This article is originally published in Aliran by UK Menon on
As Western academic institutions surrender to political pressure, the Global South faces a historic opportunity to define education on its own terms.
The collapse of empires is a spectacle history reserves for its more dramatic transitions. In the past, empires crumbled quietly. Only palace guards, concubines and those living at the imperial centre bore witness to the final gasps of authority. In the far-flung outposts, the illusion of power lingered – kept alive by distant garrisons and the inertia of habit. News of the fall arrived late, often long after the empire had already died at its core.
But the decline of the American empire is different. It unfolds before our eyes in real time, streamed and archived by the very technologies it once used to proclaim its dominance.
What we are witnessing is not just America’s geopolitical realignment. We are seeing the steady dismantling of the ideals it once claimed to champion – among them, the university as the heart of a civilisational mission rooted in freedom, reason, and dissent.
That claim to a civilisational mission no longer holds. The recent arrests and expulsions of protesting students, alongside growing political interference in university affairs across the US, have shaken a long-held assumption. So has growing political interference in university affairs across the US. The assumption was that the West – especially America – remains a reliable reference point for liberal democratic traditions and academic freedom.
Beneath these extraordinary developments lies something even more disturbing: a resurgence of the racism and exclusionary ideologies that once accompanied colonisation.
Control through funding, silence through fear
The erosion of academic freedom is not always enforced through arrests or laws.
Under the current US administration, we are seeing a new strategy emerge: the use of financial levers to ensure that universities align with state narratives – especially on international matters. Criticism of foreign governments and solidarity with oppressed peoples have become flashpoints.
Universities are being pressured to remain silent or neutral in the face of genocide and mass violence. Those who speak out – students, faculty members, even entire departments – risk losing funding, public support or institutional standing.
This is not neutrality. It is complicity.
What we are witnessing is an attempt to rationalise and justify genocide by banning the language that names it. The goal is not just to silence protest. It aims to reshape moral and political discourse itself – so that calls for justice are rebranded as threats, and acts of solidarity are rewritten as acts of disruption.
This form of repression is perhaps more dangerous than outright censorship, because it cloaks itself in the language of “stability”, “balance” or “policy compliance”.
In truth, it is a deliberate attack on moral consciousness within institutions that once claimed to protect it.
If the university cannot speak the truth about the world, especially when that truth is painful or unpopular, then it has ceased to be a university at all.
The suppression of student voices, the censorship of scholarship deemed “divisive” and the narrowing of academic inquiry all echo historical efforts to control not just territories but also minds.
Today, this project is renewed – not through conquest. It happens through the dominance of knowledge production, digital surveillance and the global reach of proprietary technologies that shape what can be known, taught, and believed.
It is a recolonisation by other means, carried out through epistemic control and technological dependency.
We are witnessing the quiet reassertion of a hierarchy of knowledge. In this hierarchy, Western institutions, platforms and standards define what counts as science, what qualifies as credible, and what deserves to be preserved or erased.
In this emerging world order, countries in the Global South risk becoming passive consumers of ideas, data and tools they did not create and cannot question. This is not just marginalisation – it is intellectual subjugation.
In this climate, the imperative to redefine our own educational values is not just about relevance or reform. It is about resistance and self-determination. It is about ensuring we do not cede control of our intellectual futures to those who once denied us agency. These same forces now return, cloaked in the authority of liberalism and technology, to reassert their dominance over our imaginations, institutions and identities.
The question we must now ask is urgent and unavoidable: how do we wean ourselves from outdated models? How do we define our own principles to lead our students and our nations into the future?
Letting go of the imitation reflex
Much of post-colonial higher education, including in Malaysia and elsewhere in Asia, has been built on inherited frameworks. These are often reproductions of British or American systems, often without interrogation.
These models, once held up as gold standards, now appear increasingly brittle under pressure. To continue emulating them uncritically is to ignore the structural fragilities they have exposed.
We must move from mimicry to intellectual independence. This means not only rejecting what no longer serves us but also taking responsibility for building something better – rooted in our contexts histories, and future aspirations.
Reimagining the university
Redefining academic freedom and institutional autonomy must begin by grounding universities in the needs and experiences of their own societies.
A university worthy of public trust must reflect:
- The pluralism of its population, not the dogma of imported or home-grown orthodoxy
- The hopes of its youth – not only for jobs, but for justice, identity and agency
- The intellectual traditions – spiritual, philosophical, indigenous – that exist beyond the Western canon
Academic freedom must not be an imported abstraction. It must be an internal imperative – embedded in institutional cultures, protected by legal frameworks and nurtured by civic solidarity.
Resisting epistemic capture
We must also be clear-eyed about the threat of epistemic colonisation – the domination of what counts as valid knowledge. It manifests in many forms. Globally ranked universities, algorithm-driven learning platforms or “innovation grants” that direct research away from social critique and towards marketable products all have the same effect. They narrow academic inquiry and outsource our intellectual agenda to foreign interests.
To reclaim our autonomy, we must:
- Protect the right to question – especially when it challenges state, corporate or religious power
- Support knowledge creation in local languages and epistemologies
- Demand transparency in data regimes and resist dependency on foreign tech infrastructures that monitor, rank and sort our academic lives
This is not a retreat into nationalism – it is a refusal to surrender our future to a digital and epistemic elite.
Building new solidarities
If the West is no longer our horizon, we must look sideways – to each other. Powerful lessons in academic courage and resistance are emerging across the Global South. We see them in South Africa’s decolonial struggles, in Latin American student movements, in Southeast Asian demands for accountability in education. These are not just case studies. They are blueprints.
Regional and South-South solidarities offer both practical models and moral support. They show that academic transformation is not only possible – it is already underway.
New ethic of leadership
None of this is possible without ethical leadership – by faculty, administrators and students alike. In times of repression, neutrality is complicity.
The responsibility of academic leaders is not merely to manage institutions, but to defend them: against political capture, against market distortion and against their own bureaucratic inertia.
We must lead with:
- Courage, to speak when others fear
- Integrity, to uphold dissent as a democratic value
- Imagination, to envision a university that serves people, not power
Students as co-authors of change
Above all, this transformation must include students – not as clients or liabilities but as co-authors of the university’s future. To arrest or expel them for protest is not only to betray democracy – it is to betray the very purpose of education. We do not educate for compliance. We educate for conscience, for participation and for the courage to ask, what kind of world do we want to live in?
Danger of repressive mimicry
There is an added danger. What is happening in the US does not merely disappoint those who once looked to it as a moral compass – it emboldens others.
If a country that once styled itself as the “greatest democracy” can criminalise campus protest, suppress minority viewpoints and deploy police against student dissent, then what prevents authoritarian regimes from doing the same? They might do so with greater force and with far fewer legal safeguards.
In countries already saturated with restrictive laws – on speech, assembly, information and cyber-space – the normalisation of such repression elsewhere may serve as both justification and inspiration. If the US government can ban books, threaten faculty or dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion programmes (DEI), why should others hesitate to use their own arsenal of laws to achieve even greater control?
We stand at the edge of a dangerous spiral, where the legitimacy of silencing dissent gains global currency.
Our future, our terms
The time has come to decouple from Western dependency – not to reject universal values but to reclaim and reimagine them. If the traditional centres of democracy can no longer model freedom, then we must.
The university of the future will not be built in Cambridge or Berkeley. It will be built wherever educators, students and societies refuse to give in to fear and refuse to hand over their minds.
We do not need permission to be free. We only need the will to begin to be free.