Whenever a university lands in a political controversy, its administrators tend to retreat to the same refuge: “institutional neutrality.” The phrase conjures an ivory tower where scholarship floats in pure abstraction, safely removed from class politics and state power. It is a comforting picture, but Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who wrote from a fascist prison cell in the 1920s and 30s, dismantled it a century ago.
For Gramsci, power in modern capitalist societies is rarely sustained by the baton and the prison cell alone. It relies primarily on cultural hegemony: the public’s spontaneous consent to the worldview, values, and economic interests of the ruling class. Educational institutions are among the very foundations of this, the fortresses of civil society. As he put it in the Prison Notebooks, “every relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship…” (Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 66) Universities, in other words, do not float above the political fray. They are one of the main places where consent is manufactured, class leadership is organized, and the current dominant order is naturalized as common sense.
At the center of a university’s self-image is the “traditional intellectual”: the autonomous thinker, pursuing universal truths. Gramsci saw this independence as an ideological illusion. By appearing neutral and apolitical, traditional intellectuals lend moral gravity and historical legitimacy to the status quo. Seen this way, the university is less an impartial arbiter of truth than a hegemonic apparatus, a system of institutions, agents, and practices that translates structural power into cultural dominance and, historically, selects, socializes, and legitimizes the governing and economic personnel of the existing order.
That function is most visible in what gets prioritized as knowledge. A curriculum or a canon is never an innocent catalog of human achievement. Raymond Williams, the Welsh socialist academic, described it as a “deliberately selective and connective process” that gives the prevailing order its historical and cultural ratification. What a university chooses to teach and fund sets the perimeter of legitimate political thought.
This is where non-“Western” ways of knowing are pushed to the margins. The study of the Arab world, or West Asia more broadly, is a perfect example of this. Many Arab scholars, most notably Edward Said, argue that the Western scholarship on countries in that region is never a neutral act of description.
It was, and is, an institutional style for authorizing claims about a region, its peoples and its politics, and it grew up alongside Western empire. The very field was built on that history. The very labels “Near East” and “Middle East” place the region in relation to a European center, and for much of the twentieth century area studies in Western universities were shaped by the priorities of states that wanted to understand, and often to manage, the societies being studied. The result was a body of knowledge that spoke about the region far more than it spoke with it.
By elevating one epistemological tradition at the expense of others, higher education takes part in what some scholars call epistemicide: suppressing alternative ways of understanding reality.
Over the past four decades, this dynamic has deepened under neoliberal managerialism. Elite institutions have moved away from “disinterested,” formative education towards specialized, utilitarian programs built to feed corporate demand. Students are rebranded as consumers purchasing human capital, while faculty work under performance metrics and grant-seeking imperatives. The logic of the market is no longer debated as economic theory; it is internalized as common sense.
This is not to suggest the story ends in domination. Gramsci insisted that hegemony is never a finished victory; it is unstable and must be constantly remade. Because universities absorb the conflicts and contradictions of the society around them, they remain arenas of struggle. Student strikes, labor walkouts, and union drives have repeatedly turned campuses into laboratories of counter-hegemony.
The campus has been a starting point of many national protests, from Egyptian students occupying Cairo University in 1972 and the Kent State shootings that sparked a nationwide strike against the Vietnam War in 1970, to Serbian students blockading every public university after the 2024 Novi Sad collapse. Here, the university becomes a site where hegemony is challenged. In waging what Gramsci called a war of position, student activists and scholars refuse the role of passive consumers and organize as organic intellectuals of their own, and that means contesting what knowledge matters and exposing the university’s material ties to power.
True institutional neutrality is an impossible myth.
Every syllabus, endowment investment, and disciplinary policy either legitimates the ruling hegemony or makes room to resist it. For universities like NYU, the question is not whether they are political, but which conception of the world they choose to construct.
The Zeitgeist aims to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented are solely those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board.
