With the hegemony of the neoliberal university roles, structures and systems within higher education have significantly changed. Changes are structural and discursive, conceptual and ideational creating new identities and subjectivities. Student-subjectivities are reconstructed into ‘consumers’ and ‘entrepreneurs’ who join universities to enhance their employability prospects in an individualized and competitive environment (Molesworth et al., 2009; Williams, 2013). Resisting the neoliberal university has been proposed both theoretically and empirically by previous literature, organizational interventions, collective actions, protests and activism. An alternative/post-neoliberal university is re-imagined where free inquiry is exercised, social innovation is practiced and democratic values are nurtured (Cole & Heinecke, 2020; Heath & Burdon, 2013). In such social imaginary, students are empowered to innovate solutions to societal problems, experience self-organization and networking, and exercise free speech and democratic citizenship. Achieving such imaginary is possible through building on bottom-up transformational strategies where students are seen as the main partners and agents for change. Building on student voice, engagement, and participation to transform higher education has been proposed, studied and evaluated in some developed/western countries (Cole & Heinecke, 2020; Risager & Thorup, 2016). However, the neoliberal university is no longer peculiar to developed countries. In Egypt, higher education reforms were guided by international receipts where privatization, internationalization, and quality assurance were constructed as the solution for higher education crisis (Kohstall, 2012; Cantini, 2021). Student subjectivities here are subtly re-engineered into neoliberal ideal subjects who seek to achieve the better grades, improve their entrepreneurial skills, and are responsible for their career prospects. In a developing, neoliberal and authoritarian context, re-imagining universities through building on students as potential transformers for higher education become both a challenging mission and promising opportunity. Delving into possible strengthening of student participation and engagement and to organizational and discursive change in the Egyptian higher education, the paper critically reviews, compares and discusses the relevance and transferability of various approaches to student engagement: a) traditional representative student unions b) student protests, activism and social movements c) new organizational structures and programmatic interventions that enable students to express their imaginaries of themselves, roles, universities and societies while equipping them with networking, self-organization and collective action skills. This includes a wide array of interventions: innovation/policy labs, partnership programs, network coaching programs, and student as partners of research projects. While discussing the different approaches to student participation, the paper explores the feasibility, constraints, and necessary prerequisites for their transferability to the Egyptian context.

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