The University Should Learn from the Critique of Gotha Program
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Writer: Sally Mju
In academia, we’ve all encountered familiar figures, the ruddy-faced men with growing waistlines who spend more time in air-conditioned meeting rooms than in classrooms, signing papers rather than reading books, running intellectual life as if it were a family business. But they shouldn’t distract us from the fact that there is still a whole community of scholars trying to keep knowledge from being reduced to a cheap commodity, people who push their students beyond the obvious, who conduct research after hours, who read and write because it is a way of living, not a way of collecting performance points. They’re far from perfect, yet they remain the best part of the university.
Reading the Critique of Gotha Program, one sees that Marx was not merely criticizing a distribution model, but highlighting a deeper problem at the heart of Lassalle’s framework, where “equal right” hides unequal conditions. While Marx did not directly talk about administrative privilege, his broader body of work clearly identifies a dynamic in which authority arises from position rather than labor — a pattern that today’s universities reproduce with striking accuracy. And the most important thing that Marx wanted to emphasize in the Critique of Gotha Program was, there can be no equality at the end if inequality at the beginning remains, a law of social operation that today’s universities are a clear demonstration of. Look at today’s universities and the pattern is unmistakable, an ever-expanding administrative class with steadily rising salaries, while adjuncts and contract lecturers earn so little they must work two or three jobs just to survive. This is not a matter of individual failure, it is the exact reproduction of structural inequality Marx described 150 years ago.
In contemporary academia, the people who produce knowledge, the lecturers teaching four to six courses a semester, the researchers scrambling to secure grants to keep their labs alive, the teaching staff absorbing the emotional labor of students, occupy the lowest tier of the hierarchy. Invisible forms of labor such as mentoring, pastoral care, hands-on teaching, or painstaking feedback at midnight are treated as “non-work,” while a thirty-page report no one will ever read conveniently counts as “contribution.” This inversion is precisely what Marx warned against, real labor is devalued, while bureaucratic form is elevated to the status of universal measure. The university becomes a place where inequality is sanitized through beautiful words like “efficiency,” “performance evaluation,” and “measurable outcomes.”
If the university is to learn anything from the Critique of Gotha Program, it should begin with organization, there can be no emancipatory knowledge if the very structure that produces it is itself oppressive. This is not an abstract idea, it’s a brutal reality. Student debt rises, contingent faculty burn out, funding flows toward “profitable” research, while community-centered scholarship is dismissed as lacking “impact.” A real university must be democratized from within, decision-making bodies must include those who teach, those who research, and those who care. Resources must be allocated according to actual need and actual contribution, not according to rank or administrative status. Teaching, emotional labor, and mentoring must be recognized as legitimate forms of work, because, as Marx reminds us, those who create value should be the ones who benefit from it.
I’m not interested in destroying the university, I’m interested in giving it back to the people who keep it alive. Scholars don’t lack will, they lack conditions. Low pay, endless deadlines, precarious contracts, and vanished time, these are the forces that suffocate their ability to think and create. When I speak of a “bottom-up university,” I’m not invoking a distant utopia, I’m naming the political task of pulling academia back toward people, toward society, toward real human needs. The Gotha Program teaches us that there can be no just knowledge when the structure that shapes it is unjust, and that changing society begins with changing the place where society’s knowledge is produced. A real university is one where people have a voice, have power, and have the conditions to create, not a place where intellectual life is crushed beneath the wheels of bureaucracy and the market.
An equitable university cannot be built by reports and metrics, but only by redistributing power, from the hands of those in boardrooms to the hands of those who actually produce knowledge.
