Higher education and “public good” Christopher S. Collins – Azusa Pacific University APHERP CCU Chiayi Taiwan 2016 Higher education and “public good”

Public sphere The notion of public sphere originates in 18th century London with Habermas (1962), defined as the interlocking set of institutions, networks, and activity that sustain an independent civil society. This sphere exists beyond and within markets and nation-states.

Universities and the public sphere Universities are essential because of their key roles in creating and codifying new knowledge for economies and societies (Kerr 2001). The research university “serves to some degree as public sphere for its own local and city communities, particularly in constituting an independent civil space for political debate and critical ideas about social organization” (Pusser et al. 2012, p. 3) The ideal public sphere through education is a space that is free from domination by a single interest or ideology.

Public purpose What greater good would be lost if universities closed? Without a larger purpose that underpins its existence, the survival of higher education is no longer certain. in 1529 monasteries were centers of farming and craft production and the source of community welfare. 10 years later, in 1539, a bill for the confiscation of the large monasteries passed through Parliament. p. 8 It had all happened before in a more university like setting. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Buddhism moved from India via central Asia to China. The Buddhist churches accumulated great wealth and property and held a monopoly of metals. In 842 CE, the impossible happen. All foreign religions were proscribed: China with xenophobic. The moral of the story is that nothing lasts forever. Self-interest can be channeled in many other ways. The institutions disappear and their functions are picked up elsewhere. Universities are not monasteries, but other agencies could issue certificates for work, for a fee research could be run from corporate or government laboratories. Scholars and humanists could be sent back to private life to finance their activities themselves. Students who won real knowledge could buy e-books. New ideas could be sourced from civil society, the business world, and the communicative space, as they were in 17th and 18th century Europe and they are from the Internet today. What greater good would be lost if universities closed? If higher education is empty of public purpose, its survival is no longer certain.

Public good Knowledge that emerges through research is a public good that can enable other public and private goods. Public good should tie universities into a larger process of democratization and human development, “but, at worst, it is joined to empty self-marketing claims about the social benefits of education or research with no attempts to define, identify, or measure the alleged benefits” (Marginson 2012, p. 9)

PRIVATE VS. PUBLIC Markets can foster social inequities, restrict access to public knowledge goods, distort the academic vocation, and breed self-centered, less public universities. “We must break our imagined dependence on states as the source of the collective, of global public goods. Because knowledge lends itself to global flows, in a knowledge intensive age, research universities are important creators of global goods – though this is under-recognized.” (Marginson, 2012, p. 22)

Concluding thoughts Higher education institutions need a larger purpose that underpins their existence. What is public in universities? What could be public about them? What should be public about them?