Academic Vomit : Academia Under Capitalism in the Eyes of an Anarchist

How Britain’s profit-driven universities are collapsing, and why only radical transformation can save higher education.

This book delivers an uncompromising critique of the UK university’s dominant business model, exposing how market logic is actively pushing higher education towards systemic collapse. This crisis was a predictable outcome of a system built on competition, profit, and permanent precarity.

The book offers a forensic analysis of how universities transformed into corporate institutions, fixated on revenue generation, student recruitment, rankings, and government funding metrics. Within this model, academic labour is systematically devalued. Scholars are. stripped of intellectual autonomy and transformed into obedient workers, governed byperformance targets and managerial surveillance. As profitability take precedence, the ethical foundations of academic life are steadily dismantled, eroding collegiality and intellectual freedom.

The book offers a radical vision for the future of higher education. Drawing on anarchist principles, it calls for a complete reimagining of the university: the nationalisation of research infrastructure, the collectivisation of teaching and curriculum, the dismantling of hierarchical governance, and the abolition of patents, restrictive peer review, and profit-driven publishing.

By rejecting corporate control and reasserting education as a public, collective, and emancipatory project, the book offers a powerful vision for transforming higher education from the ground up.