University's Third Mission as a Challenge to Marxist Theory
University's Third Mission as a Challenge to Marxist Theory

Summary/Abstract: This article is based on a literature review, and makes an effort to contextualize an emerging streamof higher education research (critical university studies, Marxist higher education research), to marksome challenges posed by the rise of the university’s third mission to the Marxist theory of education,and finally, to modestly contribute to this new stream of research by proposing a brief conceptualizationof these third mission activities as seen from a Marxist perspective. In its first section, thearticle traces the emergence of the comparative higher education research and the variety of topicsthat it addressed during its' institutional development, to focus on the conceptualisation of therelation between universities' third mission activities and NPM reforms of the higher educationsector in the second section. Then, in the third and fourth sections the rise of the critical universitystudies and its Marxist branch is discussed. In the final section article presents a potential typologizationof the universities' third mission activities from the Marxist perspective. In final section itconcludes that Marxist tradition brings to the table of the higher education research a complex andsubtle conceptual machine for the analysis of labour relations within and without the academicworkplace, and that it could be successfully deployed in the analysis of what Christine Musselincalls the late industrialisation of academic activities.

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