What we critically ascertain in this essay is how the modern university is increasingly drifting away from the key ambitions of its own mission statement, and largely by its own doing. Although the typical university in its mission statement claims to aspire outstanding quality, academic freedom, and to contribute to society, in its daily organization, the modern university has normalized and internalized a neoliberal metrical governmentality, in which quality, freedom, and societal benefit risk being exchanged for quantity, managerial control, and status benefit. In this essay, we stand up against this worrying self-harming protection strategy, what we term—following Jacques Derrida—the autoimmunity of the university. To structure our argument, we will discern the main worrying autoimmune paradoxes of this university policy in the hope to further the debate and potentially remedy the university of this self-inflicted harm.

Firms in East Africa face highly uncertain environments, fueling environmental dynamism, changes in industry structures, and enhanced competitive dynamics. In order to understand the opportunities and challenges within such an environment, extant theory argues that firms need to develop scanning capabilities. However, since the effect of environmental characteristics on the development of firm capabilities in lower income countries is unclear, we analyze how different environmental characteristics drive or hamper such capabilities. We focus specifically on scanning capabilities that allow firms to respond swiftly to changing needs by monitoring their environment. We include four environmental characteristics: environmental dynamism, heterogeneity, formal and informal competition. We investigate this in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, from which we mustered a sample of 440 manufacturing firms. Our main results indicate that environmental dynamism and informal competition have a paralyzing effect on the development of firms' scanning capabilities in East Africa, which implies that environmental characteristics may hamper rather than help the development of firm capabilities.