In the course of the Bologna Process, the European higher education area was fundamentally restructured. The aim of creating and harmonizing a common European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2020 was to respond to the challenges of a globalized economy and to increase competitiveness and employability. By means of the strategies of the two-tier study system, modularization of the study program, competence orientation, and the opening of the university, universities have undergone considerable structural and permanent changes (Troiani et al 2021). Problematizations of an academic capitalism refer to the criticism of these higher education policy strategies. The university as a place of 'employability' (Molesworth et al 2009) turned away from a Humboldtian ideal of free and independent science and education (Barnett 2011).

Against these shifts, the double symposium asks for a shift of the symbolic order of the university and reflects on the potentials autonomous knowledge production, which counters bureaucratic and neoliberal control. The symposium builds on general goals of organizational education perspectives in ‘humanizing’ organizations as well as the NW 32 special call for empirical contributions on ‘democratizing organizations’. Through dealing with concepts of organizational transformation, learning and networking, this double symposium focuses on the role and potential of students as potential transformers of the neoliberalized university. What are the alternative imaginaries, strategies and design practices of students organizing towards the vision of a '21st century university'? (Williams 2013) What are present students´ social or institutional movements and how do they mobilize and transform Higher Education Institutions? What are alternative envisionings, students might have towards the right for articulation and free speech, towards the necessities of turning towards sustainability – or towards political needs of participation and institutional transformation (Cole et al 2020).

From an organizational education perspective, the symposium addresses students´ voices and students engagements for transforming higher education (Risager et al 2016). They might be understood as heterotopic actors in which the "utopian impulse [...] prepares the terrain for a radically new development" (Moylan, 1990, p. 175). Higher Education organizations transforming might create plurality, multiplicity and diversity and opens towards different paths of heterotopian strategies in the dynamics of protest, engagement and organizational  transformation. Higher education might then activate generative social fields. It might lead into new forms of direct, distributed, and democratic engagement and might become a metastructure of a globally networked ecosystem. Such a university might aim at 'transformation literacy' as a future path of student learning and social renewal for the future (Weber et al 2020).

The first part of the double symposium explores forms of student agency in different neoliberal contexts and how they contribute to organizational transformation in Higher Education (Heath & Burdon 2013).

The first paper discusses forms of students’ political engagement in the contemporary consumerist English higher education, reflecting on new and subtle forms of individualized political practices drawing on a Foucauldian approach that situates ‘the student as the political actor’. The second paper tackles how black student activism through ad-hoc organizational structures (broad-based campaigns) provides radical alternative imaginaries to the American racialized neoliberal university. It discusses institutionalized responses of administrators to such campaigns and how it can lead to organizational learning and change. The third paper adresses organizational transformation of the Egyptian higher education which reflects a different neoliberal and developing context. It compares and critically analyzes different mechanisms (student activism, formal representation, programmatic interventions) for strengthening student participation while discussing their relevance, feasibility and potential for organizational change.

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