Is Democratizing Higher Education A Good Idea?

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

University? What Crisis?: Why The University is Not Facing A Crisis

This article is in response to the ‘New University’ Movement (NUM) which has been growing over the past year. I want to discuss some of the ‘problems’ which the movement has raised and discuss why I don’t see it as a systematic problem with ‘the University.’ My reference points for this article will be the posters which have been around, the leaflet from their ‘Alternative Opening of the Academic Year’ and an article which was written for this magazine last year. One point which I will not touch on here is the issue of staff wages and/or working hours. This is mainly because I do not possess the required information to discuss this issue and am thus not comfortable talking about it. The ‘New University’ collective have made no secret of their opinion that the university is facing a crisis. Personally, I find their promotion around the building somewhat over-the-top – verging on propaganda. However, that is a minor issue and not the purpose of this article.

When I think of the New University Movement, two concepts immediately spring to mind: marketisation and democratisation. The latter point seems to me as a misguided thing to be campaigning for and to have at the core of the movement. Don’t get me wrong, I love democracy as much as the next person. My problem is basically that at UCM we are lucky to be in an educational institution which is remarkably democratic and values the opinion of its students. This movement then seems slightly misdirected – I mean we have it pretty good: two students provide representation in the Management Team, the Academic Council is a large presence in the Board of Studies, course evaluation forms are integral to the development of courses and the students are offered the chance to attend General Assemblies. There are plenty of outlets for students to voice their opinion or to pass them through a representative. We shouldn’t underestimate how valuable our opinions are. I perceive it as a trust issue. I fear that many people have lost trust in so many people (perhaps even in society) and so feel the need to shout about their woes. I think a more constructive approach would be to look at the current democratic means within the UCM structure (and other university structures) and to take advantage of them. P.S. have some trust in management.

How about commercialisation/marketisation of the university? Firstly, I find the term marketisation empty as it really doesn’t suggest anything particularly meaningful. Applying concepts of the market to education is a more complex issue than stating that the university has become/is becoming marketised – this is empty jargon. Furthermore, I question whether there is anything inherently wrong with a free-market education movement. The assumption by the NUM is of course that it is wrong. This is indeed inseparable from that argument that ‘capitalism is bad’ which I have grown to find tedious and unimaginative.

Finally, the argument that students have only become interested and driven to studying subjects and skills which will aid them in the labour market is, for me, a personal attack. I’m a Philosophy major. The belief is that there is a systemic issue with the university, however, I, for one, have never felt this. As a sole Philosophy major I know I’m not in the majority of UCM students. Does the fact that one person (me) can spend their time in higher education pursuing something which they find inherently interesting and intrinsically beneficial not completely undermine the claim that the university creates this problem. If the issue is systematic, then no person should be free from that problem. Perhaps, in pursuing my interests in philosophy and ethics I am ‘fighting the system’.

I don’t think I’m fighting the system. I’m studying what I want. I have no real worries about my chances in the labour market. I’m motivated, interested in what I’m learning, benefiting from what I’m learning and confident that this will serve me well. Perhaps, I’m naïve. Perhaps, I’m just proving that there is no systematic problem.

On a final note, I understand that the NUM is not solely focussing its aims at UCM, however I think it is important to mention some of its shortcomings when applied to UCM. The fact that they are interested in improving the university is also something I do not oppose; I’m all for improvement and progress. I’m just not certain that the points that they imply are in crisis really are that bad.

Finn O’Neill