| What is the University and where is it going? What are its possible
futures, and what futures are most likely to happen? The popular image of ‘the
University’ in television and film is one of ivy-covered tradition, though only
a minority of actual university sites fit the image. In its search for a foundational
argument, scholarly discussion of the University as an institution often works
back to the ancient Greeks, or at least to the mid-nineteenth century The Idea
of a University by Cardinal Newman ([1854] 1996). Here there is a divergence
between discussion of the University conducted within the humanities, and discussion
in the smaller specialist fields of higher education studies and policy studies
in education. Practitioners in the humanities are preoccupied by the discursive
and administrative conditions for teaching and scholarship in those disciplines.
Examples of this kind of commentary include papers by philosophers Gaita (2002),
and Godon in this volume, and Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
(1987), written from English literature. Higher education and policy specialists
focus on the tasks of system organisation, government policy and institutional
management. Their disciplinary tools are drawn mostly from sociology, economics,
and political science and policy studies. They find the antecedents of the contemporary
University less in Plato and Newman and more in the building of the modern mass
education systems after World War Two (Scott, 1995; King, 2004) and in Kerr’s
The Uses of the University (1963). From there it is a short step to discussing
the role of the University in the global ‘competition state’, which is the most
recent rendering of the university-as-nation-builder project, and hence to globalisation
and its university manifestations such as global networks (Beerkens, 2004) and
cross-border students (Marginson & Rizvi, forthcoming). Examples of this work
include the articles in this volume by Vincent-Lancrin, Eckel et al, Rhoades et
al, Westerheijden et al, and Turner & Pusser. Some commentary draws on both
sets of sensibilities. Though the article here by Kenway et al works in education
policy studies, its central concern is with the character of and conditions for
scholarship. In his account of The University in Ruins the starting
point for philosopher Readings (1996) is not Plato’s Academy but the modern University
and its role in constructing national culture, as Waks notes in his article in
this volume. Readings argues that this role is irretrievably compromised by globalisation,
neo-liberalism and corporatisation. His work might be said to represent a third,
postmodern strand of discussion about the University, which focuses on the role
of the University in the authorisation of truths. Perhaps the most famous and
influential example is Lyotard’s critique of utilitarianism and commercialism
in The Post-Modern Condition (1984): The question (overt or implied)
now asked by the professional student, the State, or institutions of higher education
is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What use is it?’ In the context of the mercantilisation
of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: ‘Is it saleable?’
And in the context of power growth, ‘Is it efficient?’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 51) Preoccupations
with neo-liberalism and its manifestations in the University cross the different
literatures. Several of the articles in this volume target commercialism and markets,
policy-driven and money-driven science, and credentialism. Compared to a decade
ago, there is now less inclination to situate ‘managerialism’ as a universal explanation
of all problems in the University. Executive-leaders, university businesses and
modernised institutional bureaucracy are symptomatic of a larger set of cultural
and social practices. These practices have produced a fourth way of talking about
the University, in the burgeoning business literature, which imagines universities
as standalone corporations swinging free of government in their own global marketplace
and subjected to the familiar novelties of corporate management and leadership.
In this kind of literature the University has no history: it is nothing more or
less than the generic corporation – though images of traditional Ivy are exploited
in the marketing and branding strategies of the more venerable institutions. The
practices of scientific research and its commercialisation might have produced
a fifth strand of literature about the research-intensive University (where, rightly
or wrongly, most attention is focused), but have yet to translate discussion of
innovation strategies, technology transfer and research and development (R &
D) investment in journals such as Research Policy into a broader institutional
frame. We can find illuminating insights in almost any intellectual tradition.
Arguably, no one grasped the institutional being of the modern University better
than Clark Kerr. The Uses of the University is as informative for executive
managers as for their critics (though neo-liberal economists, who are both managers
and never-satisfied-with-an-impure-market critics, would probably prefer something
that is less explanatory and open-ended than Kerr, and more normative and strident).
Kerr’s key insight, one that was novel 40 years ago but is now commonplace, was
that mass higher education is associated with multiple purposes and constituencies.
