How Governments Quietly Reclaim Control Over Universities: New Study Maps the Machinery of Politicization

When politicians accuse universities of being out of touch, the accusation is rarely just rhetoric. Behind the headlines about campus culture wars lies a quieter, more technical process: the deliberate redrawing of who gets to govern higher education. A new open-access study in the journal Higher Education argues that ‘politicization’ has become one of the most overused and least understood terms in the field, deployed as a rhetorical weapon far more often than it is analyzed as a measurable phenomenon. Researchers Yishai Fraenkel and Annette Bamberger of Bar-Ilan University and UCL set out to change that, offering both a conceptual toolkit and a detailed empirical case study of how a state can systematically claw back authority from its universities without ever announcing that it is doing so.

The scale of the conceptual problem is striking. A search of the ERIC database found that more than 200 academic papers published in the last decade used the term ‘politicization’ in their title or abstract, yet with striking inconsistency. Some authors use it to describe campus climate, others as a synonym for state pressure, and still others to describe the politicization of individual identity. Many define the term not at all. The result, the authors argue, is analytical promiscuity that reduces an important phenomenon to a buzzword, leaving scholars without a shared vocabulary to detect when and how governance actually changes. Their remedy is to import rigor from political science and sociology, delineating four distinct approaches to politicization, each with its own ontology, causal mechanism, and set of empirical indicators.

The first approach, associated with political scientist Michael Zürn, defines politicization as the demand for or act of transporting an issue into the field of politics, making previously unpolitical matters political. Here, the key indicator is a shift in jurisdiction: a dispute once handled by departmental committees or professional norms migrates into parliamentary hearings and binding policy settlements. The second approach, advanced by the Sheffield School of British institutionalism, treats politicization and depoliticization as instruments of statecraft. Depoliticization, in this account, is not a retreat of politics but a governing strategy that delegates contentious issues to arm’s-length agencies, expert bodies, or market mechanisms in ways that reduce visible executive responsibility. Politicization is the reverse: a reassertion of political control into venues where elected officials can steer outcomes. The Sheffield School operationalizes this through three tactics: institutional, rule-based, and preference-shaping depoliticization or repoliticization.

The third and fourth approaches emerge from discourse theory. The constructivist view, associated with Jacques Lagroye, holds that no issue is inherently political; politicization is a social process of relabeling, in which actors successfully strip an activity of its perceived neutral or professional status and rebrand it as political. A curricular decision, such as the design of a gender studies syllabus, becomes ‘political indoctrination’ rather than academic judgment. The post-foundational approach, drawing on Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière, goes further, distinguishing between ‘politics’ as routine administration and ‘the political’ as the ineradicable dimension of antagonism that such ordering attempts to contain. Politicization, in this framework, is the disruptive moment, a strike, blockade, or governance crisis, that exposes suppressed conflict beneath an apparent academic quiet.

To demonstrate how one of these frameworks works in practice, the researchers applied the Sheffield School approach to Israel, a country whose higher education system was historically characterized by strong arm’s-length autonomy yet now faces persistent allegations of state encroachment. The historical arc is essential to the analysis. Israel’s universities, founded on Humboldtian ideals of academic freedom before the state existed, clashed after 1948 with a nation-building ethos that viewed higher education as a strategic instrument. The friction produced the 1958 Council for Higher Education Law, which created an independent statutory body dominated by academics and public figures, an early form of institutional depoliticization. In 1974, the Planning and Budgeting Committee, modeled on the UK’s University Grants Committee, moved the power of the purse to an autonomous academic-led subcommittee, further insulating the sector from political control.

The pendulum then swung the other way. From the early 1970s, surging demand for access among marginalized populations overwhelmed the elitist status quo, and state authorities intervened more directly, culminating in a 1995 amendment that granted college degrees equal status to university degrees. Institutions nearly tripled, and cohort participation reached roughly 50 percent by 2010. A secondary wave of depoliticization followed, as the Ministry of Finance’s Budget Division defined the macro-parameters and budgetary rules for the Planning and Budgeting Committee, bypassing both the Cabinet and the Knesset and cementing a technocratic governance model. This era, the authors stress, did not signal a retreat of the state but a reconfiguration of control, with fiscal rules prioritizing market logic over traditional social or academic mandates.

