Download PowerPoint Presentation - Creating global public goods

Higher education, political cultures and
public good: A comparative study /
Simon Marginson
SRHE conference, Newport, 11-13 December 2013
The walls of the Roman town of Venta
Silurum (Caerwent) are still standing
after almost 2000 years. An early
example of the provision of public
good(s) in the Newport region.
The problem
• Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are among the primary
social institutions. They educate people in social skills and
attributes on a large scale, structure opportunity and social
mobility, create and distribute codified knowledge, further
citizenship and cosmopolitan sociability, and carry a heavy
and growing traffic in cross-border global relations.
• Yet social science has failed to develop a unified and
comprehensive account of the social production of higher
education and the associated research (HER)
• We know much more about individual market goods (such as
earnings benefits to graduates) than we do about collective
goods and non-market private goods. How should ‘public’
goods be defined, observed and where possible, measured?
There is little conceptual, empirical or policy clarity
How are we to understand the relational social environment
(‘society’) and within it the ‘public’?
•
•
•
•
as an economic market?
as a governed space, the space of the state?
as a combination of self-actualizing individual citizens?
as a communicative realm, of social networking and
media/ Internet, stretching to the ends of the earth
• as all of these?
• and if so which parts are ‘public’ and which are ‘private’?
• Many practices of HEIs are not captured as benefits for
individual students or companies but are consumed jointly.
Consider scientific and social literacy, open source and public
forms of knowledge, political socialization, tolerance of
foreigners, mutual productivity enhancement at work, etc.
• Identifying public goods, especially relational collective goods,
which are constituents of sociability, is a frontier problem for
both social science and policy.
• Without coherent definitions and tools for observing public
goods in HEI, solely normative (and ideological) approaches
come to define the public goods.
.
• And public goods are often underestimated. Policy models
higher education as a market of competing university
corporations, models the relationship between social public
benefits and individual private benefits as zero-sum, and focuses
primarily on the on individualisable economic benefits…
• … exceptions are higher education's role in furthering social
equity, internationalization, research as contributor to
innovation, and vaguer programs on ‘social engagement’. But is
this list comprehensive of the social and public effects of HER?
• What happens to sociability when the policy pendulum swings
to private goods? Can we leave the task of forming sociability to
the Internet and media, consumption, and work? Maybe with
desktop MOOCS substituting for face-to-face teaching?
No one definitive approach
• There are various approaches to the 'public' or 'social' outcomes
of higher education in social science. All can contribute, e.g.
- Notions in political theory of common public good (e.g. Mainsbridge 1998),
- The public sphere (Habermas 1989)
- Public economic goods (Samuelson 1954, McMahon 2009, Ostrom 2010),
- including global public goods (Stiglitz 1999).
• Approaches to the 'public' role of higher education vary across
the world, according to different political cultures and state
traditions. What is the potential for a common or global
approach, parallel to the global reach of the economic definition
of private goods as individual earnings and rates of return? Can
we devise a new global language for public goods?
‘Public’ and
‘private’ are not
necessarily zerosum, e.g. notions
of public can
embody the
private
Amartya Sen’s
idea of individual
freedom
Paul
Samuelson:
Zero sum
notion of
private and
public
goods in
economics
Samuelson’s public and private goods
• Public goods are residual: All goods are private goods and
producible in markets unless they have the special
characteristics of public goods, which are:
• Non-rivalrous or indivisible: a unit of the good can be
consumed by one individual without detracting from the
consumption opportunities the unit provides to others
• Non-excludable: when a good is provided to one individual its
benefits spill-over to many others who did not pay
• Hence public goods are under-produced in markets and
require government or philanthropic intervention
Global public goods
• ‘Global public goods are goods that have a significant
element of non-rivalry and/or non-excludability and made
broadly available across populations on a global scale. They
affect more than one group of countries, are broadly
available within countries, and are inter-generational; that is,
they meet needs in the present generation without
jeopardizing future generations.’