Kerr christened the University as ‘the Multiversity’, which was clever, and anticipated
later theoretical developments, though it never quite caught on. He saw the Multiversity
as a ‘city of infinite variety’. The University was no longer reducible to a single
purpose (if it ever had been), such as scientific research, or scholarship, or
the formation of culture, or the training of social leaders. As Pusser (2002)
remarks in an insightful review essay on the successive versions of Kerr’s argument,
his Multiversity was also marked by contradictions: autonomous and constrained,
powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core,
dedicated to education as it depreciates teaching, devoted to liberal arts and
vocational, nonprofit and commercial, and an ‘aristocracy of intellect’ in a populist
society. (Pusser, 2002, pp. 460‑461) Clark Kerr sealed the
authority of his analysis by predicting – in the early 1960s – the growth of a
‘knowledge industry’ with nodes along Route 128 around Boston and the Silicon
Valley in California, a revolution in the biological sciences, a steeper hierarchy
between science and humanities, the politicisation of the student body (later,
the student revolt was to cost him his post as President of the University of
California when he was dismissed by Governor Ronald Reagan) and the ‘mechanisation’
of learning to cope with the tasks of mass teaching. Pusser notes that Kerr’s
account of the origins of the Multiversity and its ‘daily routines’ has held up
well; but ‘little in the book explains why the University functions as it does
or why it is so often enmeshed in conflict’ (2002, p. 463). Kerr’s account of
the politics of the University is too focused on its internal operations, with
not enough recognition of the external forces that drive it. Pusser suggests that
in identifying these external drivers, in the case of the American University
we might look to the fostering of research by industry and cold-war government,
and the role of the research-intensive University in training national and global
leaders. Perhaps the former explanation holds up less well outside America – in
most nations, despite common global imaginings about the knowledge economy, and
much to the continued chagrin of policy makers, the evidence for American-style
strategic research synergies between government/university/industry is sparse.
‘Academic capitalism’ (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997) of this kind and on this
scale is confined to a small number of leading capitalist economies and cannot
become universal to the University unless every nation becomes wealthy. In contrast
with the United States, for better or worse, most national economies are not awash
with surplus capital from a plethora of public and private sources, available
for parking in the universities, to seal the Faustian bargain with economic power.
On the other hand, the sociological role of the University in leadership training
and in social selection is played out everywhere, whatever the state of the national
economy; and it echoes through several of the articles in this volume. Despite
its external limitations, at the time it was published, Kerr’s internally focused
notion of the Multiversity was useful for people like himself, for the then emerging
caste of professional administrators/leaders thereby invited to play balance-of-power
politics among the fecund communities that were ranged within and around the University,
and so maintain executive control, in the days before performance management and
competitive budget distribution were invented to pursue the same purpose in an
economically arbitrary, not politically arbitrary, fashion. That political model
of the University as a field of often contrary interests (Baldridge, 1971) has
now given way to a corporate model of managing the University as a site of production
with an economic bottom line, though the latter is hard to define (profits? economic
revenues? student numbers? research grants? research outputs? local social status?
competitiveness within the national higher education system? global standing?).
Yet it is clear that the University as an institution is at least as strongly
motivated by social and global status, or prestige, as a goal in itself, as it
is by the goal of economic revenues – though the two objectives are also intermeshed,
in that achieving one is a principal means to the other. And the component academic
units within the University are often little concerned about revenues as an end
(while always mindful of money as a means); and their notions of status or prestige
tend to be focused on discipline-based goals that are much narrower than those
of the University qua University. Arguably, the model of University as self-serving
corporation – while it is certainly capable of inflicting major changes on teaching,
learning and research, as the experience of the last decade indicates (Marginson
& Considine, 2000) – no more exhausts the University as an institution than
the notion of the University as site of political conflict and resolution; the
University as privileged site for the workings of the scientific imagination;
the University as community of scholars; the University as the fountainhead of
culture and civilisation; the University as the arena of cultural diversity and
global linkages; the University as producer of common public goods; the University
as the wellspring of commercial science and technology; the University as the
engine room of global competitiveness; nor, indeed, the University as irretrievably
wrecked by neo-liberal globalisation. The range of these images indicates the
University is not only complex in its activities and associations, but is a ‘discourse
sticky’ institution. Many claims are made on the University. The different
literatures and the various claims are associated with many insights into the
practices of universities. At the same time, though there are growing similarities
between research-intensive universities across the world – a convergence that
is much remarked on in the higher education studies literature – we lack persuasive
theories or just new Kerr-style insights to help us understand the likely future
trajectories of the University. It is broadly agreed the research-intensive University
will continue to be an important institution. Amid the emergence of flexible learning
and virtual institutions, Peter Drucker inspired a careless claim that conventional
face-to-face universities would soon be obsolete, but the argument failed to outlast
the collapse of the dot-coms at the end of the 1990s. Since then, there has been
surprisingly little attention to ‘University Futures’; and the discussion is often
narrow. It seems that few of those who talk about the future of the University
can refer to its pedagogical and cultural aspects while keeping an eye also on
its sociology, political economy and its policy context. This special issue
of Policy Futures in Education on ‘University Futures’ is one attempt to
fill the gap. The authors have varying preoccupations, and use different methods
of inquiry and exposition, and come to sometimes contrary and often heterogeneous
conclusions. We invite you to read all the articles because they each add something
distinctive to our common understandings of University Futures, and they help
us to map the field of discussion itself. In the opening article on ‘Competition
and Markets in Higher Education’, Simon Marginson starts not from the economic
roots of the University, nor its contemporary functions in the competition state
or the production of knowledge goods, but from its social roots – its role in
the allocation of social benefits and relative advantages in a neo-liberal era.
