Higher education and public good

Marginson/Creating global public goods

Page 1

9/7/2011

Higher education and public good

Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne London, 6 September 2011 1 Higher education and public good [Thanks and preliminary remarks] The December 2010 decision of the UK Coalition government on the funding of higher education in England has sent shockwaves around the world. The UK continues to be a global ‘thought-‐leader’ in higher education policy. Or at least, a thought-‐leader in the successive waves of neo-‐liberal reform, which has spread everywhere. Colleagues, you can be sure that the December 2010 decision, its later refinements and its implementation, are being watched with great interest in Treasury Departments around the world. Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg have brought many other higher education systems closer to a fully developed status market. The UK reforms have particular implications for the other Westminster systems, Australia and New Zealand. 2 [Summary of paper] It is true the United States has long had a status market in higher education, and reductions in public funding in many states there have further elevated the notion of higher education as a private good. But American status competition is also balanced against civic, social, scientific and cultural objectives, through a complex set of subsidies and political arrangements; and the federal character of U.S. higher education blocks wholesale one-‐off shifts from public purposes to private purposes. Not so here. I want to work through some implications of the new UK funding system. I will not focus on how it affects your institution, your job, or the pecking order of universities. You know more of these than I do, and discussion usually stops there. Rather I will locate the changes in the history of public/private relations, and consider where the Anglo-‐American research university is heading. We make our own history, as a German economist once remarked, but under conditions inherited from the past.

3 ‘Public’ and ‘private’ What do we mean by ‘public good’, and ‘private good’, in higher education and other sectors? If we search for absolutes here we will fail to find them. 1


Page 2

9/7/2011

Understandings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are couched in universal terms but nested in particular conditions of life. They vary by time and place, and in their mutual logic. As some people see it, ‘public’ and ‘private’ compete with each other, zero-‐sum fashion. The more human practices are ‘private’, the less they can be ‘public’, and vice versa. In other notions ‘public’ and ‘private’ are positive sum for each other. Each may be enhanced together. John Stuart Mill and John Dewey distinguish between public and private in terms of different kinds of action. A private action affects only those engaged in it. A public action has consequences for others not directly concerned.1 Economics captures this in its notion of ‘externalities’. But whether an action affects others is not just a matter of empirical fact. It is also a normative question. In some societies religious belief, or whom we can marry, or whether we have the right to abortion, or how much we are paid, are seen as private matters. In other societies these matters are public. What one person does, even behind closed doors, is seen to affect all others. Matters also look different, depending on whether we start from the individual, or ‘society’. All personhood originates in a relational social order. Yet unless identity is also grounded in the individual we lose our freedom. Public affairs are a continual tug of war between these two first causes. This tension dates from the beginnings of the Western liberal tradition. In Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, in the funeral oration, Perikles is careful to keep the two starting points in equal balance—the claim of the ancestors and the city as a whole, and the claim of the individual citizen. It was different in the Confucian heritage societies, where at about the same time, the public realm of the state and the private realm of the family were welded together by common values, not set against each other. But it is mostly the Western liberal tradition that shaped higher education. Hannah Arendt states there was little respect for the private realm of the household in Athens and Republican Rome. The private realm was seen as a site of drudgery and obscurity. In the public realm, where men competed for power, status and the esteem of their fellow citizens, individuality was most fully expressed.2 But in mid imperial Rome onwards this began to shift. Michel Foucault noted in The Care of the Self3 the growing valuation of the private self. Later, in the early modern state, the pendulum swings and we 1 See the discussion in Raymond Geuss, 2003, pp. 81-‐85. 2 Hannah Arendt, ####. 3 Michel Foucault, ####.

