Od ucieczkowości do dobra wspólnego. Synergia myślenia krytycznego i przedsiębiorczości jako strategia oporu na współczesnym uniwersytecie (Kenia - Portugalia)

The article responds to the diagnosis of the progressive crisis of the contemporary academy, which, under the influence of free-market transformations, precarization, and managerialization, is losing its emancipatory potential, increasingly becoming a space for the reproduction of the status quo. The starting point for the considerations is a critical analysis of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) discourse, with particular emphasis on its impact on the systemic marginalization of the humanities and their instrumentalization for the sake of technological innovation. The aim of the text is to examine the grassroots, tactical strategies of resistance undertaken by academic participants in the face of these processes. The empirical basis consists of qualitative research, semi-structured in-depth interviews subjected to reflexive thematic analysis, conducted among academic staff of public universities (technical, humanities and art faculties) in Kenya and Portugal as part of the international CAPHE project. In the theoretical layer, the text problematizes the tension between the categories of the “entrepreneurial university” and “critical thinking”. Drawing on Bill Readings’ diagnosis of the posthistorical university (2017), on the post-workerist theory of the commons (Szadkowski 2015) and the concept of the Undercommons (Harney, Moten 2013), the author argues that in academic practice, grassroots entrepreneurship does not have to mean capitulation to the logic of capital. The analysis of the collected material shows that it rather becomes an essential tool for survival and bypassing cumbersome state bureaucracy (Kenya) or a subversive practice of regaining agency in a technologized market environment (Portugal). The article demonstrates that overcoming the institutional impasse requires moving beyond the framework of melancholic escapism. It is the synergy of radical critical reflection – rooted in the humanities – with socialized entrepreneurship that allows for the creation of a new form of active resistance, constituting a step towards the reconstitution of the university as an institution of the common good.