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Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities Edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch University of Regina Press, 2026

Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities

Edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch

University of Regina Press, 2026

The contributors to Knowledge Under Siege: Charting a Future for Universities, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch, identify many contemporary pressures on institutions of higher learning in capitalist countries, drawing mostly on the experiences of universities in the Anglo-American sphere. Among the issues discussed in this book are the neoliberal and managerial restructuring of universities; the conservative backlash against demands for social justice; the colonial and imperialist foundations of Western universities and the dominance of English-language publications in global science, and; the argument that universities should maintain “institutional neutrality” with regard to social and political phenomena like the genocide being committed in Palestine by Israel. Given the breadth of the book’s 19 chapters, this review cannot do justice to every contribution. Instead, I focus on several themes that emerge across the collection.

Gloria Ladson-Billings’s overview of developments in the United States—particularly Florida, Texas, and North Carolina—brings home the coordinated nature of the authoritarian assault on universities. This has included government decrees regarding what can or cannot be taught; state bans on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) statements or programs; the weakening of tenure protection; legislation mandating the teaching of “conservative” curriculum, and; shifting accreditation of academic programs away from independent professional bodies or external review processes that have rejected government interference in these programs. We could add to this list other developments, such as the attempt to replace professional bodies with a government-appointed accreditation authority.

The trends described by Ladson-Billings are also present in Canada, and particularly in Alberta, reflecting the emulation of the American right by Canadian Conservatives. Intellectuals of the “anti-woke” movement in Canada are calling for the elimination of EDI criteria in academic hiring and federal research chair and granting programs, and the establishment of conservative “civics” schools. Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government in Alberta sought the power to vet university research funding applications in the Provincial Priorities Act passed in 2024, claiming that federal agencies disburse funds “based on a certain ideology.” Over the objections of its faculty, staff, and students, the University of Alberta’s management removed EDI language from its hiring policy in March 2026—a move lauded by Janice MacKinnon and Jack Mintz.

Issues that receive less attention by the authors in this book include the impacts of artificial intelligence and the normalization of online teaching on higher education. An exception is the interesting chapter by Christopher Newfield, which envisages the role of new technologies in a dystopian, post-democratic future for higher education. These developments, implemented at a radical pace since the pandemic, have profoundly destabilized the pedagogy and research skills that have long been foundational to the social sciences and humanities and that had adapted to earlier information technologies. AI will replace human labour and create new potential for the commodification of education. Just as we are on the verge of a technical revolution that calls into question the need for institutions like universities, academics are more poorly organized than ever to influence the direction that these changes will take. They have been through several decades of deprofessionalization and the growth of the academic precariat. The switch in 2020 to holding meetings and courses online, leaving offices, staff lounges, boardrooms, and classrooms empty, has eroded the interpersonal relationships that are essential to collective action in any workplace or community and may never be fully reversed.

Few of the authors address the question “What is a university for?” in relation to the climate crisis, and none refers to the climate justice universities........

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