2


Page 3

9/7/2011

see the emergence of new kinds of public power. The Romans had a notion of common good, but not of the state as separate from the people.4 In the modern period, especially after the French revolution, the regulative capacity of the state advanced continually, while civil society opened up between the private realm and the state. Zero sum tensions between ‘public’ and ‘private’ were sharpened. The doyen of the research university, Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw the private sphere as the sphere of human fulfillment. He said the state should get out of the way. The idea of a separated private sphere, protected by what Irving Berlin calls ‘negative freedom’, has proved compelling. It has powerful friends. It is not only compatible with a capitalist economy but formative of it. The idea of freedom as individual self-‐determination, of life as one’s own project, of people investing in their own enterprise, of reflexively remaking themselves: this idea is dominant in education and elsewhere, the point of reference for everything else Thus Western liberal societies are suspicious about ‘public’ when it is seen as a property of state. At different times anti-‐statism has been central to both left and right. The 1960s student movement and counter-‐culture were soaked in it. In the 1970s and after it sustained the New Right and neo-‐ liberalism; while women’s liberation and ecological movements practised a collectivist civil society outside the state. Cyber communication has inherited this. This kind of civil society is not an anarchistic rejection of social order, more an alternative to government by states. As John Frow notes, ‘there is neither a logical nor an historical necessity for the public sphere to be equated with the state, or to figure as the opposite of civil society’.5 He cites Habermas’ notion of the eighteenth century public sphere, the communicative space that embraced the newspapers, London coffee houses and salons of informed public opinion. Some notions of civil society include the market. Civil society embraces both public and private elements—public in relation to the family, private in relation to the state. Not all nations have a developed civil realm.6 In those that do have a civil society, higher education is an important component. In those that do not have a civil society, higher education is one means of create it. In sum, the balance currently leans to the private side. While the claims of ‘private’ are taken for granted, those of ‘public’ require more justification, 4 Guess, p. 41. 5 John Frow, 1996, p. 105. 6 See the chapter on higher education in Russia by Mark S. Johnson and Andrey V. Kortunov, in

Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun (eds.), 2011, p. 152.

3


Page 4

9/7/2011

especially if seen as a project of government. Public claims positioned in civil society are more attractive than those dependant on states. 4 Analytical tools from economics: Public goods and private goods So far I have emphasized history and ambiguity. This is not enough. We need analytical tools, to service both empirical social science, and policy. We need a steady definition of ‘public’ activity in higher education, demarcated from ‘private’ activity, even if the two are often mixed in practice. Before bringing the history up to our present predicament, I want to establish a definition. It helps us to make sense of the changes to the system. Essentially two possible definitions of public/private are available. The first approach is to divide ‘public’ and ‘private’ along the lines of state and non-‐ state. Here that which is ‘public’ is controlled by governments. The problem with this approach is that public sectors do some things that benefit only narrow private interests. Also, some common goods originate outside states. The second approach is Paul Samuelson’s notion in economics,7 of public goods and private goods. This is the approach I will use today. Here the basic notion is that of the economic externality. Externalities are benefits of higher education realized by persons other than those who invested in the education. They can be monetary or non-‐monetary.8 Public goods are a subset of externalities with special collective characteristics. 5 Characteristics of public goods Public goods are both non-‐rivalrous and non-‐excludable.9 Non-‐rivalry in consumption means the benefits are indivisible. A unit of the good can be consumed by one individual without detracting from the consumption opportunities available to others. Thus sunsets are non-‐rival and indivisible, if views are unobstructed. The benefits of weather monitoring stations and pollution controls are non-‐rivalrous. Non-‐excludability means that when a good is provided to one individual its benefits are available to all. Street lighting, and pollution controls, are non-‐excludable benefits. Goods that can be owned by one person and withheld from others are excludable. Few goods are naturally both non-‐rivalrous and non-‐excludable. Many goods are ‘impure’ public goods, with benefits partly non-‐rival or partly 7 Paul Samuelson, 1954. 8 Walter McMahon, 2009, p. 193. 9 Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler, 1996, pp. 8-‐9.