~ Inge Kaul, I. Grunberg and Marc Stern (Eds.), Global Public Goods: International
cooperation in the 21st century, New York, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 2–3
Note the potential for global public ‘bads’ – negative crossborder externalities such as brain drain
.- Global public goods (and bads) created in higher education need
systematic attention and negotiation
- Who pays for global goods? How can they be governed in the
absence of a global state?
-
Joseph
Stiglitz:
Knowledge
as a (global)
public good
Knowledge as a global public good
• Knowledge is predominantly a public good. There is a moment
of excludability, when it is first created and disseminated. But
once disseminated it has no subtractibility (non-rivalrous) and
it can be rendered partly excludable only though artificial
means such as rules governing journals
• Knowledge is also a global public good – the mathematical
theorem retains its value all over the world no matter how
many times it is used
• Hence basic research is subject to market faliure, and
everywhere is funded by governments and philanthropy, or by
universities themselves
Rivalrous
Excludable
New knowledge at the
point of creation
YES
YES
confined to creator (or owner)
enabling IP development
Knowledge held within
scholarly circle
NO
YES
club good, access policed by rules
Knowledge published
in commercial journals
NO
YES
club good, access policed by price
Knowledge circulating
freely in social
communications
NO
NO
a pure public good, knowledge in
its most natural and final state
RESEARCH
Teaching
• Teaching/learning are associated with both private and
public goods. Private goods included social status, earnings,
social and cultural capital, better health, non pecuniary
benefits like cultural sensibility. Public goods include
knowledge content of curriculum, and including common
literacy, diffusion of new technologies, social equity in
opportunity, the contribution to democracy, etc
• Teaching is policy sensitive; e.g. the private good aspect is
enhanced when the scarcity of places rises; equal resourcing
of universities tends to flatten differentials in private value.
• States can finance private as well as public goods – and often
do. Private institutions produce some public goods through
teaching programs, e.g. free courseware at MIT, MOOCs
Rivalrous
Excludable
As a universal right
NO
NO BY DEFINITION
Knowledge contents
NO
NO
General education in
non elite institutions
NO
NO
in mass education a public good
Vocational education
YES
congestion
YES
varies, more so in elite institutions
Elite networking,
cultural capital,
status
YES
congestion
YES
capable of market production
TEACHING
Collective goods
• Because of its methodological individualism, economics is
weak in estimating collective goods, which are not
individualizable. Collective goods such as public knowledge
or social order are not aggregates of individual goods, they
are relational/systemic goods quite distinct from individual
goods, which are goods of another kind
• Collective goods are shaped by political and fiscal
philosophies, ideologies and decisions. But to say they are
subject to politics is not to say that none can be measured,
e.g. volumes of knowledge flows, extent of social mobility
between generations, attitudes to foreigners.
