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Monographs

2025

This book revitalizes the Marxian concept of critique for research into the transformation of universities. It consists of a set of comprehensive and interconnected theoretical tools, starting from the reflection on the political ontology of higher education, through the critique of political economy of the sector to the analysis of activist struggles within the universities, and back to the ontological concept of the common – a foundation for the university alternative design. The tools offered and discussed in context throughout the book allow for a productive use in overcoming the current crisis of the university, as well as to avoid the pitfalls present in contemporary debates around it. Unlike the dominant discussions on the university in crisis, the authors argue that to grasp its nature, one has to reach more profound than the level of appearances such as marketization and commodification.

Szadkowski and Krzeski offer a compelling reappraisal of critique as a mechanism to liberate intellectual work. By linking critique to how knowledge is structured and commodified, they help us transcend reductionist narratives of a crisis-ridden University. Prioritising ontological renewal, they embrace the political and the common, enriching our collective ways of knowing the world as a movement. Pivoting around academic and student protests in Poland, the book enables us to imagine spaces and times of critical hope that resist the capitalist subjugation of intellectual activity to knowledge production.

Richard Hall, Professor of Education and Technology, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

In the century since Antonio Gramsci new works in the Marxist tradition have made only modest contributions to social thought: the combined result of the savage repression in the West of the dangerous revolutionary ideas, plus the collapse in the East into jacobin conspiracy and dogmatism. If a living, vibrant Marxism had been part of the twentieth century mainstream then much catastrophe would have been averted. Now the drive for capital accumulation, sovereign individualism and rampant nationalism have brought us to the brink of ecological disaster and World War III. Into the void step two emerging scholars, Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski with an original Marxist critique of higher education and the common good. There is hope in this development, vital resources for reflection, discussion and action.

Simon Marginson, Professor of Higher Education at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford, UK, Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China, and Joint Editor in Chief of the journal “Higher Education”

2023

This book offers a systematic, sectoral, and in-depth Marxist perspective on the critique of political economy of higher education. It proposes an original method of analysis of higher education as a field of capitalist production, grounded at the intersection of mainstream higher education research and contemporary debates in Marxist theories. At the same time, it imbues a political perspective based on the embedding of higher education within the wider social network of antagonistic relations that traverse the capitalist economy at large.

“A fascinating, innovative application of Marxian analysis to how labor in higher education is being subsumed by capitalism, not just within one country but internationally. Focusing on the work of research and publishing, especially interesting is Szadkowski’s analysis of capitalist efforts to measure in order to control academic labor-despite its complex heterogeneity. Beyond subsumption, his theory highlights the existence of commons in higher education, and struggles to liberate them from capitalism’s grasp.”

Harry Cleaver, author of Reading Capital Politically

“No other author in critical higher education studies applies robust Marxian analysis to produce a razor-sharp disquisition of the conditions of contemporary academic labour under capitalist capture, better than Szadkowski. Add to this an Engelsian lively language and attention to storytelling detail, and this otherwise heavy book makes a delightful read, albeit its insights leave little to take delight in when it comes to present-day universities.”

Mariya Ivancheva, author of The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela

“Szadkowski gives an answer to the crucial question: why restart from Marx in the analysis of the global university? This work builds up an autonomous method and a collective point of view, contra mainstream liberalism and orthodox Marxism. Thus, situated within and against the edu-factory, the author tells us that those who want to understand the contemporary university must be committed to its transformation.”

Gigi Roggero, author of The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America

“This book analyses how academic labour has been entangled in capital on a global scale. Using a deep understanding of Marx, it creates a fresh, clear and engaging understanding of the historical moments when the university’s multiple internal mechanisms of status, distribution of prestige, communication practices, and freedoms have been turned into a metricized, quantified, and competitive acceleration of academic labour. Breaking with existing Marxist and liberal analyses, the book’s outstanding scholarship provides an exciting and much-needed new understanding of the transformations of higher education.”

