Abolish the University: A Call for Radical Reproduction of Life from the Picket Line

When I arrived at the University of Groningen in Netherlands on March 18 to speak on feminist political ecology, I was met not with a classroom but a picket line. The university was on strike. My hosts, faculty in the Department of Spatial Planning and Environment, had invited me to lecture on planning for degrowth, drawing from my research on care and commoning at the intersection of urban redevelopment and land policy. But when the strike was announced, I was offered a choice: cancel my visit, or give an open lecture at the Strike Fair in the city centre. It didn’t take me long to decide.

Because just as much as it is an academic's job to teach and do research, it is also the duty and responsibility to stand with university communities across campuses that are under attack. Whether we’re facing devastating budget cuts, censorship and retaliation against “activist” scholars, or the criminalization of students protesting genocide—this moment calls for resistance. To borrow the words of Jane Fonda in her recent lifetime achievement speech: “This is our documentary moment. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal.”

As someone whose academic path has moved through the UK, the US, and now Switzerland—and as a citizen of Turkey—I know first hand that there is no real “safe haven” for critical scholarship under authoritarian neoliberalism. But that precarity, even when it feels individualized or temporary, is systemic. Across countries and campuses, we are witnessing a coordinated assault on the institution of higher education, especially in their function as places for collective knowledge production, critical thought, and resistance to rising authoritarianism.

What’s at stake is not simply the University—as in the building, or the job—but the university as an institution of capitalist social reproduction. And this is where I want to suggest something that may sound controversial in the times of outrageous insults, but is in fact deeply grounded in the history and praxis of feminist struggle: Abolish the university!

Abolish the University?
A call for “abolish the university” is not to argue for destruction. It is a call for transformation. In this sense, it parallels Sophie Lewis’s provocation to “abolish the family.” In her 2022 book Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Lewis makes the case that the nuclear family is not only inadequate for providing care, but is in fact a key institution of patriarchal capitalism: private, coercive, and deeply unequal. Abolition, for her, is not about erasure, but about freeing up our capacities to care, love, and live collectively.
The university, too, is such an institution. Like the family, it is central to the reproduction of labor power—not just through credentialing and skills training, but through ideological conditioning, class sorting, and disciplining of bodies and minds. It is deeply patriarchal, riddled with racial and colonial hierarchies, and governed increasingly by logics of competition, productivity, and austerity. As radical scholars have long noted, the institution of University is not outside extractive capitalism—it is part of the very ideological infrastructure that sustains it.
So when we call for solidarity to defend universities today, we must ask: which university are we standing the grounds for?
The neoliberal academy is already a hollowed-out version of itself. The ideal of a public university—open, inclusive, collaborative—has been systematically undermined. Universities today are project-based grant farms, turning scholars into managerial labor chasing competitive funding. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts largely remained tokenistic; before it largely become the taget of alt-right politics. Academic buildings are being shut down, research time eaten by bureaucratic metrics, and collegial life spatially disintegrated under the banner of “flexibility.” The university is dissolving not only intellectually, but materially.
Budget cuts, then, are not isolated incidents. They are capitalist enclosures. They are the privatization of the remaining bits of knowledge commons, the extraction of public resources, and the foreclosure of spaces where collective futures can be imagined and built. As Stuart Hodkinson reminds us in his work on urban commons, such enclosures are not only economic but also epistemic and spatial. The university is being de-commoned—physically, politically, intellectually.

Toward the Pluriversity
But to say that the university is a site of reproduction for capitalist society is not to say it has no transformative potential. Quite the opposite. As with the family, abolition here means clearing space for something else to grow—something based not on private accumulation, but on care, conviviality, and commons.
Scholars of decoloniality have given us a name for this alternative: the pluriversity.
The pluriversity is not simply a more diverse university. It is a fundamentally different kind of institution—one that accommodates “ecologies of knowledge” (Boaventura de Sousa Santos), grounded in an “epistemology of conviviality” (Francis Nyamnjoh), and committed to re-membering and re-humanizing knowledge production (Ngugi wa Thiong’o). A pluriversity, in this sense, is anti-hierarchical, anticolonial, anti-patriarchal—and organized around the principles of radical care and justice.
In a pluriversity, knowledge is not commodified but shared; not instrumentalized but nurtured. It is rooted in community, oriented toward collective well-being, and open to multiple ways of knowing. Rather than reproducing dominant subjectivities, it cultivates spaces of unlearning and co-creation. It becomes a commons.

