Abstract
The university is usually pictured as a free sphere, a place of disinterested inquiry, critical thinking and individual responsibility, insulated from politics and the market. Even its critics tend to treat whatever falls short of this ideal as an unfortunate aberration rather than an expression of the institution itself. This talk takes a more sober starting point. My claim is not that particular studies are biased or particular fields compromised, but that the modern university as a whole operates as a propaganda instrument: not an autonomous sphere but both an object and an instrument of governance, and the keystone of the technocratic expert society we inhabit.
Working from the Swedish case, I trace how the university was remade over the twentieth century from a site of humanist reflection into an apparatus of social-scientific governance. The decisive impulse came from American research philanthropy, whose large-scale investments built up an empirical social science designed to make society measurable and steerable: an instrument of social control. Once social questions were recast as objects of measurement, the social ceased to be a moral and political matter and became a technical one, and those who paid for the mapping also defined the problems to be mapped and the direction in which they were to be solved. A welfare state grew up around these structures that cared for people while quietly disarming their capacity to resist the concentration of power that built it. What made this possible was not any single discipline but the institution as a whole: nothing conceals an apparatus of governance better than the good name of free, truth-seeking science.
This is what makes the modern university corrupt in a structural rather than an anecdotal sense: it is not the quality of thought but the interests of its funders that decide which questions are asked and which answers gain authority. Today the expansion of steerability takes new forms: information-gathering intensified through digitalization and ever denser surveillance, with the university still serving as the developer that realizes it, as newly endowed research centres present new technologies as science and public benefit that everyone is expected to welcome.
This talk draws on my book Historien om det moderna universitetet. Från humanistisk reflektion till samhällsvetenskaplig styrning (Celanders, 2026).
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