Abstract
What does Paulo Freire’s analysis of oppressed peasants in 1960s Brazil have to tell us about the working conditions of academics in the 21st-century university? Troy Heffernan’s Academy of the Oppressed answers this question with conviction and analytical force. Drawing on Freire’s primary works, most notably Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), and read in productive dialogue with Bourdieu’s account of capital and the reproduction of privilege, the book also draws on a substantial body of the author’s own research conducted across higher education systems in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. The result is an original contribution to the sociology of work and organisational power. It is a text that will speak directly, and at times uncomfortably, to anyone with a stake in the governance and labour conditions of contemporary academic life.
The book’s central proposition is straightforward: the managerialist transformation of higher education over the past four decades has reproduced the dynamics of power, control and manufactured consent that Freire documented in radically different contexts. Heffernan advances this argument across eight chapters, moving from a contextualisation of Freire’s legacy, through a historical account of the corporatisation of the university, to sustained analyses of oppressor and oppressed dynamics within Academia, and concluding with a Freirean examination of the possibilities and limits of collective liberation.
Empirically, Heffernan draws on interviews, focus groups and survey data gathered from participants ranging from vice-chancellors and university presidents to students and academics with different levels of seniority, and contractual precarity. This breadth of perspective allows the analysis to trace the operation of power across the span of institutional hierarchy. Chapters Five and Six, dedicated respectively to the mechanisms of oppressor control and the oppressed, constitute the analytical core of the volume. The examination of restructuring as a technology of workforce control, the deliberate dispersal of accountability across bureaucratic layers as a means of neutralising grievance, and the engineering of precarity as a condition for extracting unpaid labour from insecure staff, is rendered with sociological precision.
One of the book’s most relevant contributions concerns the mechanisms by which academics from marginalised backgrounds are structurally confined to the periphery regardless of individual merit or institutional presence. Heffernan identifies the ‘circle of power’ as the operative unit of institutional control: a predominantly middle-class, White, cisgendered and male formation governing access to decision-making, resource allocation and career advancement. Crucially, admission to the institution does not constitute admission to this circle. The empirical material substantiates this with force. Participants from marginalised backgrounds at elite institutions describe arriving with credentials and capability only to find that ‘the hierarchy was already decided and what I did had nothing to do with it’ (p. 113), with research teams assembled through pre-existing networks of privileged incumbents rather than scholarly contribution.
A key instrument in reproducing this exclusion is the expansion of teaching-focused precarious contracts: simultaneously market-driven, organisationally functional and self-reinforcing. Universities deploy them as cost-reduction mechanisms, concentrating cheaper labour in student-facing roles while ring-fencing research time and grant-generating capacity for those already within the circle of power. Once inside such a role, exit becomes foreclosed: the absence of protected research time, administrative overload and the lack of grant history disqualify the incumbent from the very criteria through which research-intensive mobility is measured. Heffernan is explicit about who disproportionately occupies these positions: women, academics from working-class backgrounds and disabled academics. The result, as Heffernan puts it, is that ‘privilege replicating itself is fundamental to how universities have operated in recent decades’ (p. 50), with leadership selection functioning not as meritocratic advancement but as the renewal of a controlling minority the circle of power is structurally designed to perpetuate.
By applying Freirean categories to the neoliberal university, Heffernan refuses the common assumption that the degradation of academic working conditions is an incidental by-product of austerity or market competition. Instead, he demonstrates that this degradation is systematic, intentional and self-reinforcing. The mechanisms by which workers are silenced, divided and rendered individually complicit in their own exploitation are achievements of it. This argument will find productive resonance with scholars working on employee voice, the conditions of decent work and the structural determinants of workplace inequality.
One area where the analysis falls short of its own ambition concerns intersectionality. Heffernan acknowledges, at several points, that the burdens of precarity and exploitation are differentially distributed across gender, race and career stage. However, these acknowledgements remain peripheral observations within the broader oppressor/oppressed binary. The gendered architecture of managerialism in higher education, including who disproportionately carries the unpaid labour of teaching, pastoral care and administration, and whose voice is most systematically foreclosed, warrants more than occasional notation. The binary framing, for all its analytical utility, risks flattening the intersectional complexity of who, precisely, is being oppressed and by how much.
In the final chapters on liberation, Heffernan is honest that no viable pathway to collective action can be prescribed from outside the specific conditions of a given institution or sector, and that solidarity grounded in shared ideological understanding must precede any form of organised resistance.
In sum, Academy of the Oppressed is a timely, empirically grounded and theoretically committed work. It poses questions about power, agency and the politics of academic labour that the sociology of work is well positioned to take seriously.