Reclaiming the University as Commons
Commons are not simply “shared resources.” They are social relations: practices of co-creation, co-maintenance, and co-governance. To reimagine the university as a commons means to reclaim it not as a site of service delivery or workforce production, but as a living infrastructure for the reproduction of life.
In the context of higher education, this means rejecting the language of “competitive edge” or “global excellence” as metrics of value. Arguments like “budget cuts will make us less competitive internationally” or “humanities are cheap, we should keep them” are not just ineffective—they are complicit. They accept the premise that value lies in utility, efficiency, or market relevance. What we need instead is a radical defense: one that starts from a commitment to knowledge as a right, not a privilege; as a resource, not a commodity.
This also means organizing our universities not just as sites of knowledge production, but as sites of knowledge commoning. That means preserving and creating physical spaces where students and scholars can gather without surveillance or performance metrics. It means resisting the fragmentation of academic labor into project-based silos. And it means building institutional cultures where care is central—not an add-on, but a method, a value, and a goal.

Radical Care as Method and Horizon
To make this shift, we must center care—not as charity, nor as managerial wellbeing—but as a political methodology.
Feminist scholars like Joan Tronto define care as a species activity: the ongoing effort to maintain, repair, and continue our world so that all may live in it as well as possible. Tronto identifies five phases of care: caring about (noticing needs), caring for (taking responsibility), care-giving (the work itself), care-receiving (evaluating the outcome), and caring with (embedding care in a democratic ethos). When applied to the institution of university, this framework invites us to radically reimagine what academic labor is, and who it is for.
Sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn expands this view of care to include three interrelated domains: direct personal care; maintenance of physical surroundings; and the weaving and reweaving of the social fabric. In short: care is not only about individuals—it is about infrastructures, relationships, and collective life.
In my own work, I’ve called for care-full municipalism: a framework for reclaiming municipal governance as a means of resisting the enclosures of caring capacity and spaces for care. I now extend this to care-full scholarship as an agenda—a mode of academic practice that resists extraction, embraces interdependence, and seeks to transform the university from a site of patriarchal-capitalist accumulation into a commons for collective thriving.
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Struggle at the University as Previsioning
Universities are not only sites of knowledge production. They are sites of social reproduction: they prepare, shape, and reproduce the subjectivities and institutions of our world. That is why budget cuts and neoliberal restructuring matter. They are not just matters of fiscal choices of moving funding from here to there. They are political acts—enclosures of the collective means to reproduce life otherwise.
And this is where the family/university analogy becomes most powerful. Both institutions are central to reproducing labor power. Both are in crisis. And both, as feminist family abolitionists insist, must be transformed—root and branch—if we are to build a future based on justice and care. The hatchet clears the way, but the seed is what we must plant. Abolition is not enough; we need alternatives that can grow into new socio-ecologies.

Antonio Gramsci wrote on prevision to emphasise its difference from foresight or prediction. It is a political method. It means intervening in the present with a clear analysis of its forces, in order to shift the trajectory of the future. It is, in Gramsci’s words, “the only scientifically possible way of knowing.”
In other words, we cannot predict what comes next. But we can act to make it otherwise.
The university strikes in the Netherlands, the univeristy occupations in Greece last year, the ongoing university boycotts in Turkey, like many others across the world, are not simply about preserving the university as it is. It is about imagining and struggling for what it could become. Not a competitive firm. Not a privatized shell. But a commons. A pluriversity. A seedbed for new worlds.

And that struggle—like care, like knowledge—is collective. There is no escape from it. But there is everything to gain by stepping in, together.