Arguably, the University plays a key part in configuring the social as a modernised
Hobbesian space, the civilised war of all against all that F.A. Hayek and
Margaret Thatcher imagined. Status competition in higher education has two dimensions:
the competition between students for the most favoured places, and the competition
between institutions for resources and prestige. Within the University, Marginson
is interested in the interplay between the University as prestige maximiser and
the University as resource driven. He examines status competition in higher education
on both national and global planes and explores the national/global intersections.
He finds that while status competition is much broader than buyer–seller competition
in economic markets, these markets are becoming more pervasive and influential.
Correspondingly, status competition has become both ‘economised’ (it is mediated
by private capacity to pay), and intensified (there is diminished attention to
public-good objectives, so that status competition is less modified by state interventions
designed to increase equality of opportunity between individuals and between social
groups). These trends have shaped the capacities of individuals, and universities
as institutions, to use globalisation to pursue projects of upward mobility, and
have more closely tied the University to the servicing of national and global
hierarchies. This suggests the classical national policy project of equality of
educational opportunity has been rendered obsolete by marketisation and globalisation,
and now needs to be reworked. Marginson is interested in the manner in which in
every nation the category of high-quality universities seems to be shrinking and
a worldwide market in prestige universities has emerged. These patterns are typical
of positional competition (Hirsch, 1976) in ‘winner-take-all’ markets in a networked
environment (Frank & Cook, 1995). Marginson’s argument suggests that we need
to look beyond the critique of neo-liberal discourse. The discursive practices
of neo-liberalism are deployed by specific socioeconomic interests. Far from the
free movement of capital being the ultimate arbiter, markets in higher education
are subordinated to government policy, to status competition and to conservative
social power. On the global plane markets serve specific national interests, not
vice versa. He argues that the leading Anglo-American universities exercise an
unhealthy sway, while the rapidly growing commercial markets in cross-border English-language
education also rest on relations of domination/subordination. Both of these factors
retard the potential of higher education outside the global metropolis and therefore
hold back national capacity in the developing world where universities are crucial
to social and economic formation. In ‘Building Future Scenarios for Universities
and Higher Education’, Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin notes that higher education institutions
and systems are affected by four common factors: convergence in the forms of higher
education and the issues faced by institutions, from often very different starting
points; the growth of participation including cross-border student mobility, despite
demographic decline in some nations, and the multiplication of missions and functions;
greater institutional autonomy and an expanded role for private providers; and
new potentials of information and communications technologies (ICTs). The article
provides informative internationally comparative data on participation rates,
demographic trends and public and private funding across the nations of the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). In about half the OECD countries
public expenditures per student declined between 1995 and 2000, though in some
cases the drop in public funding was compensated by increased private funding.
