English translation of an article originally published in Portuguese in Observador.
Imagine a newly appointed lecturer at a Portuguese university. They arrive motivated, with new ideas for teaching and ambitious research projects, but quickly learn the system's unwritten rule: it is safer to be loyal than brilliant. They discover that their future in the institution depends less on the quality of their work than on their ability not to disturb old hierarchies, to 'know their place'. Around them, many other early-career academics and researchers live the same reality: they are told that merit matters, but everyone understands that what really carries weight is obedience.
In Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson show how countries prosper when their institutions are inclusive, opening doors to talent, innovation, and participation, and how they become trapped in mediocrity when institutions are extractive and exist above all to protect the power and privileges of a small elite. Inclusive institutions allow people with ideas and talent to advance, create, and challenge the status quo; extractive institutions do the opposite, rewarding loyalty over competence and punishing those who question the rules. Seen through this lens, the experience of that newly appointed lecturer ceases to be a biographical detail and becomes an institutional symptom.
An uncomfortable question therefore imposes itself: are Portuguese universities genuinely inclusive institutions, or small extractive systems that reproduce and defend established power?
Universities often function like small countries. They have their own laws in the form of regulations, governments in the form of rectorates, senates, and councils, elites concentrated mainly among full professors, and citizens with little voice, including students, grant holders, early-career academics, and researchers. And, as in any small country, the way power is distributed and exercised determines whether the institution opens doors to talent or merely protects those already inside the circle of power.
This is where the distinction between inclusive and extractive institutions stops being theory and begins to describe everyday university life. In an inclusive university, rules exist to ensure that the best work is recognised and rewarded regardless of personal loyalties. A few simple questions offer a first diagnosis of the Portuguese university system. Who gets hired? Who advances? Who decides what is taught and how? Who is heard in meetings and who is merely present as scenery? If the practical answer is 'mainly the obedient and well connected', then we are much closer to the extractive model than we like to admit.
As has been observed in other university systems, one of the most damaging practices is the promotion of obedience at the expense of competence. From the first steps of an academic career, young academics learn a simple lesson: it is safer to be loyal than excellent. The newly appointed lecturer quickly realises that contract renewal, workload allocation, or the possibility of advancement depends less on the quality of what they do than on their ability not to challenge established power. In many competitions, internal candidates seem to enjoy a mysterious advantage, while outsiders are treated almost as threats. In meetings, many people prefer to wait and see what those with real power think before risking an opinion. It is no accident that, in many bodies, those with formal or informal power make a point of speaking first: by doing so, they set the tone for what may safely be said and what is better left unspoken.
Added to this is a well-known feature of Portuguese universities: academic inbreeding. In many departments, a large share of the faculty studied there, completed their doctorates there, and built their entire careers there, sometimes literally in the same corridor. Some continuity is natural, but when hiring one's own graduates stops being the exception and becomes the rule, the system closes in on itself. The same networks retain control, new ideas are filtered according to convenience rather than quality, and the best career strategy stops being to broaden one's horizons and becomes to demonstrate loyalty to the dominant group.
Another sign of extractive institutions is asymmetry of risk: there is a core of people with secure positions and a growing layer of people who live permanently on unstable ground. In Portugal this is visible less in academic titles than in the excessive reliance on guest lecturers and fixed-term researchers. People who fear losing their income do not take intellectual risks: they do not start controversial projects, criticise fragile leadership, or experiment with different teaching methods. They keep their heads down and try to survive. A university that systematically relies on this precarity finds it very difficult, in practice, to become a genuine community of free thought.
In Why Nations Fail, the authors also show how elites often use complex rules and procedures to hide power behind paperwork. Does the pattern sound familiar? Portuguese universities have become experts in endless committees and councils in which the real decisions are often made in informal conversations before the meeting. Job announcements multiply that are written so narrowly that, in practice, only one person fits the profile. It is not an irrelevant detail that a competition for an assistant professorship in a Portuguese university may come with a ten-page notice, when at many leading universities the announcement fits on half a page. Evaluation systems proliferate in which the format of the CV matters more than the substance of the work, where the quantity of listed items counts more than the quality of what was actually done. Bureaucracy creates an appearance of fairness and transparency, but often works as a smokescreen: instead of opening the system, it helps perpetuate the pathologies that run through it.
The tragedy of this extractive logic is that it does not harm only individuals; it harms the country. The most talented young people seek systems in which merit carries more weight. Many leave for foreign universities that offer clearer rules and real opportunities for advancement and, in many cases, they do not return. They leave because they understand that here merit is praised in speeches but is rarely decisive in decisions. Innovation slows, not because ideas are lacking, but because those who try to do things differently encounter invisible walls: closed competitions, blocked careers, silent resentments. The university becomes a place where caution systematically defeats boldness.
If we accept this diagnosis, the solution is not another slogan or another carefully drafted strategic plan. It is to change the rules of the game. Any serious reform of universities should begin with a simple idea: everything that promotes independent thought should be welcomed, and everything that inhibits it should be reviewed. A more inclusive university is not built with more rhetoric about merit; it is built through concrete decisions about how people enter, advance, and are evaluated. That means genuinely open and competitive recruitment, less inbreeding and more mobility between institutions, mechanisms that protect weaker voices, and far greater transparency in decisions that shape careers and priorities. A university worthy of the name does not normalise inconvenient voices; it gives them space, argues with them, and grows through that confrontation.
The instinctive reaction is to say, 'that is just how the system works; nothing can be done'. Why Nations Fail reminds us of the opposite: institutions are not natural phenomena, they are human constructions. Today's rules were, in many cases, written to protect concrete interests and can be rewritten if there is the will to do so. The way institutions work is a choice, not a destiny, and it can be changed by those who refuse to accept them as they are. Students, early-career academics, researchers, and taxpayers are not mere extras: they are the people who feel, every day, the consequences of universities that waste talent and make life harder for those who think differently.
Portugal does not lack good students or capable researchers. What we lack is a university system confident enough to reward people who think for themselves, even when that is uncomfortable. A university that takes its mission seriously does not fear inconvenient voices; it needs them. They reveal what is not working, test the limits of established ideas, and force the institution to justify its choices. The central question is no longer 'why do Portuguese universities fail?' The decisive question is different: how long will we accept universities that function like small extractive states rather than open and inclusive institutions worthy of a country that claims it wants to be fairer, more innovative, and more prosperous?
If we are serious about reforming the state, including revision of the Legal Framework for Higher Education Institutions, then reforming universities is not a technical detail. It is one of the most important institutional battles of our time.