Disciplining knowledge: the emergence of an ideological–punitive regime in global higher education
本文通过八个国家的比较分析，揭示了一种结合市场工具与强制性国家干预的意识形态-惩罚性体制如何重塑高等教育治理，削弱大学自治与学术自由，对关注高等教育政策与学术自由的读者有参考价值。
This article argues that a new ideological–punitive regime is reshaping higher education governance by combining market instruments with increasingly coercive, identity-driven State interventions. It asks how a new ideological–punitive regime is reshaping higher education governance beyond neoliberal market logics, and through which convergent and divergent mechanisms this occurs across national systems. It draws on a qualitative comparative analysis of eight cases—Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Poland, Spain/Madrid, and the United States—based on official policy documents, Scholars at Risk reports, and verifiable high-quality journalistic sources. Drawing on theories of hegemony, agenda control, and State power, it develops a framework explaining how coercive, organisational, and symbolic mechanisms recalibrate the balance between consent and coercion within universities. These mechanisms weaken collegial governance, erode peer review, and generate chilling effects that reconfigure academic work, institutional autonomy, and international collaboration. The findings show that contemporary interventions exceed the logic of neoliberal market governance, forming a hybrid order—neoliberalism-plus—in which metrics and competition persist but become subordinated to identity agendas and tests of cultural orthodoxy. By clarifying how punitive repertoires operate and circulate across contexts, the article contributes to scholarship on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and the political economy of knowledge. It concludes by outlining strategies to strengthen organisational resilience and safeguard universities as critical, democratic, and globally connected public institutions.