4


Page 5

9/7/2011

non-‐excludable. Some goods are known as ‘club goods’. Their benefits are partly non-‐rival but subject to congestion; one individual’s consumption reduces the quality of service available to others; and they can be made excludable using entry controls or prices. One example is selective private schools. Whether a good has some or all the characteristics of a public good, is not solely or even necessarily a question of its intrinsic character. It is also affected by one or another mode of production and distribution. In their summation of externalities and public goods, Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler state that public goods are best understood as policy sensitive ‘incentive structures’.10 The public or private good character of goods like health and education is determined by intrinsic factors related to the nature of the good, and/or also determined by social norms, public policies and the contest of interests. If they want, societies can provide such goods on the basis of shared consumption. On the other hand, exclusion mechanisms can be set up, so that open public goods become partly closed club goods. Paul Samuelson finds that because public goods are subject to market failure—no one can profit from producing goods freely available to all— these goods depend on state or philanthropic funding. This is not necessarily true of club goods, which can be financed by the closed network of joint beneficiaries, but it is true of all non excludable goods. They cannot be produced efficiently when production is left to the market. 6 Public and private goods in higher education Cornes and Sandler note that ‘in some instances, an activity may give rise to multiple outputs, some of which can be private, others purely public, and still others impurely public’ and subject to congestion. ‘Such an activity yields joint products’.11 Higher education as teaching and learning is one joint product. Research is another joint product, with a different balance between the elements. Public goods play a larger role in research than teaching. Let’s look at each element in turn, research and teaching. 7 RESEARCH Research is closely affected by the nature of knowledge. Joseph Stiglitz remarked that intrinsically, knowledge is close to being a pure public good.12 The benefits of the mathematical theorem are indivisible. It is non rivalrous. It is used by any number of persons without being depleted. It is 10 ibid, p. 6. 11 ibid, p. 9. 12 Joseph Stiglitz, 1999.

5


Page 6

9/7/2011

also non excludable. Once in circulation anyone can access it. But the public good nature of knowledge is not complete. It is qualified at two points. In fact research begins life as a private good and evolves into a public good. First, the point of creation. Then only the creator (or owner) of new knowledge can access to its benefits. They have a first mover advantage that disappears once the knowledge is used. At point of creation knowledge is both rivalrous and excludable. This enables an intellectual property regime. Once the knowledge embodied in a patent is circulated, however, it can be reverse engineered and repeatedly accessed. It retains use value but its commercial potential vanishes. IP regimes becomes increasingly artificial and difficult to hold, being confined to particular artefacts that embody knowledge not the knowledge itself. The second point is club arrangements such as academic journals. By setting a price, publishers create exclusion and it becomes profitable to circulate knowledge in a market. This market is blown away if final form knowledge circulates freely on the Internet. Many provisional discoveries are placed on the Internet before being formally published, but the journal industry survives because journals embody knowledge in an authoritative final form verified by peer review. This is a flimsy basis for a market and it could be broken by concerted action. 8 TEACHING The intrinsic nature of knowledge also affects the character of teaching. The knowledge contents in curricula are often freely available and can be infinitely copied and consumed without any reduction in benefit. Thus MIT placed its courseware on the Internet. General education programs at all levels and institutions, programs that provide knowledge but not saleable vocational credentials, have a strong public good element. Teaching also generates other products that are not public goods. Institutions produce scarce credentials with exchange value in professional labour markets. Elite institutions offer the cultural capital and social capital identified by Pierre Bourdieu, and provide graduates with social status. Teaching is a good example of a joint product. Regardless of the open courseware initiative, enrolling at MIT continues to generate private goods, in general education as well professional degrees. The private and public goods are positive sum rather than zero sum. No doubt MIT figured that the status value of its degree would rise rather than fall if it opened its courseware to the world,. The Internet, like all media, is an effective engine for building status. 6


