Think Development Blog

In the recent blog Protecting Universities as a Public Good: A Response to the Immigration White Paper we sketched out some important ways in which the university can and should be seen as a public good. In this post we engage in more detail with this idea, reflecting on our recent co-hosting of a panel on academic activism at the Development Studies Association 2025 conference.

Public goods are not about profit generation, or market competition. They are provided to all members of society and for the benefit of the public. They are collective in nature and intimately tied to a vision of the good society. This will not be the same vision in all places at all times, and more often than not one of the challenges of distributing resources and power is that different visions of the good society exist. This makes policies around public goods extremely difficult but of vital importance.

The purpose of the university as a public good, thus goes beyond its contribution to an individual quest for knowledge, skills or ambition, as important as this may be. Its purpose is also for wider societal transformation, for education and knowledge generation which is of benefit to those who study and work there but also those in the surrounding communities and world at large.

However, policies have eroded the public good from the higher education agenda, instead too often prioritising individual and economic gains. This has led to the commodification of higher education in ways which are less embedded in local communities, and more about a “supply of skills through a passive pipeline feeding talent into pre-existing systems”. These shifts have disrupted the university as a potential cultural force, threatened academic freedom and led to a crisis of the collective while we search for the missing public good of higher education. As Laura Shepherd puts it to viscerally in her personal reflections, “the transfiguration of creativity and spark and wonder into performance metrics organized alphabetically in an Excel spreadsheet id the story of my community, and it is a tragedy”.

Universities are increasingly global and international in their focus and ambitions, while decreasingly embedded in local communities. This is not a question of distance, scope or scale of focus, rather it is symptomatic of a growing dearth in community-awareness and collective action. Navigating a world in crises, requires collective thinking, effort and action. This means an urgent mission to reconnect universities to communities, promote meaningful participatory engagement across all research activities, and leverage every opportunity towards solving societal problems across all disciplines.

Academic activism is one way in which universities can connect to communities and play their role as a public good of critical thinking, education, and knowledge generation. As observed by Spolander et al, “academic intervention is not always embraced, unless grounded in community struggles, which go beyond intellectual purposes” (2022: 71). We had this at the front our minds during our recent Academic Activism panel at the 2025 Development Studies Association global conference, practical discussions around activist scholarship brought further insights to this increasingly important topic, from both Global South and North contexts.

Bagesh Kumar spoke on academic activism in Indian Higher Education with a focus on identity and representation in knowledge production. Bagesh’s contribution was particularly incisive in its depth, delving into intricacies of caste-based exclusion and how the wide range of categories defining India’s hierarchies come into everyday effect amongst the country’s Dalit populations. Bagesh offered nods to Foucault, highlighting how there remains a range of small-scale resistance available even to society’s most marginalised groups, and academic activism can be practically applied to tease these out further and, hopefully, solidify such resistance into fuller, solidarity-based responses against oppression.

Ambarish Karamchedu, Cheriesse Bema and Nithya Natarajan’s paper discussed, from a critical development studies perspective, how to maintain anti-capitalist pedagogy and academic activism within the neoliberal university, especially around the topic of the climate crisis. It was galvanising to see Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed feature boldly in this work nested into a UK university context, while also exploring how our academic experiences and activist aims gel with Freirean concepts of radical hope elaborated via the praxis of learning. Freire's own view of us all as, by definition, unfinished beings and a perennial work in progress, did however let us circle back to contexts we are structured into.

In the discussions which followed a shared feeling of the necessity of change was palpable. Universities as institutions of higher education ought to be crucibles of change, where individual quest for knowledge intersect with opportunities for social transformation; where knowledge production, exchange and transmission is aimed at finding solutions to collective problems, dismounting barriers, tackling injustice and pursuing social change. It is only through seeing and treating the university as a public good that we can achieve this, together.

Authors' Bio

Mouzayian Khalil is Assistant Professor in International Development and Global South Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, and current Director of the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Institute for International Development (WICID)

Briony Jonesis Professor of Peace and Justice, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, and member of Executive Management Team, Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Institute for International Development (WICID)

Romain Chenet is Senior Teaching Fellow in Global Sustainable Development- GSD, Cross-Faculty Studies, University of Warwick and member of the Steering Committee, Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Institute for International Development (WICID)