Outsides: Reframing the Social Legitimacy of the University

Abstract

The current assault on the legitimacy, relevance and independence of higher-education institutions constitutes a systematic attack on the foundations of democratic society and the radical-liberal project itself. In essence, the social legitimacy and sense of public good of the university are being eroded, with weighty consequences for the future of the sector. To address this issue, this article proposes ‘outsides’ as a theoretical framework for reconceptualizing the university’s legitimacy beyond state-centred political imaginations. We theorize two interconnected forms of outsides. The first is political outsides, or spaces of engagement that generate thinking, action and accountability beyond state apparatuses. The second is university outsides, or solidaristic networks that generate transformative spaces to protect academic autonomy from corporate and managerial encroachment. We propose ‘outsides’ as a progressive and innovative social legitimacy ecosystem that positions universities as an ‘estate’ within democratic architectures, embedded in broader society networks rather than solely dependent on state recognition. This reframing offers pathways for universities to recover and reconfigure their academic autonomy while maintaining genuine accountability to diverse publics, ensuring that the ‘public good’ status of higher education is actively produced through relational engagement rather than assumed as a static institutional privilege. We argue that these outsides strengthen institutional autonomy and accountability, facilitating generative options for programmatic work and action in higher education. Finding ways ‘to think against the state that has no outside’, we argue that outsides have the potential to reframe the social legitimacy of the university in ways that may respond to the current challenges of the higher-education sector.