Like Marginson, Vincent-Lancrin notes that as well as providing teaching, research
and services, universities exercise a central function – their ‘only remaining
monopoly’ – in granting degrees and screening graduates for employment. This is
‘one of the foundations of social stratification in democratic societies’. Vincent-Lancrin
identifies six possible scenarios: little change, so that trends to mass education
and marketisation are halted and developments in ICTs and lifelong learning largely
take place outside the sector; a more entrepreneurial model with enhanced scope
for private funding; an unabashed free-market model with institutional specialisation,
enhanced hierarchy, extensive internationalisation and widespread use of ICTs
in teaching, and movement of much research outside the universities; the re-centring
of universities on a lifelong learning and open education model, again with research
moving outside the sector, greater flexibility and an enhanced role for corporate
institutions; a global network of universities where learners would design their
own education, and industry partners would play a key role in the large market
for lifelong learning; and the disappearance of formal tertiary education. Common
to several of the scenarios is a demand-driven approach, more focus on the development
of teaching, and the separation of teaching and research functions, with publicly
funded science moving to outside research centres. In ‘Universities, Regional
Policy and the Knowledge Economy’, Michael Peters & Tim May extend Vincent-Lancrin’s
discussion of knowledge economy linkages to a more detailed examination of ICT-driven
economic activity and its implications for regional capacity building. Regardless
of the ideological content of some knowledge economy discourses, for example a
tendency to abstract education/economy linkages from community building, ICTs
have transformed both industrial productivities, and the material forms of community.
At the same time, ICT-mediated networks, like the ICT industries themselves, are
concentrated in particular nodes bound by geographical space. ‘The major theoretical
question is why has industry clustering reappeared in advanced economies when
it had all but disappeared in the mid-twentieth century.’ This re-regionalisation
enables location-bound higher education institutions to retain a central role
in economy and society, confounding predictions that the Virtual University would
shift from adjunct to dominant form. ‘Place matters’, as Turner & Pusser put
it in the heading to their article. Further, there is potential for these concentrations
of new economic activity to be globally plural, rather than confined to the USA;
and in turn this suggests that in the longer term there is potential for the exacerbated
dominance of American institutions to be modified. In any case, Peters & May
suggest that it is important not to become confined by critique but to focus also
on the materiality, the positivity of the new economies and explore the potential
for civic construction and education/industry/community interfaces that are created.
They examine a detailed case study, the Manchester Knowledge Capital Initiative,
which seeks to counterbalance the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London.
Within the Knowledge Capital Initiative some regional higher education institutions
are shifting significantly, from being seen as merely ‘in’ the region to becoming
‘of’ the region. In ‘In the Shadow of the Ruins: globalization and the rise
of corporate universities’, Leonard Waks focuses on that sector of higher education
where, as Vincent-Lancrin notes, much of the institutional innovation is now concentrated
– the for-profit institutions and corporate universities. For-profit corporate
universities have yet to gain acceptance from the orthodox academic sector as
‘real’ universities. However, benefiting from the neo-liberal policy climate and
offering specialised forms of adult and vocational education, they ‘have achieved
broad public and political acceptance and accreditation’. Waks identifies two
principal types of for-profit corporate university: standalone adult universities
such as the University of Phoenix that are open to all customers, and the university
divisions of corporations such as Motorola that want staff training that is ‘more
closely aligned with the firm’s specific missions and markets’. In the last decade
enrolments in both categories have grown rapidly though there are only a small
number of really large-scale providers. The University of Phoenix is the outstanding
success story, with many city-fringe sites in the USA and campuses in Mexico and
the Netherlands. Few of the company-specific institutions have gained accreditation
their own right: most work through established universities. However, conferral
of state or mainstream institutional authority is not always essential to the
corporate university sector, which sees the mainstream University is an illegitimate
cartel organised to retard new initiatives, and regards Hayekian neo-liberal states
as over-regulatory. Waks notes that in 1988 the Thatcher Government passed legislation
requiring all diploma programs in the United Kingdom (UK) to be subject to approval
by the universities. For the successful International Management Centres Association
(IMCA) these were the very institutions IMCA was set up to contradict. The IMCA
provides tutoring services and accredited degree programs to corporate universities.
