Abstract
<p>As political illiberalism becomes a more prominent feature of contemporary democratic and hybrid political systems, the consequences that these emerging political forces have for institutions of higher education are only beginning to be explored. Universities occupy a central position in the ideological struggle for cultural hegemony: they produce knowledge, train elites, socialize large numbers of students, and shape the discursive environment. Illiberal movements recognize this and in addition to restricting the academic freedoms of university systems at large, also use these institutions as metapolitical instruments for achieving hegemony in both liberal democratic and authoritarian settings. Existing research offers little in terms of systematic frameworks for understanding the diversity of these organizations, which tend to be analyzed using case studies. This article addresses this gap by comparing illiberal universities across the US, EU and Russia and classifies them into four ideal types based on two primary factors: their origins and their funding sources which, we argue, influence the functions, incentive structures, and relations to political power for these universities. According to these two primary factors, we show that each ideal type operates according to a specific organizational logic. These findings demonstrate cross-national evidence for the multifaceted way in which illiberal movements engage with universities in the “third wave of autocratization.”</p>