Higher education is a public good which should be subject neither to the capricious demands of the market place nor the prejudices and preferences of the currents students or any other sectional interest.
Universities provide a partly protected space within which trying to extend and deepen human understanding has priority, in a way unsuitable for most other types of institutions in society. They are not research labs of corporations or political and pressure groups, which pursue inquiry for a practical purpose for some sponsoring organization. Those are not interested in what might be called second order inquiries: to extend the boundaries of the topic, the status of the language that is employed for it, the character of the knowledge that it produces – but neither of these can be deemed irrelevant in advance. The logic of free inquiry and human flourishing is radically at odds with the logic of the maximand. These values of intellectual inquiry are central to the university.
Universities devote themselves to finding new ways of increasing human understanding. Higher education is a public good, with a historic role at the heart of intellectual, social and economic advancement. Universities are not simply a good for those who happened to enjoy private benefits from them at any given moment. The case for universities should not be made by any sectional interest, but merely on the part of those who happen to be current students or who are currently employed there. Demanding more transparency and internal democracy, the New University movement has taken umbrage with the marketization of the Dutch higher education system and given voice to its displeasure by occupying the Senate House of the University of Amsterdam. This movement is an indicator of the appreciation of a conception of the university which is not informed by a half-baked market ideology.
There is however a major caveat: calling for internal democracy might well produce the same outcome, namely the perverse hierarchy that is insinuated into the staff/student relationship: the students acting as a customer for educational services and the staff throwing money at whatever the students want. For both democratic citizens and consumers vote: everything a consumer purchases is a product from a company, while the latter is receiving the former’s vote. Every basic economics textbook defines, in the first chapter, the object of study economics as the study of the efficient allocation of scarce resources between competing means. The assumption of this model is that we, in this case the students, are rational agents who make choices within their constraint to maximize utility, and that your utility cannot be compared to mine. As a customer, only you know your utility, and thus only you know what you want. But when you come to university, by definition you don’t know what you want because, by default, if you did, you wouldn’t have to come to university. The moment professors are forced to treat students as customers, they have to serve their prejudices. But the university has to liberate students from their prejudices. Teachers must be in the position to impose the unpopular. Students come into the university with preferences. But their intellectual and human growth is in part contingent on the extent to which their current preferences are disregarded by their teachers. It is therefore crudely true that the vague pronouncement of internal democracy, though well-intended in light of a bleak status quo, unwittingly leads to a similar outcome.
As Stefan Collini, academic and author of What Are Universities For? (Penguin, 2015) states: we must articulate a new conception of what we want higher education to be. There already is, according to Collini, much more latent appreciation of this kind of intellectual inquiry than the current rather superficial discourse of economic growth and internal democracy every succeeds in tapping into. However, the language some use to talk about universities represents them as being principally institutions that provide vocational training for employment and the application of technology for promoting economic growth. The language some use to talk about students represents them as either consumers who shop in the educational supermarket purely for what provides the most remunerative future job at the lowest possible cost. If we continue to use this language to talk about students as democratic decision-makers who can pass judgement about the structure and content of the curriculum, just as a consumer does on goods and services, then those are the kinds of universities we shall end up with.
Dominik Leusder
The Bell 