Page 7

9/7/2011

Given its knowledge foundations teaching begins as a public good but can develop as a private good. The steeper the hierarchy between institutions, and student places, the tighter the competition for entry into the leading institutions, the greater the element of exclusion, the larger is the potential for markets and the less the dependence on government and philanthropy. Low tax governments, that want to reduce spending, foster markets, and league tables that emphasize status differences and the private value of degrees. The causation also works in reverse. When governments nurture market competition, this enhances differences in the private value of places. When social competition for the most valuable places is heightened, families with the most private resources tend to win. But where higher education is provided as a universal right and by definition is wholly non-‐excludable, it is a public good. Unlike the circulation of knowledge as a public good, which is an act of low cost philanthropy, equal opportunity needs public financing. The more higher education is moved away from this model, the more it tends to enhance social inequalities not reduce them. This is historically obvious in the US and China. Still, every higher education system in the world has a hierarchy of value. It is a question of degree. Nordic countries combine leading universities with a high floor of value in the institutions below. Status differentials are modest, competition muted and publicly financed equality of opportunity provides a strong balancing element. But only elementary education in those nations is close to a pure public good. 9 The Coalition’s market reforms Armed with these analytical tools, let’s return to the historical narrative and the new funding system. Post-‐war mass higher education combined the different public and private goods in uneasy balance. General education and broadly accessible vocational education were set against elite reproduction in high status institutions. Access expanded, while research powerhouses were built, combining public good knowledge with commercial IP and high status teaching that derived its value from research reputation. Equality of opportunity pulled the system one way and neo-‐liberal business models of the university as competitive firm began to pull it to the other. As neo-‐ liberal ideology took hold, responsibility for university improvement was devolved down to institutions. The new system takes this much further. It is a full-‐blown competitive economic market, albeit structured by the state, subject to price caps and split into two distinct competitions—a competition for high value status and a competition for low value revenues. 7


Page 8

9/7/2011

There is a contestable market in the elite institutions for full priced elite students. There is a cut-‐price competition for volume among lesser status institutions. Equality of opportunity is fractured at one and the same time by the old hierarchy, which is now enhanced, the newly intensified economic competition, and the tight new segmentation between markets. How does the state exacerbate market forces? It steepens the competitive hierarchy between institutions, creates zones of scarcity and exclusivity, and fences these off from egalitarian drift. As noted, exclusion turns public goods into club goods even where rivalry is absent. Prices must be high enough to act as a deterrent. ‘In order to set a price for a commodity, it must be possible to exclude those who do not pay the price’.13 Once installed, the market runs itself, lightening the political load. Market prices plus student selectivity sustain hierarchy and exclusion better than policy directives. But the notion of higher education as a universal public right had to be smashed. The Coalition hit upon a striking method. It withdrew public subsidies for teaching in the humanities, arts and social sciences. Remarkably, these disciplines are now seen as solely private goods. In future, in those disciplines, the public good component of knowledge and general education has to fund itself somehow from private tuition. If the increased literacy of graduates benefits others in their workplace, a classic externality, the original student will have to pay. This will work only in high status institutions able to charge premium fees. At the top end of the market these programs will become boutique consumption goods focused explicitly on non-‐economic private benefits. If erstwhile public goods are to survive a market they must become exclusive. But there is limited custom for such programs. As Cornes and Sandler remark, price excludability blocks the optimum production of club goods. Whether under competition or monopoly, some of those wanting the good will be excluded. Total provision will be too low.14 Humanities and social science enrolments are trending down. Over time, the general education component of higher education will fall, creating more room for competition in market stratified vocational degrees. This is the Coalition’s most radical reduction of the public good. 10 Non market benefits and social externalities What does this mean in practice? Can we put numbers on it? Economist of education Walter McMahon says we can. In his book published in 2009, 13 Cornes and Sandler, op cit, p. 43. 14 ibid, p. 289.

