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

The conceptual core of Bauriedl’s argument is a distinction that political debates increasingly blur: the difference between academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of ideology. Academic freedom, as she frames it, is not a license to voice any opinion whatsoever. It is a right to produce and communicate knowledge through scientific methods, protected by law because truth claims derived from evidence must remain beyond the scope of political negotiation. In Germany, this protection is unusually strong, anchored in Article 5, paragraph 3 of the constitution, which states that art and science, research and teaching are free. The constitutional right covers anyone who seeks knowledge using scientific methods, and it has functioned as a globalized norm of liberal science since the 1960s. But a university, Bauriedl emphasizes, is not merely a legal construct. It is a social space in which the boundaries of what can be said are constantly tested, and in which perceived freedom depends heavily on whether researchers fear that their own work is under threat.

The strategy she identifies among right-wing actors is to contrast academic freedom with a supposed freedom of ideology, positioning critical research on gender, colonialism or climate change as ideological while presenting other fields, such as research on economic growth or nuclear power, as neutral science. This maneuver, she argues, inverts the actual epistemology of scholarship. Free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does. When an evolutionary biologist comments on gender studies, that is an opinion rather than science, because academic freedom requires participation in academic discourse grounded in a sufficient understanding of a subject and its methods. There is, in her account, no requirement for political neutrality at universities beyond neutrality with respect to political parties, provided those parties do not seek to abolish fundamental democratic values. Academics are in fact called upon to defend democratic values, and where necessary to be politically active in doing so. Researching uncomfortable truths about climate change, sexism and racism, she insists, is not ideological when the findings are fact-checked, and it may even require uncomfortable scientists willing to communicate them.

The empirical picture she assembles is sobering. A 2024 study by the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies surveyed 9,083 respondents drawn from all status groups at 158 German universities about their subjectively perceived academic freedom. A majority considered themselves free in choosing research topics, with 83 percent reporting freedom in topic selection, 64 percent in the implementation of research projects and 80 percent in publishing results. That still means roughly every fifth scientist feels their research practice is rather unfree. Eight percent expect moral devaluation and ten percent expect career problems, with only minor differences between status groups. Meanwhile, the Academic Freedom Index, an annual assessment covering 179 countries produced jointly by Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, draws on 2,363 country experts in its 2025 edition and tracks five indicators, including freedom of research and teaching, academic exchange, institutional autonomy and campus integrity. The 2026 update shows that although academic freedom remains better protected in democracies than in autocracies, significant losses have occurred in countries including the United States, Argentina and Mexico, with erosion of university autonomy in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and, most abruptly, the United States.

What has changed, according to Bauriedl, is not the existence of pressure on critical scholarship but its mechanism and scale. Scholars of critical theory have faced marginalization for decades, and feminist academics in geography endured mockery from colleagues well into the 1980s. What is new is that policing now arrives through coordinated public attacks by authoritarian groups, journalists or politicians, amplified through press and social media, naming and shaming individual researchers for allegedly ideologically motivated work. In Hungary, gender studies have been eliminated at universities, creating pressure on feminist scholars elsewhere. In the United States, aggressive action against specific research topics threatens to become a template exported to countries like Austria or Germany. At the national conference of the Alternative for Germany party in January 2025, the party leader announced that, should the party come to power, she would abolish gender studies and dismiss all professors who teach the subject. These campaigns, Bauriedl notes, are not attacks on specific people but on critical positions, and their function is to force unwanted voices into self-censorship while consuming researchers’ time, resources and health.

The German case illustrates how legal and institutional structures mediate these threats. Because German professors are employed by state ministries rather than by their university presidencies, they cannot be dismissed easily, which offers a measure of protection unavailable elsewhere. Yet gender, colonialism and climate studies remain fundamentally under pressure, requiring scientists to legitimize and defend the relevance of their topics repeatedly. Bauriedl also points to two resolutions of the German Bundestag, adopted in May 2019 and January 2025, which were intended to counter antisemitism but which, in her assessment, subject academics researching land grabbing, settler colonialism or genocide to general suspicion. By applying a definition of antisemitism that was not formulated for use at universities, the resolutions, she argues, fail to differentiate critical statements and can equalize descriptions of settlement colonialism and apartheid with the denial of Jewish self-determination, with a social media post criticizing the Israeli government potentially ending an academic career. She stresses that countering antisemitic discrimination at universities is important and appropriate, but that the instruments chosen violate academic freedom and university autonomy.

