Times Higher Education asks what a socialist mayor’s battle with institutional power can tell us about transforming entrenched systems
When the Organizing Logic Applies Everywhere
Times Higher Education ran an unusual piece in its opinion section in early March 2026: a reflection on what Zohran Mamdani’s approach to municipal governance might teach scholars and administrators about changing entrenched academic publishing systems. The connection is not as strained as it might first appear. Both situations — a democratic socialist mayor trying to change the culture and operations of a massive, institutionally resistant city government, and reformers trying to change the structures of academic publishing that serve corporate interests over knowledge circulation — involve the same fundamental challenge: how do you transform a system when the system has strong interests in reproducing itself?
The Publishing Parallel
Academic publishing in the United States and globally is dominated by a small number of large commercial publishers — Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley — that charge universities and researchers billions of dollars annually for access to research that was largely funded by public money. Open access advocates have been pushing for reforms for decades, arguing that publicly funded research should be freely accessible to the public. The reforms have made some progress, particularly through federal funding mandates for open access publication, but the commercial publishing model has proven remarkably durable. The parallel to municipal governance is structural: both city bureaucracy and academic publishing involve institutions with strong financial and cultural incentives to resist change, large numbers of participants who benefit from the status quo, and reformers who must work within existing structures while trying to transform them.
What Mamdani’s Method Offers
What the Times Higher Education piece identifies as instructive in Mamdani’s approach is not his specific policies but his organizing logic: the decision to be transparent about what change requires, to build coalitions explicitly, and to accept that institutional transformation is necessarily confrontational. Mamdani did not try to transform city hall from within by being a good manager. He named the interests that would resist change and built public power to counteract them. Academic reformers, the piece suggests, need to do the same: name the commercial interests that profit from the current publishing system, build faculty and institutional coalitions explicitly opposed to those interests, and accept that reform will be uncomfortable. Times Higher Education has been publishing critical analysis of academic publishing practices for decades. SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is the leading advocacy organization for open access and research equity in academic publishing. The comparison may seem unlikely. But the intellectual move — asking what lessons from one arena of institutional reform apply to another — is exactly the kind of cross-domain thinking that produces useful insights. Whether or not one agrees with Mamdani’s politics, the question of how ordinary people transform institutions that have every incentive to stay the same is one that matters across many domains of public life.
