Any critique about the neoliberal university ought to confront and acknowledge its colonial roots. Victoria Reyes, in her book Academic Outsider (Stanford University Press, 2022), highlights that higher education was never designed for the global majority, particularly people of color from low-income backgrounds. It was built by and for the elite—predominantly white, cisgender, male and affluent individuals—whose privilege shaped the norms that dominate higher education today. These norms actively harm oppressed communities. People of color in positions of power within higher education, such as tenured faculty or administrators, often perpetuate these systems of oppression when they conform to institutional norms instead of challenging them.
The positivist research paradigm (a.k.a. positivism) sustains oppression in academia by prioritizing quantifiable data while dismissing subjective experiences and social contexts in pursuit of “objective” truths. This fragmented approach erases the complexity of lived experiences and ignores the interplay of privilege and oppression in shaping identities. Positivism fuels deficit-based research, white saviorism and helicopter science, invalidating diverse epistemologies and methodologies. Deficit-based research highlights negative conditions in oppressed communities, framing them as lacking while ignoring systemic causes of inequities, such as settler colonialism and structural racism. Legacies of positivism reinforce harmful stereotypes and stigmatization toward communities of color in higher education.
In contrast, a transformative paradigm offers an alternative to positivism by centering the voices and experiences of oppressed communities. It prioritizes knowledge democracy and dismantling of power imbalances that have historically excluded marginalized communities from the research process. Over the past 25 years, community-engaged research (CEnR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) have emerged as crucial approaches in health education, public health and the social sciences to address social inequities. Both approaches emphasize equitable, reciprocal community-academic partnerships, to foster genuine collaboration and systemic change.
As a woman of color from the Global South and an immigrant scientist who studies health equity, I have witnessed firsthand both the transformative potential of CEnR in addressing social injustice and the discriminatory practices that neoliberal universities perpetuate in my own research with low-income and immigrant communities of color. While CEnR and CBPR are integral to addressing complex health and social inequities by empowering communities and fostering sustainable interventions, a question remains: Can these approaches thrive within the neoliberal university?
White Saviorism and the Neoliberal University
Unfortunately, the rise of CEnR within neoliberal universities, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, was driven not by a genuine shift toward equity, but by a desire for funding and institutional prestige. As Megan Snider Bailey notes, “Market forces … shape university-community partnerships,” reinforcing a colonial mindset rooted in the white savior complex. This complex positions universities as gatekeepers of resources and legitimacy, exploiting oppressed communities under the appearance of “helping” them to secure funding from entities like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
The white savior complex describes privileged individuals, often white, who see themselves as “saviors” or “benevolent rescuers” of oppressed communities. This paternalistic mindset creates exploitative dynamics and replicates patterns of subjugation. For instance, universities often profit significantly from research with oppressed communities, taking up to 50 percent of grant funds as indirect costs for expenses such as facility maintenance and administration. These funds rarely return to the communities that need them most. Instead, universities divert these resources to maintain their own operations, exposing the hypocrisy of institutions that claim to support equity and justice. These exploitative practices raise a critical question: Who benefits the most from the oppression and illness of communities of color?
The answer often points back to the universities themselves. They profit from the appearance of equity while perpetuating social injustice. The harm caused by white saviorism extends beyond finances. Transactional and extractive research methods are normalized in the neoliberal university. These methods reinforce patterns of subjugation and undermine long-term partnerships that could foster social justice and radical healing. As scholars have shown, a human-centered, liberatory approach must replace the transactional and extractive methods often associated with white supremacy and settler colonialism.
Precarity in the Academy
Universities that claim to promote social justice and CEnR often perpetuate exploitative practices and precarious working conditions. They frequently hire community leaders, promotoras de salud (community health workers), students and scholars of color on short-term contracts with little job security and no benefits. These precarious positions create dependency on higher institutions that exploit labor while controlling access to resources.
As Anne Cafer and Meagen Rosenthal explain, moral outrage often drives short-term involvement in community projects. CEnR that fails to address inequitable power dynamics becomes another tool of oppression disguised as allyship. Superficial, performative community-academic partnerships deepen mistrust of academic institutions in oppressed communities and reinforce power dynamics and social injustice.
Raquel Wright-Mair and Samuel Museus highlight how academia’s power hierarchies instill a fear of retaliation, silencing junior scholars of color from challenging systemic inequities. Scholars of color are often forced to align their work with institutional goals while sickening their bodies and damaging their mental health. The market-driven model of the neoliberal university prioritizes profits and productivity, limiting justice-oriented research. To address these issues in higher education, we must ask urgent questions:
- What can we do to dismantle white-led initiatives that perpetuate dependence and subjugation?
- How can institutions eliminate the white savior complex embedded in their structures?
- How can we ensure fair calculation of indirect costs in CEnR that prevent the exploitation of community needs for grant funding and institutional prestige?
Recommendations for Conducting Respectful and Liberatory CEnR
The neoliberal university perpetuates the white savior complex, commodifies community needs and exploits people of color through short-term appointments designed to maintain systemic inequities. Therefore, it is pivotal to embrace the liberatory nature of CEnR that prioritizes social justice and structural change.
- Transformative practices. Researchers must critically reflect on how their own positionality and privilege influence the liberation or oppression of marginalized communities. Universities must recognize and amplify the expertise of community members in shaping research agendas and outcomes. Furthermore, institutions must actively embrace linguistic justice and culturally relevant methods, respecting the languages, traditions and cultural contexts of the communities they engage. By prioritizing these practices, institutions can foster decolonial, respectful and inclusive collaborations that effectively challenge and dismantle oppressive systems in higher education.
- Accountability is essential. Funding agencies must prioritize equitable representation and tangible benefits for communities over superficial metrics when evaluating CEnR. Neoliberal universities must stop exploiting community researchers and scholars of color through precarious, short-term appointments that reinforce tokenization and systemic inequities. Universities often hire people of color temporarily to build trust for community-academic partnerships while maintaining the overrepresentation of white faculty. To disrupt this cycle, funding agencies must require universities to intentionally hire and retain leaders, scholars and students from oppressed communities, ensuring they have job security. Empowering these voices permits CEnR to address community-specific needs, build local infrastructure and foster authentic partnerships rooted in equity, respect and shared power, dismantling the traditional hierarchies of academic research.
- Rejecting unpaid labor is nonnegotiable. Unpaid labor perpetuates inequities, exploiting oppressed communities. Ethical CEnR demands equitable compensation, collaboration and empowerment, ensuring all participants are treated with dignity and are compensated fairly. These principles are critical to advancing liberation and driving systemic change.
Advancing CEnR that truly serves oppressed communities requires dismantling the colonial, patriarchal and exploitative structures underpinning higher education. Embracing a transformative paradigm prioritizes genuine representation, community needs and liberation over market-driven motives, creating a model for lasting social change and liberation in an increasingly inequitable world.