University, Capitalism, and Transdisciplinary Resistance

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Oriol Corcoll Arias

The contemporary university, historically conceived as a locus for the production and transmission of critical and emancipatory knowledge, finds itself trapped in a structural contradiction. On the one hand, it proclaims a commitment to epistemological universalism — the idea that knowledge should be valid and shareable universally — and to the intellectual daring of sapere aude; on the other, it functions as a device for the reproduction of privilege, endogamy, and resistance to change.

Globalised Digital Capitalism does not reject transdisciplinarity: it exploits it. Platforms such as Google, Meta, X, or OpenAI integrate adaptive technologies, data, emotions, languages, and economies to produce operational meaning and capture attention. Agility, symbolic hybridisation, and transversality are now the key vectors of power.

While Globalised Digital Capitalism hybridises languages, formats, and knowledges to generate symbolic value on a massive scale, academia clings to disciplinary structures designed for a medieval world of compartmentalised and feudal thought. Digital platforms have embraced far more nimbly the principles of transversality and interconnection that academia rejects out of fear of losing its internal privileges. Far from being a neutral space for intellectual dissent, its hierarchical structure — organised into bounded departments, opaque committees, and inaccessible indexed journals — operates as a mechanism of symbolic self-preservation.

This rigidity is no accident. As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated, disciplines stabilise paradigms, and these paradigms protect the capital — symbolic, economic, and institutional — of dominant actors. Transdisciplinarity, in this sense, challenges not only the forms of knowledge, but also the hierarchies that sustain them.

An illustrative example: a transdisciplinary doctoral project is rejected by a Catalan university that markets itself as open and modern, on the grounds of “academic incongruence” and “not knowing the institution from within”, while a Japanese institution — specialising in global and transdisciplinary studies — welcomes it enthusiastically. It is especially telling that a country often labelled “conservative” should act with more openness than another that insists on portraying itself as modern. The objection is not epistemological, but political: thinking that crosses boundaries threatens the distribution of symbolic power within Catalan academia.

It is particularly striking to realise that figures such as Jürgen Habermas or Noam Chomsky, if they were to propose their projects from scratch today, would face the same formal obstacles. Contemporary Catalan universities are often less open than those of the period immediately following fascism: there was more transdisciplinarity and intellectual courage in the post-war era than in today’s seemingly democratic and globalised present.

As Terry Eagleton has noted, the modern university exhibits a paradoxical parochialism: while defending “universal” knowledge, it retreats into self-referential rituals that perpetuate the status quo. This closure becomes operational through nepotism in faculty recruitment, opacity in hiring processes, and the closing of ranks against proposals that overflow established categories.

Thus, the PhD — which ought to be the gateway to critical research — becomes an ideological filter that neutralises difference and deactivates the transformative impact of thought. PhD theses are reduced to futile rhetorical exercises in adapting to disciplinary codes, limited to regurgitating consecrated theories without any original contribution. Academic production enters an arid cycle of redundant articles that merely shuffle information into bounded, innocuous formats without generating real knowledge.

It must be understood that, in a world defined by interconnected crises — climate, inequality, digital mutation, disinformation — transdisciplinarity is neither a postmodern whim nor a tool to be monopolised by capital, but an epistemological and ethical necessity for academia. As Basarab Nicolescu formulates it, transdisciplinarity is not a sum of disciplines, but a movement that dissolves their boundaries to generate new ontological frameworks capable of grasping real complexity.

Paradoxically, the public university — funded by all — incapable of competing symbolically, imitates this model only in its most superficial form: promotional videos on social media, digital marketing, and empty “innovation” discourses. The result is a Stockholm syndrome saturated with pathos: a mimetic enactment of capital’s rhetoric without any real transformation of practices. When this is done in pursuit of profitability or institutional prestige, it becomes a form of hypocritical collaborationism. And the problem is not confined to the upper echelons: it is reproduced — through passivity or convenience — at the lowest levels of the system.

Take undergraduate degrees, for example. It is no longer clear whether students arrive with poor preparation due to structural deficiencies in secondary education, or whether it is the university itself that has abdicated any intellectual demand, so long as students keep paying tuition fees and keep the funding wheel turning. The result is an academic space that often abdicates its formative function and merely certifies attendance, as if the mere fact of sitting in a classroom were equivalent to learning. Instead of being a stage for intellectual transformation and personal discovery, the degree has become an administrative procedure designed to satisfy indicators, not curiosity.

And to complete the model come the Master’s degrees — almost always unnecessary. What should represent a significant and transformative specialisation, theoretically relevant, has been reduced to a mere financial toll for — with luck — access to an already saturated and precarious labour market. Rather than concentrating knowledge, many Master’s programmes merely accumulate hours to pad out CVs. Professors themselves often admit to stretching the undergraduate syllabus in order to justify the existence of Master’s degrees that add little beyond fees and bureaucracy. The result? More paperwork, more titles, more debt… but no real progress in either education or thought.

We must reclaim the original sense of the university as a space for intellectual freedom, experimentation, and symbolic resistance, and we must trust in the transdiscipline. It is absolutely vital to banish the indifferent academic — the one who perpetuates the system — as a traitor. If academia wishes to play any role in shaping the post-critical world already in formation, it must abandon its protection of obsolete rituals and commit to open, hybrid, and courageous forms of knowledge. Thinking cannot be a luxury or a procedure: it must be a radical practice of transformation. If the university is unwilling to take that risk, it does not deserve to be saved: it deserves to be dismantled.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons