co-becoming, as this will allow for reclaiming the future for the university and its broader ecology.

This article opens a space for dialogue between Marxism and the field of higher education research. First, it demonstrates to what extent Marx is present in the theoretical and methodological discussions within the field and it examines the reasons behind his absence, i.e., the development of two perspectives regarding capitalist transformations, namely academic capitalism and exceptionalism. Second, it introduces Marx’s method of critique, conceived as the integrity of three different analytical moments and it further explicates how those moments can be translated into the general research program. It does so in reference to a) ontological assumptions; b) sector’s political economy; c) students and academic protests; d) ideas about the alternative. Finally, it uses those four areas to reflect on the key differences between Marx’s critique and the two perspectives discussed. By doing so it opens up paths for further dialogue between Marxism and higher education research.

This article introduces a general framework for the critique of the university in crisis that originates in the Marxist tradition. After indicating the limitations of current proposals regarding th...

This article contends that the University has become a place that has no socially-useful role beyond the reproduction of capital, such that it has become an anti-human project. The argument pivots around the bureaucratic university’s desire for surplus, and its relationship to the everyday, academic reality of feeling surplus to requirements. In defining the contours of this contradiction, inside the normalisation of political economic crisis, we question whether there still exists space for an academic method or mode of subjectivation. We also critique the ability of the University in the global North to bring itself into relation with the epistemological sensibilities of the South and the East, which can treat other ways of seeing and praxis with dignity and respect. In grappling with the idea of surplus, and the everyday and structural ways in which its production is made manifest, we seek to ask whether another university is possible?

This article discusses the use of bibliometric indicators for the assessment of individual academics. We focused on national indicators for the assessment of productivity in Polish higher education institutions. We analysed whether institutions (N = 768) adopted national templates for their own sets of criteria for intra-institutional evaluations. This study combined an analysis of internal policy documents with semi-structured interviews with deans from institutions in different fields of science. Our findings showed that, despite their high levels of institutional autonomy, the majority of institutions adopted the national criteria for the evaluation of individual academics. This article concludes with recommendations for reducing the negative consequences of local use of national indicators for the assessment of researchers. This work was financially supported by the National Science Centre in Poland (Grant Number UMO-2017/26/E/HS2/00019).

This article provides a map of the three-element conceptual set of the common (the common good, the commons, and the common) in reference to higher education. It does so using a method of political ontology. It discusses the three concepts in reference to the six dimensions of higher education reality (ontology, politics, ownership, governance, benefits, and finance). Thus, it not only presents a systematic view of higher education reality as seen through the lenses of the common but also explains the substantial (and in some cases, subtler) differences between the concepts themselves. Moreover, it addresses briefly the differences between the concepts from the order of the common and those from the order of the public. Finally, the article seeks to offer an insight into what this particular conceptual set may provide the researchers in terms of thinking through, and designing an alternative to the current predicament of higher education.

Higher Education and the Common Good is the second recent inspirational monograph by Simon Marginson, director of the Centre for Global Higher Education. His earlier book, The Dream Is Over: The Cr...

In this short introduction to the thematic issue of Theoretical Practice we draw on the Marxist concept of critique to explain how Marxist higher education research could be understood as a constituting practice within-against-beyond the contemporary university in crisis.

Entrevista com Krystian Szadkowski coordenada por Felipe Ziotti Narita (Unesp). Szadkowski é doutor em Filosofia pela Universidade Adam Mickiewicz (Polônia). Trabalha na Cadeira da UNESCO em Pesquisa Institucional e Política de Ensino Superior. Foi pesquisador do Instituto de Pesquisa Education International (Bélgica) e da Fundação Marie Curie (2010-2013). Editor-chefe da revista acadêmica "Theoretical Practice" (polonês/inglês) e managing editor da revista polonesa "Ciência e Ensino Superior". Membro do Centro de Políticas Públicas da Universidade Adam Mickiewicz. Seus interesses de pesquisa estão concentrados em sistemas de ensino superior e marxismo. É co-editor do volume "Joy Forever: political economy of social creativity" (MayFly, 2014). A reailzação da entrevista contou com o apoio de Eric Blanc. Interview with Krystian Szadkowski coordinated by Felipe Ziotti Narita (São Paulo State University - Unesp). Szadkowski received a PhD in Philosophy from Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He works at UNESCO Chair in Institutional Research and Higher Education Policy. Former researcher at the Education International Research Institute (Belgium) and Marie Curie Fellow (2010-2013). Editor-in-chief of the academic journal "Theoretical Practice" (Polish/English) and managing editor of "Science and Higher Education" (Polish). Member of the Center for Public Policy at Adam Mickiewicz University. His research interests cover higher education systems and Marxism. Recently he co-edited a volume "Joy Forever. Political economy of social creativity" (MayFly, 2014). The interview was published with the support of Eric Blanc.

