Knowledge, Power, and the University

Foucault shows us that knowledge is never neutral. What counts as truth is always shaped by the ways power circulates through society. Medical science, law, pedagogy, even economics: these are not just innocent descriptions of reality but practices that authorize certain ways of living while disqualifying others. In this sense, knowledge is a technique of governance. It decides what kinds of lives are legible, respectable, and valuable, and what kinds of lives can be dismissed or excluded.

Foucault’s work repeatedly returns to the entanglement of knowledge and power: there is no knowledge that is not already inscribed within relations of power, and no exercise of power that does not mobilize knowledge. He identifies what he calls subjugated knowledges—forms of understanding that are dismissed, excluded, or rendered illegitimate by dominant epistemes. These are not simply “false” beliefs to be corrected by proper science, but marginalized ways of knowing that are actively suppressed because they threaten established regimes of truth. From medical discourses that define “normality” against the disabled body, to colonial taxonomies that relegate indigenous cosmologies to the realm of “superstition,” the function of subjugated knowledges is to reveal the violence of epistemic hierarchies. They remind us that every claim to “truth” is entangled with political structures that authorize some forms of life while disqualifying others

Michael Sandel has made a similar critique in his work on meritocracy and higher education. He argues that modern universities, particularly the elite institutions, have ceased to function as public goods. Instead, they serve as sorting machines that distribute honor and privilege to a narrow group while consigning the majority to lives defined as lesser. The diploma becomes not simply evidence of learning but a certificate of social worth, legitimizing the enormous inequalities that follow. In this way, universities reinforce the idea that only certain forms of knowledge—and by extension certain kinds of people—are valuable.

Sandel proposes two broad remedies. First, he urges that societies revalue the dignity of work. A meaningful community depends not only on those who earn academic credentials, but also on those who sustain social and material life through forms of labor often overlooked. Second, he suggests reforming admissions and funding structures: for example, experimenting with lotteries among qualified applicants and investing heavily in non-elite institutions. Such measures would weaken the monopoly of prestige universities and open up recognition to a wider range of citizens.

Placed in a Foucault's frame, Sandel’s critique underscores how universities operate as mechanisms of power: they produce “truths” about who belongs at the top and who does not. His proposed reforms attempt to interrupt this process, not just by changing who gets into Harvard or Yale, but by challenging the deeper assumption that educational credentials should define human worth.

Pierre Bourdieu: Symbolic Violence and the University

If Foucault unveils universities as instruments of discipline, and Sandel critiques their role as engines of privilege, Pierre Bourdieu casts them as sites where inequality is naturalized through what he calls symbolic violence. For Bourdieu, universities do not simply measure knowledge or ability. They reward forms of cultural capital—ways of speaking, writing, dressing, and behaving—that the upper classes inherit almost without thinking. When working-class students struggle or fail, the institution frames this as a lack of merit, when in fact it reflects the hidden advantages of those already endowed with the “right” dispositions. The university appears neutral, but it is a stage on which privilege constantly reenacts itself as achievement.

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—the ingrained dispositions that shape how people perceive and act—helps explain how this process unfolds. The university is not just a transmitter of knowledge but a producer of habitus aligned with existing hierarchies. Students learn not only what to know, but how to act, speak, and think in ways that reinforce the social order. Even the supposedly open competition of admissions misrecognizes the playing field, for only certain forms of habitus are legible and rewarded.

In Bourdieu’s framework, the university is a field of struggle. Professors compete for symbolic capital through publications, titles, and prestige, while students compete for credentials. But this competition is structured so that those already advantaged are best equipped to succeed. The aura of academic objectivity disguises this structure of reproduction, leading both winners and losers to accept the outcome as deserved. This is what Bourdieu means by misrecognition: domination succeeds not through force alone but because it is believed to be legitimate.

Placed alongside Foucault and Sandel, Bourdieu’s perspective underscores the ways universities reproduce inequality not only by disciplining subjects or credentialing elites, but by masking privilege as merit. The university functions as a magician’s apparatus: turning inherited advantage into the illusion of intellectual worth, thereby sustaining the very hierarchies it pretends to transcend.

Isabelle Stengers: Hesitation and the Ecology of Knowledge

Where Foucault alerts us to the ways knowledge is bound up with power, and Sandel critiques the way universities convert merit into privilege, Isabelle Stengers widens the lens. For her, the problem is not only inequality or disciplinary policing but the very way modern institutions organize knowledge. She warns against what she calls the “epistemological police”: the tendency of universities and scientific authorities to dictate which forms of inquiry count as legitimate and which do not. In doing so, they foreclose the possibility of what she calls an “ecology of practices,” where different knowledges—scientific, experiential, indigenous, artistic—might coexist without one claiming universal dominance.

Stengers also critiques the tempo of the modern university. Under pressure to publish, secure grants, and climb global rankings, knowledge production becomes a frantic race for outputs. Against this, she calls for slow science—a deliberate slowing down, a mode of inquiry more attentive to context, uncertainty, and the fragile work of building trust between practices. The failure of universities, then, is not only in their role as meritocratic gatekeepers, but in their inability to cultivate hesitation. For Stengers, hesitation is a political and ethical act: the capacity to resist premature closure, to remain with problems in their difficulty rather than rushing to solutions that reproduce existing hierarchies.

Placed alongside Foucault and Sandel, Stengers pushes the critique of the university into a more speculative and generative register. If Foucault exposes universities as disciplinary machines, and Sandel unmasks them as engines of privilege, Stengers imagines how they might be otherwise: not credential factories or epistemic police stations, but plural, hesitant spaces where knowledge is practiced as a shared, risky, and ongoing negotiation of how to live together.

In light of Agamben’s diagnosis, Stengers’ call for hesitation takes on a sharper edge. If sovereign power operates by deciding who is included and who is abandoned, hesitation is a way of deferring that violent decision, of refusing to collapse the multiplicity of lives and knowledges into the stark binary of bios and bare life. Where Agamben tracks the machinery of reduction, Stengers imagines practices of ecology and slowness that resist reduction altogether. In this sense, her vision of a plural and hesitant university might be read as a counter-image to the camp and the stress-laden mobilizations of modern inequality: a fragile attempt to cultivate spaces where life is not exposed but shared, negotiated, and sustained.

LLM