Published in Jon Nixon (2017, ed.), Higher Education in Austerity Europe. London: Bloomsbury. For full-text, you can get the book here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/higher-education-in-austerity-europe-9781474277280/ The Politics of Austerity and Entrepreneurialism: Reflections on the Role of Humanities Ari-Elmeri Hyvönen Esko Harni [A] great deal will depend on how [...] above all, we prevent the reduction of all education to the purely technological. Which is very tempting because it becomes increasingly difficult even to run the machinery of modern life and keep it functioning. - Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, August 11, 1959 (Arendt – Jaspers, 1992, 375) Introduction In September 2015, a group of students, teachers, researchers, and staff occupied the Porthania building of the University of Helsinki. The general assembly of the occupation reached consensus on three basic demands. The occupiers opposed austerity (particularly in education), called for an implementation of a tripartite 1 , directly democratic, decision- making process for the education system, and – finally – demanded ”that higher education be guided by education and cultural politics, not business, product development or commercial innovation” (Yliopistovaltaus, 2015). The last point was made a bit more 1 Finnish public universities have traditionally followed a model in which the key decision making bodies have a tripartite representation from professors (including associate/assistant professors), students (including graduate/PhD students), and other staff (including all teachers who are not professors and non-academic staff members). In the new ’foundation universities’ (presently Aalto University and the Tampere University of Technology) this model is no longer legally sanctioned.