It has no preset curricula and develops flexible reflexive teaching/group learning
processes that are ‘authentic’ to the specific firm. Like the University of Phoenix,
IMCA provides no research function, maintains no library and dispenses with conventional
academic criteria in staff appointment and promotion. The economic efficiency
and demand-attractiveness of this model is beyond the reach of orthodox research-intensive
universities. The success of the corporate universities in developing and exploiting
specific adult learning markets is clear. It is not so clear that they are capable
of developing commercial alternatives to conventional first degrees for pre-vocational
undergraduates, or research training at doctoral level. It is those nations
that benefit most from global exchange in education that tend to be its more fervent
advocates. Yet in ‘Curricular Joint Ventures: a new chapter in US cross-border
education?’, Peter Eckel, Madeleine Green & Britany Affolter-Caine remark
that, nonetheless, American universities can be surprisingly indifferent to the
global sphere. While there is a continuing debate about the implications of the
World Trade Organization/General Agreement on Trade in Services model for public
institutions in the United States, globalisation in higher education generates
net benefits to American universities and poses little threat to them. But despite
(or is it because of?) America’s favoured global position, international students
are relatively marginal, and universities are often insular. The authors focus
on exemplary universities that use strategic partnerships with each other, and/or
with corporations, non-profit organisations and non-governmental organisations,
to provide cross-border programs. Global enterprise is not just designed to raise
revenues: it also augments institutional prestige and creates a broader set of
capacities, potentials and perspectives. Institutions, including bachelor-level
and community college providers, consider not just research and knowledge but
the curriculum itself as a form of negotiable capital and the basis for entrepreneurial
activity. The examples include the for-profit Cardean University; the Singapore–MIT
alliance; the integrated international OneMBA program based on five providers
in five nations (USA, Netherlands, Hong Kong China, Mexico, Brazil); Universitas
21 Global, an alliance of 17 universities that is attempting to mount a virtual
university with a principal focus on delivery to China; and a second multi-institutional
network of established universities, the Worldwide Universities Network, offering
joint programs, the first accredited by York University in the UK. Curricular
joint ventures are pursued most actively by certain large research-intensive universities
that see themselves as global in orientation, and institutions that see the global
dimension as their market niche, including the for-profit sector. Eckel et al
note that nevertheless it is not ‘clear if US institutions will become more outward-looking
both in their academic and entrepreneurial ventures’, and they advocate a more
open internationalism. The American higher education sector is less aggressively
entrepreneurial than UK and Australian universities. Given the tremendous magnetic
attraction exercised by American universities on the global scale, what would
happen to the global market in cross-border education if the American doctoral
sector adopted a more capitalist approach, so that the supply of places to foreign
students rose to meet potential demand? It is therefore ironic that American
universities are seen around the world as the paradigmatic case of the successful
fusion of higher education and capitalist economy. In ‘Imagining Alternativas
to Global, Corporate, New Economy Academic Capitalism’, Gary Rhoades, Alma Maldonado-Maldonado,
Imanol Ordorika & Martín Velazquez note that on the global scale an Americanised
neo-liberal model of higher education as academic capitalism has become almost
all-pervasive. The model blurs the boundaries between public/private, and non-profit/for-profit.
It emphasises university entrepreneurship and university–industry partnerships;
the generation of profitable commodities by universities themselves; and marketised
forms of production, student fee charging, administration and system organisation.
Notions of higher education as a producer of public goods and a cultural project
are marginalised. This model of the University is now as dominant as the German
Humboldtian model of the research university a century ago. But it is an idealised
Americanised model not an actual American model, and is applied to other national
sites without the infrastructures and social supports enjoyed by American research-intensive
universities, e.g. their research resources and tuition subsidies. The move to
the market in other countries, aggressively promoted by global agencies – particularly
active in many Latin American nations – often ‘proceeds much further and to a
greater, unrestricted, extreme than it has in the USA’. Public institutions are
weakened, their public functions are undermined and because system access is expanded
by privatisation, financial barriers increase. The authors argue that nevertheless
‘there are realistic and realizable alternatives’ to the prevailing model. The
seeds of one set of alternatives lie in the inherited tradition of public universities
in Latin America, such as the autonomous university as it developed in Argentina;
and in the distinctive entrepreneurial forms of a non-profit Mexican private university,
the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (‘Monterrey Tech’).