The empirical core of the study covers 2010 to 2025 and rests on three methods: 22 semi-structured elite interviews with former ministers, members of Knesset, and regulatory and university leaders; deductive analysis of higher education legislation; and descriptive statistics tracking the composition of the Council for Higher Education and the Planning and Budgeting Committee. The legislative record reveals a clear escalation. Amendment 18 prohibited state scholarships for students evading military conscription, passing with a broad bipartisan majority. Proposed Amendment 19, based on the recommendations of the professional Messer-Yaron Committee, would have consolidated governance under a unified statutory Higher Education Authority, but it died in cabinet after the 2015 elections. Interviewees described the moment in vivid terms. One recalled a minister objecting that the reforms would have prevented the establishment of Ariel University, while a senior council official described a minister telling the prime minister that the plan meant losing all control over higher education, and at that moment, it died.

Subsequent legislative moves intensified the trend. The 2018 Amendment 20 applied Israeli sovereignty to academic institutions in the occupied Palestinian territories, cementing the controversial upgrade of Ariel University and signaling the subordination of the council’s professional guidance to the political establishment. Proposed Amendment 22 went further, compelling institutions to dismiss employees suspected of supporting terrorism under threat of budgetary sanctions, shifting adjudication responsibility from the police to the academy and targeting institutions for refusing to penalize lawful academic speech. Meanwhile, amendments to the 2007 Student Rights Law, originally a consumer-protection statute that explicitly avoided academic content, began to intrude into credit allocation and speech regulation. A 2018 law mandating academic credit for state-sanctioned volunteering effectively nationalized the university’s currency, stripping senates of their authority to define academic value, and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

The statistical evidence is perhaps the most dramatic finding. University representation on the Council for Higher Education collapsed from a majority of 67 percent in the ninth council to a minority of 29 percent in the fourteenth. The share of the elite ‘Old 4’ research universities, responsible for some 70 percent of national research output, was cut nearly in half, from 37 to 19 percent, and their representation on the Planning and Budgeting Committee dropped to zero by 2023. Concurrently, the college sector surged from 7 to 39 percent. The researchers trace this transformation to a deliberate strategy of ‘membership engineering’ that began around 2001, when Education Minister Limor Livnat launched a campaign titled ‘Ending the Cartel,’ framing universities as a detached, self-serving liberal elite. The rhetorical tactic of labeling universities a ‘cartel’ legitimized the dilution of their representation, a textbook case of preference-shaping that weakened the institutional barrier of depoliticization. Interviewees noted that the statutory duty to consult universities carried no teeth, amounting to symbolic consultation in which ministers could consult and then decide otherwise.

The study’s conclusions carry weight well beyond Israel. First, student rights legislation can be weaponized as an attack surface on institutional autonomy, with the language of public good and access morphing into an individualized, rights-based discourse that masks state intervention. Second, politicization often involves the targeted delegitimization of intermediary bodies rather than their formal abolition. Third, and perhaps most counterintuitively, politicization is not an exclusively partisan practice: several controversial bills enjoyed bipartisan support, and once depoliticization norms are breached, the appetite for executive control appears to transcend the left-right divide. Fourth, the transition from professional autonomy to political contingency is cumulative, and once politicization practices are institutionalized, they appear difficult to reverse regardless of which party holds power. For democracies facing neo-nationalist pressures, from the United States to Hungary to Brazil, Israel serves as a diagnostic warning that politicization is a tangible threat resulting from deliberate administrative strategy, not merely inflammatory speech. The researchers also note that universities are not passive: the Association of University Heads has mounted legal challenges and lobbied against legislative overreach, and external metrics now classify Israel as a ‘newly registered decliner’ on the Academic Freedom Index. By converting a vague catch-all into a systematic research program with observable mechanisms, the study offers scholars and policymakers a blueprint for detecting, and perhaps resisting, the quiet machinery of political control over the academy.

Subject of Research: Politicization and governance of higher education systems

Article Title: Beyond the buzz: analyzing (re)politicization in higher education

Article References: Fraenkel, Y., & Bamberger, A. (2026). Beyond the buzz: analyzing (re)politicization in higher education. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01787-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01787-y

Keywords: higher education, politicization, governance, academic freedom, Israel, Sheffield School, depoliticization, neo-nationalism, populism, student rights, university autonomy, public policy