This thesis studies the experience that academics – scientists, intellectuals and artists engaging in formal research – have within the contemporary university. More specifically, it explores the ethical dimension of academic critique, which illustrates how academics relate to themselves, others and knowledge and the possibilities of thinking and behaving otherwise within the academic community.

This study uses Foucault’s genealogy of ethics and navigates through multiple approaches and ideas to make sense of the phenomenon of academic critique. Drawing on my interpretation and adaptation of Foucault’s four aspects of ethics (ethical substance, mode of subjectivation, ethical work, and telos), I examine the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge within universities by problematising how existing practices of critique reinforce or resist the conditions of its own existence and contribute to the cultivation of a particular academic-self. This thesis explores the modalities of experience in a particular context of policy and experience: the Chilean academic community. This case illustrates a unique experience of the neoliberalisation of academia, which conflicts with other material realities of academic life since the Republic period (nineteenth-century).

Four analyses are deployed throughout the thesis. The first is genealogical to trace the historical (re)organisation of a discourse that began in the late nineteenth century in ways that support and contest the contemporary forms of governmentality in the Chilean university system. I focus on one of the most important intellectuals in Latin America during the post-independence period and first Rector of the University of Chile: Andres Bello. The other three analyses dive into a number of different modalities of experience in the contemporary Chilean academy. These include what can be described as sacrifice, missional and possibilising. Based on these considerations, this thesis seeks to make two contributions. First, understanding further the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge within the contemporary university. Second, provide an analytical framework for the study of the formation of the academic-self considering an ethical perspective.