Neoliberal dynamics inside universities compound the external pressure, in Bauriedl’s analysis. Intensifying competition for research funding and excellence awards makes institutions more susceptible to the ideology of neutral science, anticipatory obedience and mechanisms of exclusion. Large research collaborations that must win competitive funding to operate avoid system-critical perspectives, pursuing seemingly neutral concepts instead of clusters of excellence on the causes of climate catastrophe, the social impacts of multiple crises or postcolonial extractivism. When university management prioritizes public image and the battle for attention over the conditions of academic freedom, even small political campaigns against individual members can succeed. In many recent cases, she observes, university administrations have capitulated rashly and failed to stand up for their scholars. Mission statements and general commitments, she argues, are not sufficient; universities have become norm takers rather than norm shapers, and different views on the meaning and scope of academic freedom have left institutions without coherent defensive strategies.

The resistance she documents is still fragmentary but growing. The German Association of Geography published a statement expressing concern about developments in the United States and Hungary, yet stumbled, in her view, into the discourse trap of ideological freedom by pairing a defense of diversity with a call for ideology-free research. More promising are the self-organized networks that scientists have built, including the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity, the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies and the geographers collective Orangotango. In January 2026, geographers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland began forming a dedicated network on academic freedom, and major German research institutions have published guidelines for dealing with authoritarian attacks on scientific communication. Bauriedl proposes a concrete program: universities should refuse inquiries from political parties about the activities of academics, develop guidelines for handling hate speech from influencers and politicians, debate how to respond to research assignments from right-wing actors, prepare strategies for colleagues whose social media statements have been spied on and scandalized, and organize discipline-specific task forces capable of issuing rapid statements when research projects come under attack.

Her conclusion is that the institutional, political, social and economic conditions enabling critical research and teaching must be actively defended, because academic knowledge production depends on accepting the provisional nature of knowledge, its openness to criticism and revision, and methodological standards without submission to the disciplinary mainstream. There is a right to dissent in democratic societies, at universities and in geography, including analyses critical of the state. Defending that right, she argues, cannot be delegated to diversity managers or left to individual self-help. It requires collective practice within every discipline, solidarity with colleagues under pressure, and universities willing to provide legal assistance, protect communication channels when email accounts are flooded with hate messages and support scholars whose families are attacked. Safeguarding academic freedom demands significant effort from all academics, and that effort, she concludes, is essential for critical scholarship as much as for the capacity of societies to confront global crises and injustices.

Subject of Research: Threats to academic freedom in critical geography and strategies for institutional resistance

Article Title: Academic freedom for critical geography: principles, threats, resistance

Article References: Bauriedl, S. (2026). Academic freedom for critical geography: principles, threats, resistance. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 421-425. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-421-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-421-2026

Keywords: academic freedom, critical geography, right-wing politics, gender studies, climate change research, university autonomy, self-censorship, Academic Freedom Index, cancel culture, research funding, Germany, higher education policy

The research, led by Ririn Purba of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) together with colleagues in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, adopted a deliberately intimate methodology. Rather than surveying salaries from a distance, the team embedded itself in the daily rhythms of campus life at one state university, using participant observation, in-depth interviews and informal conversations with lecturers over an extended period. Ethnography of this kind captures what payroll statistics cannot: the anxiety of waiting for a remuneration payment that arrives late, the quiet calculations about whether a second job is feasible, and the social embarrassment of holding a doctorate while earning less than a neighbor in the private sector. The study was conducted as part of the first author’s master’s research at Universitas Gadjah Mada, with informed consent and anonymity protections approved under formal research permission.

The analytical backbone of the paper is the sustainable livelihoods framework, an approach developed originally for studying rural poverty and adapted here to academic work. In that framework, a livelihood consists not merely of income but of the full bundle of assets a person can mobilize: human capital such as qualifications, social capital such as networks, physical and financial assets, and the institutional structures that determine whether those assets can be converted into security. Applying this lens to lecturers reveals a striking paradox. Indonesian academics possess exceptional human capital, often including doctoral degrees and international publications, yet the institutional rules of their universities systematically block the conversion of that capital into economic stability. The result is what the researchers call an intellectual precariat: highly educated workers whose employment conditions resemble those of informal laborers.

Technically, the study distinguishes between macro-level policy and what it terms micro-institutional dynamics. At the macro level, Indonesia’s higher education system has been reshaped by neoliberal governance reforms, including the introduction of PTN-BH status, a legal category for state universities with autonomous, business-oriented governance. Under this model, universities are expected to generate a growing share of their own revenue, tuition fees rise, and internal remuneration systems become tied to performance metrics and institutional cash flow. Government Regulation Number 4 of 2014 governs how higher education institutions manage their finances and personnel, and it is at the level of institutional implementation that the researchers found the sharpest inequalities. Two lecturers with identical qualifications and workloads can receive dramatically different pay depending on their contract type, faculty unit, or standing within internal patronage networks.

