The Public Good and Public Goods in Higher Education

1
The Public Good and Public Goods in Higher
Education

• Presented to IFE 2020 Senior Seminar
• East-West Center, 6 September 2006
• Deane Neubauer

2
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

3
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

4
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.

5
Class Transformations and the Emergence of a
Public

• Invention of bourgeois social institutions the
  novel, leisure press, growth of literacy,
  extension of education to middle-classes
• Emergence of a Capitalist class to challenge land
  owning class
• Emergence of informed publics with
  particularized interests and their participation
  in the formation of the public interest and
  goods.

6
Public Goods

• Development of the concept in mainstream
  economics--late 19th century onwards.
• Essential elements of non-divisibility and
  non-rivalry

7
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--indivi
  dual 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

8
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

9
Public Good and Higher Education

• US-Establishment of Land Grant Universities--ensur
  ing at least one per state
• Liberalism and the free market place of ideas
• The rise of the scientific research university,
  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
• The commitments of general education

10
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.)

11
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 educations 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

12
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.

13
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
• The idea of a paramount global public good--e.g.
  planetary sustainability

14
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? Is there going to
  be neo-liberalism after the global recession?
• Does public higher education always contribute to
  the public good? Under what circumstances might
  it be viewed as non-contributory?