Though Monterrey Tech enjoys less public aid than do non-profit universities in
the USA – it has only a limited role in applied research – a third of its students
receive tuition aid from within the institution and it has large-scale commitments
to both international student exchange, and social service work by students designed
to develop sustainable local communities. Rhoades et al conclude that Latin American
universities should play to their inherited strengths and develop distinctive
national projects in three areas: the democratisation of the University’s social
and political functions; the sustainable development of independent communities;
and the building of ‘new and sovereign cultural identities’ in the nations of
Latin America. As Rhoades et al argue, in the policy discourses of the neo-liberal
competition state, public becomes private: ‘public’ purposes become controlled
by privatised objectives and agents that are beyond the capacity of either universities
or populations to affect. There is no reciprocity here. The University is accountable
to capital, but capital is not accountable to the University or subordinated to
its logics of teaching/learning and knowledge exchange. Universities are positioned
as supplicants and dependants in relation to corporations that are mostly indifferent
to higher education, and notoriously reluctant to pay for it. The next two articles
provide critiques of government policies concerning innovation and the knowledge
economy and the positioning of universities within those policies. In ‘The Knowledge
Economy, the Techno-preneur and the Problematic Future of the University’, Jane
Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen & Simon Robb note that the intellectual antecedents
of the policies on innovation and the knowledge economy lie in Schumpeter’s theorisation
of innovation as ‘creative destruction’; notions of long-wave cycles of innovation
driven by dominant technologies, and endogenous growth, drawn from economics;
and the conceptualisation of national innovation systems as networks of private
and public sector agents. It is curious that innovation is typed as ‘national’:
knowledge economy policies only partly factor in the global dimension. These policies
now exercise a major influence on programs for funding university research in
many nations. Kenway et al take in policy discourses from the World Bank, the
OECD and European Commission and specific developments in the English-speaking
countries, principally Australia. These policies ‘accord technology undue power
as an agent of change’ so that social and cultural factors are seen as subordinate
to technology, which like the capitalist economy is beyond control, and share
a common preoccupation with techno-science, networking and commercial imperatives.
Correspondingly, they value three kinds of university subject: the techno-scientists,
the knowledge networker and the entrepreneur. For the University, it is a seductive
policy, placing it at the centre of national interest by defining knowledge as
the central factor in economic growth. The caveats are that the main purpose of
knowledge work becomes its contribution to economic growth, and research funding
systems ensure that universities no longer determine the pattern of inquiry. ‘Knowledge’
is presented as a universal across all fields of inquiry, but valued knowledge
is commercialisable knowledge. Kenway et al argue that ‘current knowledge economy
policies and innovation systems tend to ignore the distinctive features of universities
and scholarly communities and that, in so doing, they put in peril aspects of
what they seek to achieve and much else besides’. The techno-scientist-entrepreneur
is encouraged to cut corners, steal ideas, evade free exchange and treat the ethical
and social implications of science as marginal to the main game. This excludes
not just basic research in the public interest but the reciprocal bonds typical
of the best academic life, where the social-economic logic is not the capitalist
economy but the gift economy. A gift transactor wants an intellectual community,
‘the intellectual relationships that the exchange of gifts creates’. Such a position
is anathema to the ‘techno-preneur’, argue Kenway et al. ‘[C]ommodity exchange
exerts a disintegrating influence on the academic community ... No one, for instance,
will freely share with someone who is known to have an eye on a potential patent.’
No doubt the future of the University turns on the potential for accommodation
between the gift economy and the techno-economy. In ‘Neo-liberalism, Knowledge
and Inclusiveness’, Peter Roberts critically examines two New Zealand examples
of policy discourses on the knowledge economy: the Foresight Project developed
by the then National Government in the late 1990s, and the Labour-led Tertiary
Education Strategy, setting out priorities for post-compulsory education and training
in 2002‑2007. Both statements are enamoured of a sense of ‘newness’, and
foreground futures in education. The discourses blend what Lyotard (1984) called
‘narrative knowledge’, and techno-science, with neo-liberal ‘market knowledge’,
using terms such as consumers, providers, stakeholders, choice, outputs, value-added,
market share, positioning, competition, performance indicators, etc. But in this
fusion market knowledge is decisive: it has harnessed techno-science (whose role
becomes to legitimate economism) to competitive capitalist ends. The Foresight
Project is a potage of all modern things to all modern people. In its language
about the ‘knowledge revolution’ there is the familiar unproblematic, almost seamless
movement from broader thinking about the future, to openness to innovation, to
globalisation and breaking down boundaries, to fostering science and technology,
to maximising opportunities for individuals and enterprises, to mushrooming knowledge
industries, to global economic competitiveness. The Labour education strategy
adds ‘foundation skills’, multiculturalism and sustainable communities to the
mix; and repeats the Foresight commitment to consultative processes. But on whose
terms? Roberts argues that notions of inclusiveness and social–racial harmony
fostered by both policy statements are illusory. The policy makers skate over
both historical inequalities and the social disharmonies fostered by market competition;
and leave fairness to be determined by market competition. In ‘The University
and Social Transformation’, Rafał Godoń shares preoccupations common
to several articles: that education is become a privatised commodity and the incentives
governing life in the University ‘have nothing to do with the common good’. Conceptions
of University as self-education, as a process of reflective personal development,
have been displaced. Students ‘no longer study for the sake of their inner betterment’.