8


Page 9

9/7/2011

Higher Learning, Greater Good, McMahon provides, alongside familiar data on the private monetary returns to degrees, detailed calculations of the non-‐ market value of higher education to individuals, and the collective social benefits from both general and vocational education. All these benefits are enhanced by high levels of participation and greater equality of opportunity. 11 [Table of direct non-market individual benefits] First, the non-‐market benefits of higher education to individuals, benefits that positively affect graduates’ lives in ways other than greater income. They include relatively enjoyable jobs, better life and occupational choices; more future oriented behaviour; better health outcomes and longer lives; lower propensity to crime and welfare dependence; higher civic participation; reduced fertility, higher child health and reduced infant mortality; higher cognitive development of children and better family life. McMahon reviews a long list of quantitative studies in these areas. Happiness also increases, in association with higher education, but this seems to be driven by the increased incomes graduates receive. Combining different studies in each category, McMahon finds the private non-‐market benefits average $8462 in American dollars per graduate for each additional year of college, and $38,020 per average graduate overall. This is larger than the extra private earnings received by the average college graduate, male and female, compared to the average high school graduate. 12 [Table of direct social benefits of higher education] These individual non-‐market benefits received by graduates aggregate and feedback into more stable, cohesive and secure social environments with more efficient labour markets, faster and more widespread diffusion of new knowledge, higher economic growth, viable social networks and civic institutions, greater cultural tolerance, and enhanced democracy. This brings us to the direct social benefits of higher education, exclusive of the individual benefits—the externalities that spill over to others, including future generations. McMahon remarks that the proportion of the total benefits of higher education that are externalities ‘is the best guide to how far the trend toward privatization in the financing of higher education should go’. The other basis for public support is equity. McMahon again reviews a long list of quantitative studies. Combining these studies, the direct non-‐market social benefits of higher education average $27,726 per graduate per year. The figure is nested in assumptions and in that respect imprecise, but, says McMahon, it shows ‘it is wrong to conclude that non-‐ market social benefits of higher education cannot be measured or valued’. 9


Page 10

9/7/2011

13 [overall table from McMahon] McMahon concludes that overall, the direct non-‐market benefits of higher education substantially exceed the market benefits. The non-‐market private benefits total $38,080, the non-‐market social benefits total $27,726 while the private earnings benefits, which drive policy on tuition fees, total $31,174. The direct social benefits are 29 per cent of the total benefits of higher education and close to the private earnings benefits. However, total externalities include indirect social benefits. These are the contributions of externalities to the value generated in private earnings and private non-‐ market benefits. Once this indirect element is included, externalities total just over half the full benefits of higher education. This figure is robust over studies in the US, UK and Europe. McMahon’s own work sets it at 52 per cent. This means that public and philanthropic funding should cover at least half the cost of teaching, plus an increment to compensate for the under-‐ recognition of, and under-‐investment in, private non-‐market benefits. This analysis suggests the withdrawal of subsidies from humanities and social sciences is bizarre and can only be explained as a policy to drive students out of those disciplines and into science and technology-‐based programs. 14 [McMahon quote] In relation to the new funding system, the question is whether the public benefits identified by McMahon will continue to flow and to as many people. McMahon’s argument suggests there is no guarantee. Compensatory action is probably needed. ‘If control of higher education is to be relinquished to private markets’, he states, ‘there needs to be analysis of the extent of market failure leading to distortions’. Underinvestment can be corrected by a combination of public subsidy and better information. ‘If there is poor information available to the average citizen and politician about the value of the non-‐market private and social benefits of higher education, then poor investment decisions and policy decisions will result.’15 15 Global public goods There is also under-‐investment in another kind of public good: global public goods in higher education and research. ‘Global public goods are goods that have a significant element of non-‐rivalry and/or non-‐excludability and made broadly available across populations on a global scale.’16 They include knowledge sharing across borders—research dissemination in English-‐ 15 Walter McMahon, 2009, p. 2. 16 Inge Kaul, et al., 1999, pp. 2-‐3.

