The Public Good and Public Goods in Higher Education Presented to IFE 2020 Leadership Institute East-West Center, 10 September 2007 Deane Neubauer
Origins of Public Good Elements of European Absolutist State Formation Territorial integration Central and disinterested bureaucracy Coherent legal system permitting uniform administration of law Ruler as stipulator of the public interest Public defined as a subject population within a coherent territorial assignment subject to a common law
Elements of the Liberal Formulation of the Public and Its Interest (s) Liberalism as a reaction to absolutism Shift in locus of sovereignty (Locke) Invention of rights discourse (Locke, French Revolution) Government as a derived set of powers Constitutionalism Rationality
The Liberal Public Good The market formulation in Adam Smith Indivisibility of the benefit The possibility that a good did not necessarily have to be wholly public or private, e.g. roads, canals, etc, whereas some goods remained inherently public, e.g. national currency, national defense, standards of time, weights and measures, etc.
Class Transformations and the Emergence of a Public Emergence of a Capitalist class to challenge land owning class Invention of bourgeois social institutions: the novel, leisure press, growth of literacy, extension of education to middle-classes Emergence of informed publics with particularized interests and their participation in the formation of the public interest and goods.
Public Goods Development of the concept in mainstream economics--late 19th century onwards. Essential elements of non-divisibility and nonrivalry (The good cannot be divided for private benefit; consumption of the good by one person does not imply less of it for another.) (But Note: the shift of some goods from public goods to private goods: e.g. fresh air, clean water, etc.)
Elements of the Private Sector Rights and privileges of capital Role of the market in creating patterns of exchange, accumulation and aggregations of capital The rivalry of large capital accumulations--individual and corporate--with the goals and interests of the public sector The long history of regulatory movements and the shifting boundaries between public and private sectors Liberal political systems as interest based contests
Democracy, Education and the Public Good 19th century activity to create an informed citizenry Spread of compulsory public education Relationship of educational provision and state forms, e.g. unitary vs decentralized systems (privileging of national vs local). Relevance to: curricula, who gets to teach? Who controls financing? Who governs and sets agendas? Rise in the status of science and notions of an improved nation through the pursuit and application of education The presumption of economic benefit from public education Early tensions between liberal education and vocational education
Public Good and Higher Education Establishment of Land Grant Universities-- ensuring at least one per state Liberalism and the free market place of ideas The rise of organized professions, public standards and academic freedom Academic freedom as a check on the direct democratic politicization of higher education Linking private universities to the public good through the state authorized public trustee mechanism
Challenges to Liberal Education and the Public Good Changing population dynamics and the outcomes intended for education Increased professionalization of higher education in post-war decades Negative experiences of science under totalitarian regimes--challenges to the free market place of ideas Opting Out--the Privatization of Education (by class, religion, particularity of interest, etc.)
Asian Inversions of Public/Private Different traditions of absolutism Absence of sovereignty assignment to the people Ideas of public inseparable from government Strong tradition of invested governmental bureaucracies Higher education s purpose to meet needs of the state, e.g. Meiji Restoration Complex history of colonialism, imperialism and subsequent institutional creations of both public and private sectors Sense that the duties, rights and privileges of the private sector have been delegated from governmental authority
Neo-liberal Challenges to Public Higher Education Declining public budgetary support-cost shifting and user charges Managerialism and academic capitalism as tools for running universities The alignment issue: how do university outcomes align with economic needs? Pressures to vocationalize the curriculum Differential internal financing--shorting non-economic aligned disciplines Shift in discourses away from those of the liberal tradition.
Global Public Goods The meaning of a global public good in terms of non-excludability and non-rivalry, and questions of externalities Who is the public in global public goods? Issues of state sovereignty and the problematization of governance Analogies of the global with public when associated with a good Ideas of a pure and partial global public good
Some Questions to Pursue Can there be some irreducible meaning to the public good that might be associated with higher education? What would it be? Can we derive essential elements of public and private sectors that cover the range of differences between Asian and non-asian experiences? Is neo-liberalism a particular form of privatization as it is applied to higher education? Are there significant differences between the emergence of neo-liberal regimes in the west and the eclectic borrowings of neo-liberal elements in Asia? Does public higher education always contribute to the public good? Under what circumstances might it be viewed as non-contributory?