They are focused on the transactional utilities of knowledge and degrees. Correspondingly,
‘the institutions increasingly focus on their economic success than on educating’.
They care less about the person they educate and more about efficiency and about
expanding the number of graduates. The myth that is identified by Godoń,
‘that education is like a ticket to a better world’ – the myth that the University
is a medium for understanding, calculating, creating and controlling futures –
in different ways runs through the knowledge economy discourse; through status
competition between institutions and the competition between students; through
the rates of return equations of economists, through the policy assumption that
the University is the producer of individual benefit, and universities’ own strategies
of increased tuition; and through University’s marketing to students, its invitation
to make enrolment in this or that program of study into self-investment. Godoń
notes that this myth rests on ideologies of self and social transformation in
which ‘self-education’ is replaced by ‘self-satisfaction and success’. These ideologies
foster illusions, and disappointment is inevitable; it is unsurprising that there
is endemic frustration with the University. Like Kenway et al, Godoń emphasises
the consequences for human relationships. The University ‘is not, any longer,
a place for establishing new friendships’ based on the love of something held
in common. Students become preoccupied with the size of the diploma, the service
they receive and the status of their institution rather than knowledge and friendship.
By confronting the philosophical underpinnings of conduct within the University,
Godoń takes the critique of neo-liberalism, and the solution, a stage further.
There is no universal internal antidote for these difficulties. The problems lie
in the larger culture. After all, as Waks remarks, ‘institutions are adaptive
tools for meeting basic human purposes’, and ‘as one sphere changes, others must
adapt to maintain stability’. We need to look to those basic human purposes –
in Kerr’s suggestive term, to the uses of the University – if we are to
understand the predicament. But the University also constitutes a space and set
of tools for personal and social reflection. If social life is reified, this makes
it all the more important to preserve (or regain) independent spaces within the
University, where research is controlled by scholars and not by outer bodies or
vocational demands. ‘Only one who is able to forget himself, to lose himself in
otherness, can reveal new perspectives on the world.’ Godoń argues that to
address its own health and gain (or regain) its ‘equilibrium’, the University
needs to confront the nature of the knowledge it transmits, recover the distinctions
between the sciences and the humanities, and above all foreground self-understanding
and empathy with the other. The final two articles re-anchor the discussion
in national systems and locally focused universities, albeit operating within
global contexts. In ‘Ground Force Does the Dutch Higher Education Gardens’,
Don Westerheijden, Jeroen Huisman & Harry de Boer use styles of garden as
a metaphor for the national higher education system (Ground Force is the
BBC’s garden changing program). In 2001 Westerheijden et al conducted a Delphi
study to establish forecasts for the Dutch higher education for 2010. In an exercise
similar to that of Vincent-Lancrin they identified three possible types of system-garden.
The Palatial Garden is government ordered in straight lines with well-clipped
hedges, consisting of the present two well-defined types of institution (universities
and colleges) with homogeneity within each group. With all universities focused
on a research-intensive mission, most students are in the college sector, which
caters for local/regional labour markets. The system is planned and public, though
tuition costs have risen. Polder Gardens fit on the margins of the Dutch polders,
which are designed in straight lines but have to fit the natural shape of flowing
water, so that there is room on the margins for a few wild flowers. The Polder
Garden higher education system in 2010 remains a nationally ordered public responsibility
and continues to be largely supply driven. It is rationally designed but less
strictly than in the Palatial Garden. The binary line is abolished, government
influence in curriculum is limited to the bachelor level and the Master’s level
is deregulated, with some instances of high fees. Some Dutch students are exiting,
preferring to access Master’s programs through European structures. The Natural
Garden is a wilder and messier place. Networking, partnerships and collaborations
with industry are endemic. A range of missions has developed, though certain research-intensive
universities have survived. Some institutions have broken out of the national
system onto the European plane, or have become global players with focuses on
China and Latin America. For-profit education takes a large share of the student
market, while academic areas without strong demand support have tended to wither.