10


Page 11

9/7/2011

speaking countries routinely takes this form—cross-‐border research collaborations, cross-‐border teaching and student exchange, and the contributions of higher education to capacity building in the developing world, to the formation of intercultural and international understanding and to global governance. Higher education institutions have a crucial global role in combined research programs that tackle common global problems, including climate, energy, food, water, disease, people mobility and the spread of human rights. In a communicative global environment, with ever-‐ increasing mobility of knowledge, ideas and people in higher education, the scope for global public goods is growing by leaps and bounds. So is the opportunity cost of ignoring them. But global public goods are under-‐ recognised and unsubsidised. We have seen that externalities must be funded by philanthropy or states. But there is no global state. The intensification of national status competition in higher education, and the part withdrawal of national funding, does nothing to fill this gap. Nation-‐ states unwilling to fund public goods at home are less likely to fund them abroad. Research universities are moving out into the global space on their own behalf, but the growing production of global public goods is traded against domestic capacity and often financed from revenues earmarked for local teaching. When financing is privatized, institutions find that increasingly they must choose between different public goods. 16 State and market in higher education Why then did high education in England go down this troubling path? What enabled the old public/private balance to be thrown out? I talked earlier about the triumph of the private self. This is not necessarily incompatible with public equality. But the two are incompatible when economic competition is rampant and financial values trump all others. The background to market reform in higher education is the rapid march of inequalities in income and wealth, the formation of a late capitalist aristocracy. This requires the reproduction of social inequality through private investment in schooling and higher education. No leading higher education institution want to miss this picnic. Tuition fees become set not by balancing public and private objectives in teaching and student selection, but by whatever the market will bear.17 The trend is more blatant in the United States. There fees have raced ahead of inflation, and student selectivity is a positive value in the all-‐important US News and World Report 17 Craig Calhoun, 2011, pp. 9-‐10.

11


Page 12

9/7/2011

ranking. Increasingly, merit-‐based student aid is displacing needs-‐based student aid. Research becomes the residual site of public values, but research performance is also the source of university claims to elite status. In this setting it is easy to move the old UK status competition18 into the newer economic market. But there is also more to it than this suggests. We need to look also at what has happened to the relation between nation-‐ state and public good. The state has advocates as well as detractors. While the New Left and New Right wear anti-‐statist clothing, conservatives foster the state as guarantor of tradition and order. And social democrats foster the state as arbiter of collective public goods. Since the late nineteenth century public good and the state have been closely joined. Within the state the public good is often defined as what is good for the state itself. That is the first reduction. The second reduction, particular to the neo-‐ liberal era, is that the state-‐as-‐public good has become largely equated with economic prosperity. The third reduction is that prosperity, in turn, is equated with the workings of markets. The public good is seen as the outcome of a semi-‐regulated ‘invisible hand’. Things become their opposite, as Hegel remarked. Through this triple reduction the public good, which was meant to compensate for market failure, becomes defined as the market itself! The old commitment of government to financing externalities is transformed into a new determination to turn erstwhile public goods into club goods, or fully commercial goods production financed by stocks. Over time the old non-‐commodity functions of states, in libraries, the arts, public broadcasting and education, tend to be emptied out. The state, the financier and protector of collective goods, turns into their assassin. At the same time, because there is no global state, global public goods are under-‐recognised and unregulated. They also fall short of their potentials. Meanwhile that other ‘public’ sphere, civil communications, is handed to private media corporations such as News Limited, that define the state and its agendas, stand over the state and are yet protected by it, and advocate profit-‐making competitive markets in all social sectors. This suggests that universities might help to rescue civil society, mediating and interpreting the influence of the commercial media, generating new public goods. 17 Whither Anglo-American higher education? 18 ibid, p. 4.

12


Page 13

9/7/2011

Is there room for such developments? You know your national politics better than I do, but one suspects there is little policy flexibility. One argument for a change is that even though the market leaders will enhance their position, others will slide; and overall this system could undermine the global role of British universities. UK global leadership has been exercised with remarkable efficiency off a modest financial base. Much the same thing is happening in the United States. American universities enjoy an extraordinary lead at world level but it will diminish. East Asia will begin to close the gap. Continuing state budget reductions are eating into the capacity of the leading state universities in the US, accelerating trends that have been building for some time. In the two decades before 2009 total state funding of the University of California fell by 40 per cent after adjusting for inflation. The UC system pushed up class sizes and courted private funds. These steps are no longer enough. A permanent weakening is in store. And opportunities are becoming more unequal. But it seems Anglo-‐American governments have lost genuine commitment to equality of opportunity. They still pay lip-‐service to equality goals but you cannot advance equality while at the same time intensifying competition and exclusion in a status market. This means that the trend to universal participation will falter, as has already happened in the US, and much of the world will move past. The spread and increase of tuition charges is a worldwide trend and not just an Anglo-‐American-‐Australian phenomenon.19 But most other nations are yet to introduce a full status market or ditch equality of opportunity. Tuition fees are now much higher in Anglo-‐American nations than most other countries. The OECD’s most recent data show that in 2006-‐07, of the 21 higher education systems for which figures were available, in eight systems local students in public institutions paid no fees, and in seven systems tuition fees were less than $2000 USD per year. Fees exceeded an average $4000 per year only in the US, Korea, Japan and Australia.20 Tuition fees have risen in a number of systems since then but not to 9000 pounds a year or to the levels now charged against local students in some US states. In the UK and Australia, though not the United States, the immediate effects of high fees on participation rates are softened by income contingent loans. But there is a clear message in these fee levels, about the predominantly zero-‐sum private good character of higher education. So the trend to 19 D. Bruce Johnstone and Pamela N. Marcucci, 2010.

