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--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”

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--ensuring 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 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

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?