The basic units are shorter modules. Accreditation is managed at European level,
using a bachelor/Master’s structure. Comparing the garden scenarios with the changes
in 2001‑2004, Westerheijden et al note that already a bachelor/Master’s
structure has been achieved, and institutions can now merge across the binary
divide. The Polder Garden is closest to reality, but developments have been more
international than the Polder scenario suggested. Government is positioning Dutch
institutions at the quality end of the global market by making their research
strengths more visible; while cross-border developments within Europe are taking
an inter-national rather than a supra-national European Union (EU)-controlled
form. The core of Dutch education remains a nationally controlled public education
system producing public goods. Clearly, the nation-state is proving to be more
resilient in higher education than many in the Netherlands and elsewhere expected,
and much of the literature on globalisation has suggested (for example, Appadurai,
1996). Higher education is determined not by a dialectic of global (or EU-regional)
elements with local elements, but in the three interacting dimensions of
the global/regional, the national, and the local (Marginson & Rhoades, 2002;
Valimaa, 2004). Notwithstanding the growing salience of economic markets
within and between national higher education systems, and the fervour about private
universities and commercialisation that touches many in the global agencies and
in the higher education sectors of nations where neo-liberalism holds sway, on
a worldwide basis public education remains the dominant mode. Public, state or
national universities enrol the majority of students at all levels of education
except vocational education, and cover more than two-thirds of students in the
United States. Even in some nations where the private sector is the majority sector,
the national universities exercise leadership in academic research and social
status, for example Japan. If public education and public policy – and more problematically
perhaps, public goods – are at the centre of the higher education equation, then
the provision of an equitable structure of participation is at the core of that
public role. As Vincent-Lancrin suggests, the classical democratic mission of
national and provincial/state higher education systems is to provide social equality
of opportunity. In ‘Place Matters: the distribution of access to a state flagship
university’, J. Kirsten Turner & Brian Pusser provide a major empirical
study of the role of public universities in developing social leaders/allocating
positional or status goods. The empirical site is the University of Virginia in
the American state of Virginia. Turner & Pusser review debates about equality
and diversity in admissions. They note that despite the benefits to individuals,
institutions and communities of diversity in the student body – and despite efforts
to improve diversity – students from certain racial–ethnic, socioeconomic and
regional origins are persistently under-represented in selective universities
such as the University of Virginia. The founder of the University, Thomas Jefferson,
stated that ‘we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown
as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not
sought for and cultivated’. Turner & Pusser provide both tabular and diagrammatic
tests of proportionality in representation, for 1992 and 2002. They find for example
that in 2002, though more than three-quarters of Virginia’s high schools were
represented in the admission cohort, more than half the students came from 13.6%
of the state’s high schools, and one school district, Fairfax County, had a remarkable
access to the University. Income tests indicate substantial socioeconomic inequality
on a sub-state regional basis. Afro-American students apply at less than 40% of
the rate that proportionality of representation would suggest, and the acceptance
rate lags further. Hispanic-Americans are also under-represented. Asian-American
students are considerably over-represented in applications (more so) and acceptances,
though over-representation diminished between 1992 and 2002. Place, income and
racial–ethnic effects tend to combine. The data from Turner & Pusser enable
specific pockets of under-representation to be identified and addressed. But whether
Jefferson’s goal is still relevant is unclear, given that the University of Virginia
has declared that it wants to raise enough in donations to dispense with the need
for state government funding and the public accountability that goes with it. The
question posed by Turner & Pusser in their careful locality study is ‘Whose
social interests are served by universities?’, a question posed more broadly in
the first article by Marginson. The questions posed by self-privatisation and
self-marketisation strategies are ‘Whose interests are served by university self-interest?’,
and what does this mean for the community building dimension of higher education
that was identified in different ways in the article by Peters & May, and
in the article by Rhoades et al? As editors, we have found gathering these articles
to be a rewarding process, and we have learned much from them. We hope they will
stimulate further discussion, and invite vigorous rejoinders and alternatives. Correspondence Professor
Simon Marginson, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton Campus, Wellington
Road, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia (simon.marginson@education.monash.edu.au). References Appadurai,
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