In recent years, the West Asian and North African university has attracted increased attention from critical scholars interested in studying the dynamics of post-colonial institutions in the context of ongoing coloniality, capitalist expansion and imperial interventions. This paper focuses on the Tunisian University, in many ways a microcosm of the trajectory of power and resistance in the colonial-modern university. Tunisia is home to one of the oldest teaching establishments in the Arab world, with Al-Zaytuna university founded in 737 C.E. Despite the deep influence of French colonial legacies in shaping early personnel, pedagogy and structure, the Tunisian university, like other of the country’s institutions in their early post-independence years, also adhered to a developmentalist agenda. In the 60s and 70s, the Tunisian university became a battleground for leftist and nationalist mobilization, cut short as a result of authoritarian impulses, infitah/liberalizing politics under Prime Minister Hédi Nouira in the 70s and strengthened alignment with western states in the context of cold war geopolitics. From the 80s onwards, the Tunisian University has been the site of increasing intervention of a variety of neoliberal, imperial actors (from the World Bank to EU, private education companies to the US State Department), ideologies and pedagogies, requiring a reduction in state resources invested in education. These interventions have contributed to a rapid decline in quality and the vocationalization of higher education, with the shift away from degrees suitable for the developmentalist state and geared instead towards the needs of (largely foreign) industry in an increasingly denationalized economy incorporated at the lower end of the global value chain with an emphasis on cheap labor and natural resource extraction. In other words, the Tunisian university has become a primary site through which capitalism (re)produces the stratified differences required for surplus accumulation. This paper argues the benefits of engaging the methodological and theoretical insights from Black studies and Decolonial theory for approaching the regional academy. These bodies of literature help to grasp not only the particular dynamics of how the Tunisian university functions to (re)produce the stratifications of racial capitalism and empire, but also to ground analysis within a genealogy of its colonial origins. They also illuminate parallels with struggles taking place within and over the capitalist, colonial-modern academy not only in the Global South, but within the metropole as well. In this sense, they contribute to our understanding of what may be conceptualized as a transnational “undercommons.”