The Moroccan Public University under Platform Rule: Digital Transformation, Academic Mediation, and the Reconfiguration of Public Higher Education

Abstract

As digital infrastructures move to the center of university life, the question is no longer whether Moroccan public universities use platforms, but what these platforms do to the institution itself. This article examines how the rise of platform-based environments reconfigures Moroccan public higher education as a mode of access, mediation, coordination, and government. Based on a critical documentary analysis of scientific studies, public reform discourses, and institutional digital environments, the article argues that the transition exceeds the adoption of tools. It signals a shift from an administrated university toward a connected university organized through interfaces, services, and trace-producing systems. The analysis shows that platformization reshapes access to public service, displaces the pedagogical relationship, redistributes academic and administrative work, standardizes pathways, and produces a new figure of the student as connected, autonomous, and visible. It also identifies five tensions structuring the Moroccan case: the gap between technical access and academic participation, the persistence of unequal appropriation, the link between fluidity and control, infrastructural dependence within public modernization, and the reordering of multilingualism through digital language hierarchies. The article concludes by arguing that digital transformation must be assessed against the public university’s mission as a service, an intellectual milieu, and an institution of knowledge.