Measurement
• We need to explore and expand potentials for
measurement … while remembering that much of the
‘outcomes’ of higher education are beyond numerical
measurement, joined to process, and happen at the
intersection between universities and other social
institutions. These outcomes do not follow a simple causeand-effect logic
John Maynard
Keynes:
Three kinds of
quality in
social science
Measurement
• John Maynard Keynes identified three kinds of quality in
social science: those subject to numerical computation,
those that could be ordered (‘higher’ or ‘lower’, ‘faster’ or
‘slower’) but not counted, those that could only be
apprehended by the exercise of complex judgments
• e.g. the role of higher education in democratic politics can
be understood only in terms of complex historical judgments
Jurgen
Habermas:
The public
sphere as
communicative
space
• Like Habermas’s public sphere the university is a semiindependent site incubating criticisms and ideas for state
renewal and public policy (though it must be said that the
state is not always listening!). At best research, expert
information and higher education help both government and
‘the public’ to reach considered opinions
• Because of (1) its advanced capacity to form self-altering
agents, and engender critical intellectual reflexivity; (2) its
capacity to provide conditions for complex collectiver political
formations; and (3) its ease of movement across traditional
boundaries, at times, in both the ‘East’ and the ‘West’, higher
education has incubated advanced democratic formations
• This suggests that one test of the public character of the
university is the extent that it provides space for criticism,
challenge and the creation of new forms of public space
The comparative dimension
Higher education systems vary according to
•Differences in the scope and role of the state
•Differences in political cultures
•Differences in educational cultures, including family
Major variations are regional (North American, Westminster,
German, Nordic, Russia, Post-Confucian, Latin American),
entailing such issues such as …
-space for civil society and its relation with HEIs; government-university
relations (forms of autonomy); protocols of academic freedom; social
expectations of higher education; responsibility for funding and priorities of
state investment; institutions’ degree of independence in global activities;
variations in the take on global public goods
Three kinds of state/ higher education
United States
Westminster
Post-Confucian
(UK, Australia, New Zealand)
(East Asia and Singapore)
Nationstate
Limited liberal state,
separate from
economy and civil
order. Federal
Limited liberal state,
separate from
economy and civil
order. Unitary
Comprehensive Sinic
state, politics
commands economy,
top graduates to state
Educational
culture
Meritocratic and
competitive. Education
seen as common road
to wealth/status within
advancing prosperity
Socially egalitarian.
Education as state
guaranteed road to
social opportunity
that is open to all
Confucian commitment
to self-cultivation.
Education is filial duty,
and social status via
exam competition
Supervises market
competition, shapes
outcomes indirectly.
Managed autonomy
Supervises, expands,
shapes and drives the
sector. Even more
managed autonomy
State role in Frames hierarchical
higher
market and steps back.
education
Autonomous university
leaders and strategy
The research project (2013-2015)
• Comparative study of approaches to public goods in higher
education in eight differing jurisdictions, through semistructured interviews with leaders and professors in
universities, government officials and social science experts
• Australia (done, 47 interviews), Russia (done, 30 Interviews),
UK, Finland, Germany, China, Korea or Japan
• Aim is to prepare a generic conceptual framework for
defining, categorizing, observing and where possible
measuring public goods in higher education and research
• i.e. exploring the possibility of a common language for
describing the social outputs of universities, that accounts for
potential national and regional variations. Such a generic
language may require minimum commonalities e.g. human
rights, universal access, state responsibilities
The interview questions
• Your training, job history, present position and main responsibilities?
• What is the role of government in higher education? What should
government do? Are there limits – what should government not n?
• What do you understand by the term ‘public good’? What benefits and
activities fall under this?
• Does higher education produce collective goods, some say social goods, that
are distinct from benefits that can be identified in relation to individuals?
What are those collective goods?
• What does higher education contribute to the ‘public good’, in the following
areas [some individual, some collective]. Consider: (1) Are there public good/
public goods created here? (2) How do we know, and can we measure them?
Knowledge; Research, development and innovation; Arts and Science not vocationally
specific; Professional and occupational training; Equitable social opportunity;
Creativity in different fields; Social communications; Building cities and region;
Citizenship, tolerance and cosmopolitanism; Internationalization; Arts and culture;
Public policy development, and better government
• If higher education creates a mix of public and private goods, do you think
that both kinds of good can grow together? Or is it that the more public
goods are created, the less private goods are created? Is it zero-sum?
• If higher education was 100 per cent funded by student tuition would the
public goods still flow? (Possible follow-up question - In part or whole?)
• Higher education is funded from a mix of public and private sources. How
should the balance be determined? (Possible follow-up question – Is it
essentially just political and arbitrary? Can it be grounded?)
• What is the global public good?
• The UN Development Program defines the global public good as benefits
that flow across borders and are widely shared. Do Russian universities
contribute to this global public good? How? How do we know?
• Governments fund research because it generates innovations in the
national economy. What if the benefits are captured by foreign firms?
Should government fund research without likely national economic impact?
• If public goods flow across borders, who should pay for them, producer
country or receiver country?