Most of the contemporary critical narratives on the crisis of the university have one prevalent feature. They all remain within the conceptual horizon delineated by the liberal philosophy and political economy with their modern binary opposition of the public and the private. Corporatization, commodification, privatization, marketization, and the expansion of academic capitalism within the walls of the university are therefore most often contrasted with the desired strengthening of the public character of the HE institution or its re-publicization. Yet, at the same time, most of the higher education researchers observe that public universities affected by the reforms tailored according to the paradigm of “New Public Management” are increasingly becoming hybrids, and the boundaries between the public and the private are getting completely blurred. Instead of remaining within this theoretical dead end, this chapter takes another route and introduces the common as a concept and as a perspective in higher education research and sees this hybridization as a framework for the organization and management of relations between higher education and capital, corresponding to the needs of the latter’s valorization and accumulation. Four main contradictions of the contemporary higher education subsumed under capital are analyzed and explored here. The chapter does so with the use of general Marxian and Autonomist Marxist theoretical frameworks developed by authors like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Gigi Roggero, which have been applied recently to critical higher education research. The contradictions are divided into two main categories: the apparent contradictions (the public vs. the private, academic oligarchy vs. capital) and the real contradictions (corrupted form of the common vs. the common, the common vs. capital). They are discussed respectively with reference to contemporary higher education reality in crisis. The final part of the chapter discusses the alternative, that is the already existing preconditions for establishing a post-capitalist university regulated according to the logic of the common, which is an alternative way of regulation of social relations of production, distribution, exchange and consumption and a different form of wealth which focuses on social needs rather than maximization of profits.

This paper deploys an orthodox Marxian reading of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital. It does so through a brief, critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption of labour under capital (formal, real, hybrid and ideal subsumption). Recapitulating Marx’s concept, it sheds some light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se. The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. Moreover, the paper aims at showing that a discussion of the university dominated by capital with reference to the functioning or constituting of markets does not provide real opportunities for the understanding and solution of such problems as precarization, exploitation or acceleration of academic work. Thus, it joins a wider stream of Marxist higher education research and could be seen as a conceptual contribution to a critique of the political economy of higher education.

The core aspect of Antonio Negri’s political philosophy and the reading of “Marx beyond Marx”, that is the thesis on the crisis of law of value, was analyzed here in details. Thesis that Negri’s altermodern humanism, at least since the end of the 1960’s, is developing in the strict interrelationship with the thesis on the crisis of law of value was proposed. Together with an ontological assumption that we are living in the era of real subsumption of society under capital it creates the conceptual matrix of the project of the common. The main parts of this text explored the following problems: a) the context of the formulation of the thesis on the crisis of law of value; b) the meaning of the law of value in the Marx’s theory; c) Marxist debate on the status of law of value in socialism with reference to its usefulness for the projects of the alternative to capitalism; d) core aspects of the thesis; e) its consequences for the new theories of exploitation, antagonism and value for the present state of the development of capitalism. The aim of the text is to show the political meaning of the thesis of on the crisis of the law of value.

Is art an economic activity? Should art be independent of economic pressures? Is the value of art to be determined separately from its value as a commodity? can we apply the Marxist labour theory of value to art? To consider the question of value in art from a Marxist perspective is, on the face of it, to invoke two kinds of philistinism. Marx tells us that value is twofold with use-value and exchange value forming a contradictory unity of value. There is no third kind of value. So, if art is supposed to be useless and priceless, how can a Marxist engage seriously with art and with only use-value and exchange value as tools? This work was originally published in Polish as an outcome of the international conference The Labour of the Multitude? The Political Economy of Social Creativity held in Warsaw, 20-22 of October 2011. Organisers of the conference were: Free/Slow University of Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana Foundation, University of Warsaw, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.