Myanmar universities in the post-coup era: The clash between old and new visions of higher education

In the wake of the 1 February 2021 military coup, Myanmar universities became the sites of multiple and overlapping conflicts. At the macro-level, the military has faced massive nationwide protests with teachers and students in the vanguard. This broad opposition has been met with highly repressive and violent systems of social control, including mass firings of university staff, the imprisonment of student activists, and a halt to the higher education reforms that had been underway for more than a decade. The State Administration Council (SAC) is now rapidly moving forward with a national vision of higher education that replicates old and repressive Tatmadaw policies and strategies. On the other side of the divide, participants in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and other social movements are re-imagining a new higher education system rooted in the idea of education and oriented toward a federal and just society. At the meso-level, within the different university institutions, educators are divided along conflictual and unbridgeable frontlines: those who kept their positions and now work in the new military educational framework for “the sake of their fields of study and their students” and those who left or were forced to leave their occupations at great personal cost. At the micro-level, this latest military coup imposed an as yet underestimated cost on the higher education staff and students who had played such a central role in Myanmar’s metamorphosis in the decade before the coup. Our article gives an insight into the coup’s impact on Myanmar by focusing on the higher education sector. At this time of crisis, it draws on a set of qualitative data gathered through online interviews with students and university staff to produce an analysis of this extremely challenging chapter in the history of the country and its education system.