This finding about ostensibly homogeneous institutions is among the study’s most significant conceptual contributions. A state university appears, from the outside, to be a single employer with uniform rules. The ethnographic data show instead that micro-level dynamics, the informal hierarchies, the discretionary allocation of teaching hours and project opportunities, and the uneven distribution of institutional allowances, generate systemic inequality within the same campus. Junior and non-permanent lecturers absorb the heaviest teaching loads while receiving the smallest and least reliable shares of remuneration. Seniority and connection, rather than transparent criteria, often determine who gains access to the institutional benefits that make an academic career viable. The walls, as one framing of the study puts it, are closing in on those at the bottom of the internal hierarchy.

The economic picture emerging from Indonesian sources corroborates the ethnography. A first national survey mapping the welfare of academics, reported by The Conversation Indonesia, documented wide disparities in lecturer income across public and private institutions, with many respondents reporting earnings that fall short of regional living-wage benchmarks. In Yogyakarta, where the study took place, regional minimum wage analyses have highlighted the gap between academic salaries and the actual cost of living. The tension spilled into public view in early 2025, when lecturers who are civil servants demonstrated in Jakarta demanding that their professional allowances, known as tukin, be paid reliably into their accounts, a protest that national media covered extensively. For a profession whose members train the nation’s doctors, engineers and teachers, the visibility of these grievances marked a turning point in public perception.

The study situates these local observations within a global literature on academic precarity. Scholars such as Guy Standing have described the precariat as a new class defined by insecure labor and the erosion of occupational identity, and researchers including Burton and Bowman have applied the concept to the neoliberal academy, where tenure-track positions shrink while contingent appointments expand. Comparable studies from Malaysia, Spain and New Zealand document freelance academics, unsustainable public universities and the anxieties produced by performance-based funding. The Indonesian case adds a distinctive dimension: precarity here is not primarily the product of a shrinking tenure system, as in North America, but of institutional remuneration structures that delay, divide and condition payments even for staff who hold formal positions. Academic inbreeding, the tendency of universities to hire their own graduates into junior posts, further concentrates vulnerability among young scholars with few outside options.

The theoretical stakes extend beyond higher education policy. Drawing on Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, the authors show how individual lecturers’ daily coping strategies, taking extra teaching, postponing family plans, chasing administrative approvals, simultaneously reproduce the very institutional structures that constrain them. The framework of rentier capitalism, developed by Brett Christophers and others, also informs the analysis: universities increasingly behave as asset-holding entities that extract income streams from tuition and status rather than investing in the productive capacity of their academic workforce. Under this reading, the lecturer’s livelihood becomes a residual claim on institutional revenue, paid after buildings, rankings and administrative priorities are satisfied. The emotional toll documented in the ethnography, including chronic job insecurity and the erosion of professional identity, mirrors findings from studies of anxiety production in neoliberal universities.

What makes the Indonesian case resonate internationally is its timing. Higher education systems across East and Southeast Asia have pursued global competitiveness through ranking regimes, performance funding and institutional autonomy, policies championed from China to Vietnam to Singapore. The Yogyakarta study suggests a hidden cost of that model: when universities are restructured as competitive enterprises, the people who deliver teaching and research become flexible costs to be managed rather than careers to be secured. The authors argue that current institutional policies, far from ensuring security and promoting advancement, frequently exploit lecturers and manufacture the very precarity that the #janganjadidosen hashtag made visible. Their findings contribute a conceptual vocabulary, intellectual precariat, micro-institutional inequality, livelihood vulnerability, that can be applied wherever academic labor is being restructured under market logics.

The practical implications are equally direct. If Indonesia wants to retain its best scholars, the study implies, remuneration systems inside autonomous state universities require transparency and enforceable floors, not just national allowance schedules that arrive late or partially. Ethnographic evidence of this kind is difficult to gather, because lecturers fear retaliation for speaking candidly, and the researchers note that confidentiality agreements restrict the availability of their data. Yet the willingness of informants to share their stories, and the resonance of a hashtag that warned a generation away from the profession, indicate that the issue has moved from faculty corridors into national debate. The walls, the study’s title suggests, are closing in; whether they are pushed back will depend on whether policymakers treat lecturers’ livelihoods as infrastructure for the nation’s future rather than as a line item to be minimized.

Subject of Research: Economic and structural vulnerability of lecturers' livelihoods in Indonesian higher education

Article Title: “The walls are closing in”: the vulnerability of lecturers’ livelihoods in Indonesia

Article References: Purba, R., Erwinsyah, R. G., Yumantoko, Belvage, R. H., Wahyono, E., Solekhah, N., & Aldyan, R. A. (2026). “The walls are closing in”: the vulnerability of lecturers’ livelihoods in Indonesia. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01781-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01781-4

Keywords: academic labor, intellectual precariat, Indonesia, higher education, neoliberal governance, lecturer salaries, ethnography, livelihoods, Yogyakarta, university autonomy, job insecurity, sustainable livelihoods framework