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 | Universities should benefit the public, not just the public purse | | published on : 12-08-2015 | | Category : Higher Education | | The higher education green paper is a radical document, explicitly designed to change universities. But beyond the debates about metrics, funding structures and social mobility is a far more fundamental reframing – of the very concept of higher education.
Government plan to allow 'better' universities to raise fees
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The authors of the green paper do not view students as citizens in an educational relationship but as customers taking part in a market transaction. Once this frame of reference is accepted, the priorities and language of the debate change; learning and education are secondary to opening up new markets and meeting the needs of employers. We must ask ourselves: is this really about fulfilling potential or is it just selling out?
In his classic tome In Defence of Politics, first published in 1962, Bernard Crick argues that some sectors of public life are simply too important to be handed over to the vagaries and vulgarities of the market. The role of the state, he says, is to counterbalance the market and protect certain sectors because of their social importance and benefit to the public. But over the past few decades, the role of higher education in Britain has been progressively narrowed down to the provision of skills required by of the labour market – whatever those may be.
We are moving from a public to a private notion of universities, in which higher education is just another market. This, above all else, should be of primary concern to the generations of yesterday, today and tomorrow, because it threatens the integrity of British cultural and civilisational development.
Until relatively recently, politicians of all political hues believed that public investment in higher education was justified on the grounds that it provided public benefits to society as a whole. In 1818, the year before he founded the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote of his desire to create “a system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens from the richest to the poorest”. His presidential predecessor John Adams said: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it.”
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