20

OECD, 2010, pp. 244-245. 13


Page 14

9/7/2011

intensified corporate competition will continue, and the gap between elite institutions and others will widen. The issues that matter are not the level of fees per se, but the consequences of the installation of a competitive market in positional or status goods for (1) public goods in the form of shared and collective goods, and in particular (2) for the role of general education, and (3) for the role of higher education in the patterning of equality/inequality. These changes do not bode well for the social and political base of higher education. As the dual track market takes hold, most of the population is decisively excluded from leading institutions, as already happens in the US. In my opinion, the evacuation of most public goods and installation of economically defined private goods as the central purpose of higher education, renders the sector more vulnerable to debundling, and substitution by competitor business organisations. Other agencies could issue certificates for professional work, for a lower fee. Research could be run from corporate or government labs. Students who want knowledge could buy e-‐books. New ideas could be sourced from civil society, business and the communicative space, as in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, as they are from the Internet today. If higher education is emptied out of its public purposes it becomes harder to justify its survival. 18 A ‘post post-public’ system of higher education? Where to from here? If the public good functions of higher education are to be regenerated, I suspect that they will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. In conclusion, let me briefly summarize the possible elements of a strategy. I will not justify each point in detail. The supporting arguments are implicit in what I have said today. I am happy to expand on the list if you wish. 19 [set of five concluding points] First, by no means all organisational reforms of the neo-‐liberal period are retrograde. We need to sort what is useful in the New Public Management business model, like transparency, performance culture and executive acumen and strategy, from that which reduces the public good, such as the competition fetish. Competition locks down not just routine cooperation but the capacity to recognize and pursue common interests across the system. Second, one reason that public goods in higher education are under-‐funded is that they are under-‐known. It is essential to more closely define, monitor, measure those public goods as McMahon and others are doing. 14


Page 15

9/7/2011

Third, the most difficult issue. We need to find ways to diminish the focus on positional competition, which adds value to the degrees provided to students in the leading institutions, but does little good for anyone else. At a system level this suggests compensatory financing to build capacity in the middle institutions in the system. I don’t expect that to happen tomorrow. In the public space we need to break the tyranny of league tables based on composite indicators and single ranks by introducing richer and more diverse kinds of comparison. The European Multirank project is less pernicious than the Anglo-‐American versions: it focuses on the provision of useful information, and avoids holistic league ladders. Most importantly, we need ways of moving forward again on equality of opportunity. Equality of rights remains the democratic centrepiece of an augmented public role. Fourth, as suggested there is much to be gained by building the public role of higher education in civil society outside the state. This is one of the balancing elements in the US. In a small tax neo-‐liberal era, civil society is often a more favourable location than the state for creating public goods. Finally, we can build the role of higher education in producing global public goods, beyond the terrain of the nation-‐state. This strategy is presently the most promising one. It offers higher education institutions the opportunity to break out of the iron-‐bound national struggle between public and private, and contribute to the much-‐needed evolution of global governance. 20 [sign off slide] I thank you most kindly for you patience with me today and wish you all the best for the rest of the conference.

15