Conference Program

Contemporary universities are often framed as caught between democratic renewal and performance regimes organised around measurable impact. Democratic education is invoked as a remedy to the university’s instrumental reduction and democratic fragility, reclaiming its vocation from economistic narrowing. On one side, universities are expected to cultivate critical judgment, participation, and civic responsibility; on the other, they are pressed to demonstrate efficiency and quantifiable outcomes. While this contrast suggests conflict between democratic aspiration and economic rationalisation, under neoliberal governance conditions, it can mask a structural convergence.

Democratic education, while seeking to resist economisation and managerial reduction, can nevertheless articulate its value in outcome-oriented terms. Democratic aspirations may thereby mirror the instrumental grammar they seek to counter, as civic formation is framed through competences and measurable outputs. What appears as a corrective to instrumentalism may thus fold back into it. This slippage is neither inevitable nor inherent to democratic theory; it reflects justificatory environments that draw even critical vocabularies toward outcomes.

This paper argues, through a political-theoretical analysis of governance rationalities, that what appears as a tension between democratic renewal and performance accountability can operate as a dual instrumentalisation of the university. Economic rationalities translate contestable public questions into matters of optimisation and delivery, reformulating political disagreement as a technical problem of management and compliance and narrowing democratic contestation. Less examined is how democratic education discourse, although resisting economisation, can internalise justificatory logics as they become taken-for-granted in higher education. What appears as a choice between economic utility and civic formation often rests on a shared justificatory premise: that education must render its value visible through predefined outputs.

When democratic formation is framed primarily as the production of measurable civic competences, the university risks subordinating learning to specified political ends, politicising and instrumentalising education. The issue is not the democratic aspiration itself, but the justificatory structure through which it is articulated, reshaping the conditions of learning and academic work. This matters because democracy presupposes openness to plurality, judgement, and the emergence of the new, whereas performance regimes presuppose predefined ends. In this way, over-politicisation mirrors economisation: although normatively opposed, they share instrumental orientation. In both cases, democratic life is recast as specified in advance rather than sustained as an open field of judgement and contestation.

These dynamics are intensified by survival pressures. Universities secure legitimacy through demonstrable impact and positioning tied to funding regimes. As value must be rendered visible in advance, specification reshapes how learning is imagined and organised, making the space for indeterminacy—the substrate of academic freedom and critical thinking—harder to defend. What is at stake is how governance conditions reorganise democratic learning: how authority is exercised, how judgement is cultivated, and how participation becomes procedural rather than transformative.

By identifying the under-theorised convergence between economic and democratic outcome rationalities, the paper contributes to scholarly debates on learning for democracy. It suggests that defending university’s democratic mission depends on resisting the reduction of both economic and civic aspirations to deliverable objectives and sustaining conditions for plurality, responsibility, and unforeseeable beginnings.