Susan Wright, Co-director of Centre for Higher Education Futures, Aarhus University, Denmark

Reviews

Elia Alberici – Per la critica dell’economia politica dell’Università. Machina. [link] And fragments of the book in Italian translation published in Effimera [link]

Andrew G. Gibson – Reopening the political economy of higher education — ontology against and beyond capital. “Higher Education” [link]

Richard Hall – Capital in Higher Education: A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sector. Richard Hall’s Space [link]

Richard Hall – Marxism and Education Series Editor’s Foreward. In, Against and Beyond Capital in Higher Edcuation. [link]

Rahmad Hidayat – Review in academic press: Journal of Higher Education Policy And Leadership Studies 5(1), 187-193. [link]

Luis Andrade Martinez – A review in online journal Intervención y Coyuntura [link]

Zehra Taskin – Yükseköğretimin sermayesi, araştırma değerlendirme ve metriklere hapsedilmiş akademi üzerine… (The capital of higher education is about the academy confined to research evaluation and metrics). [link]

Felipe Ziotti Narita – Contradições em movimento no ensino superior: ciência, trabalho e conhecimento no capitalismo globalizado (Contradictions in motion in higher education: science, labour and knowledge in globalised capitalism). Cadernos CIMEAC 13(2) 2023: 124-143. [link]

And a response: Periferias, o comum e a finitude da subsunção capitalista no ensino superior: uma resposta a Narita (Peripheries, the common and the finitude of capitalist subsumption in higher education: a reply to Narita). Cadernos CIMEAC 13(2) 2023: 144-158. [link]

2015

The university is undoubtedly at the centre of most societies in the world today. At the same time, however, it is today more than ever struggling to define its role and identity. For this reason, a thriving academic discipline today is higher education research, which seeks to set norms and values that are able to determine the function of academic institutions in contemporary societies. Their proposals, however, most often either reinforce and support the progressive marketisation of the university, or call for tighter public control without noticing the role of the state in subsuming higher education to neoliberal schemes, or finally express a longing for an academic ivory tower that never really existed.

The University as the Common sets out to create a different narrative of the university, one that escapes the dominant perspectives on higher education research today. Here, a vision for the future of academic institutions is linked to the work of social movements fighting against precarity, austerity and exploitation, and the university itself, understood as a the common, is situated in the context of social policies that support equality, welfare and democracy.

“What to do in such a situation? It would be prudent to start by carefully reading the book University as the Common. Foundations for Critical Research on Higher Education and draw not only theoretical but also practical conclusions from this reading. Just as the intellectual tradition referred to by Szadkowski goes beyond the sterile dispute between market and state, proposing the regime of the common as not only the most just, but also the best, from a pragmatic point of view, method of organising our human world, so too the vision of the university as the common drawn in this book allows us to go beyond the ritual dispute of quasi-modernity with postfeudalism, in which the discussion on science and higher education in Poland is stuck. A different academy is possible! However, one needs to know how to fight for it. Szadkowski’s book provides us with many valuable tools in this regard. Whether we make good use of them, however, is now up to us.”

Jan Sowa, author of Fantomowe ciało króla. Zmagania z peryferyjną formą

Reviews

“The University as the Common provides an extremely precise conceptual instrumentarium to reformulate the debate on the future of the university in such a way as to avoid reproducing the mechanisms that drive it into today’s crisis. At the same time, Szadkowski’s book shows that no laws will solve the problem. It is high time for the academic community to take matters into its own hands.”

Maciej Jakubowiak, Miesięcznik “Znak” 2016, “Czas na wspólnotę akademicką”

“The book as a whole is certainly a must-read for any reader wishing to get an idea of the extremely complex issues regarding the shape of the contemporary global university. We can also turn to its individual parts as good studies of certain specific problems. The perspective adopted by Szadkowski, according to which the dynamics of the development of the global system of knowledge production, the “global university”, can be explained as an antagonism between production based on the common and capital, which is a form of control over them, is an interesting counterproposal to liberal approaches to the problems of higher education.”

Eliasz Robakiewicz, Machina Myśli 2016