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Part One
Education as a Public Good
(Edited by Les Bell)
All the contributors to this volume work in, or are associated with, the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD) at the University of Lincoln. The book sets out to explore one of the key issues that underpin the current debate about the nature of higher education in the United Kingdom â the tension between public and private provision. The starting point for this volume is that there is a balance to be struck between the public and the private. In the current crisis facing higher education, there is a significant imbalance in favour of the private. The notion of higher education as a public good fails to feature significantly in current policy debates. The argument here is that higher education is and should remain essentially a public good and should not be shaped primarily by the demands of human capital, marketization and privatization. It is argued here that the concept of âTeaching in Publicâ and the notion of public generally need to be re-established as central principles in the philosophical rationale for the provision of higher education. This volume explores some of the ways in which teaching in public can transcend traditional notions of teaching as a private, privatized and marketized activity based largely, if not entirely, on the exigencies of human capital and eschewing the notion of higher education as a public good.
This first section introduces the key features of the concept of teaching in public and shows how it has emerged as a theme in higher education policy. Teaching in public presents a challenge to some of the current themes in higher education policy by raising questions in four significant areas. These are as follows:
Higher education as a public good â this challenges the marketization and commodification of higher education and asks how far is it possible to promote equality through higher education by using extended and open access, student choice and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
The learning landscape â teaching as a public space, which raises questions about the benefits of re-thinking the classroom as a public space and how far might this link to developments in pedagogy. This was the central theme of Bell et al. (2009) and forms the background for the argument in this volume.
The student/teacher nexus â the students as the first public and as producer through student participation in curriculum development, jointly exploring pedagogies. This theme raises questions about the nature and purpose of the relationship between lecturer and student and also challenges the notion of student as consumer and lecturer as provider.
Teaching as a public activity â the extent to which the wider community can engage with teaching and learning within universities both through traditional means such as attendance at public lectures and through alternative forms of access that can be facilitated through information technology and other developments within the public media. Teaching as public activity can be seen to have a profound impact on the relationship between teachers, students and the higher education curriculum.
Any debate about the nature and future of higher education needs to be located within a conceptual and historical context. In Chapter 1, Neary and Morris set out the conceptual framework for this debate by tracing the tensions between the privatization of British universities and the attempts to defend the importance of public in the provision of higher education. They argue that teaching in public provides a conceptual framework within which teaching in classrooms and the collaboration between student and teacher can be located within the wider debate about the nature and purposes of higher education and about the relationship between higher education and the state. They argue that university classrooms should be places where teaching is inspirational and meanings and ideas are reconstructed and challenged through public debate, which transcends the mere acquisition of skills and competences. The challenge for higher education in the face of the current emphasis on the private is to make public the multiple ways of thinking and to deconstruct the perception of student as consumer and teaching as a simple array of competences.
If Neary and Morris provide the conceptual framework for this debate, the other two chapters in this section provide the historical context. In Chapter 2, Thody shows how the origins of and rationale for the current debate surrounding the public and the private in higher education and the concept of teaching in public emerged in the nineteenth century as part of the various social interest groups as they engaged with the promotion of various aspects of higher learning in England. She traces the emergence of the publicâprivate debate in the nineteenth century as different interest groups responded to the needs of different publics, including women and the working classes. She argues that these sought to provide an appropriate curriculum, in relevant institutional forms, for their members. Thody also explores the ways in which public engagement in higher education, for example, through minersâ institutes, co-operatives and municipal libraries, together with the newly emerging civic university colleges, developed different perceptions of the meaning, purpose and appropriate curriculum and forms of delivery of higher education.
In Chapter 3, Bell examines how such public engagement in higher education developed in the twentieth century. He argues that, although the publicâprivate debate was evident in the first half of the century, governments tended to adopt an almost laissez faire approach to the development of universities. By the end of the twentieth century, this relationship had changed and much of higher education provision can be seen to have been shaped by the tensions between public and private. Although universities are now regarded as central to many aspects of state policy, the state has tended to become a consumer of higher education rather than a provider albeit within a framework of state regulation. Such state regulation and control has forced universities to focus on key features of the private, such as marketization, commercialization of knowledge production and the student as consumer, at the expense of higher education as a public good.
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Chapter 1
Teaching in Public: Reshaping the University
Mike Neary and Aileen Morris
Introduction
Higher education is in crisis in the United Kingdom and around the world. The manifestations of the crisis are funding cuts to universities and student protests in response to these government spending restrictions. What underpins this crisis is a controversy about the meaning and purpose of higher education that tends to polarize around the concepts of private and public forms of higher education. In this volume, we attempt to engage with this controversy, but in a way that avoids what is often a sterile and ultimately fruitless debate between notions of the private and the public. Our starting point is that higher education is a fundamental public good that needs to be maintained, but we are concerned that this concept seems unable to defend itself against the claims made by those who wish to privatize the university sector. There is, therefore, a need to transcend this debate and search for an alternative perspective that is both radical and hopeful.
The argument of the book is that the notion of public needs to be reclaimed and redefined as part of a progressive political project based on the rejuvenation of higher education. This argument will be sustained by grounding the philosophical notion of the university in the everyday working collaborations between teachers and students across a range of pedagogical practices. The chapters in this volume provide accounts and analyses of these collaborations, and they give insights into how such activities are trying to forge new notions of the public in higher education. The volume concludes by setting out an alternative conception of higher education with a focus on the traditions of critical political economy, rather than the oversimplified âprivate versus publicâ debate, to make the case for the university as a central feature of the knowing society.
The Privatized University
Since the 1980s, the driving organizational principles for higher education, both in the United Kingdom and around the world, have been privatization and commercialization, based on the imperatives of economic efficiencies and effectiveness in a marketized society (Finlayson and Hayward 2010, Stevenson and Bell 2009). This has been defined in the academic literature variously as âacademic capitalismâ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997), the âdeathâ (Evans 2004) and âruinationâ of universities (Readings 1996). It has been described as part of a process where knowledge is economized: âhomo academicus is replaced by homo economicusâ (Lock and Lorenz 2007), where scholarship becomes âknowledge capitalismâ (Leadbeater 2000), with higher education institutions recast as âprofit centresâ (Callinicos 2006) and the âenterprise universityâ (Shattock 2009). This commercialization and marketization, it has been argued, runs counter to the main academic project of higher education; or, in other words, it âmake you fick, innitâ (Allen and Ainley 2007).
This attempt to consolidate the privatization of British universities forms part of a much broader attempt by governments to reinstate the ideology of market-led social development following the near collapse of the world financial system in 2008â2009 (Amin 2009, Archer 2009, Foster and Magdoff 2009, Brenner and Probsting 2008, Elliott and Atkinson 2008, Gamble 2009, Mason 2009, Shutt 2010). This project of privatization and commercialization has intensified in the recent period in Britain and elsewhere (Lambert 2003, Willetts 2010, Fejes 2005, Brunkhorst 2006, Alonso 2003), taking on a number of familiar forms. For undergraduates, it has meant recasting the student as consumer through charging tuition fees and an increasing emphasis on facilitating student choice, driven by the concept of the student experience. At the root of this lies the attempt to reduce the rationale of a university education to that of graduate employability (Harvey 2004). While the positive effects are that universities put considerable effort into securing successful careers for their alumni, there remain problems of student unemployment and under-employment and growing issues of student debt and poverty. There are also significant consequences for curriculum development as a risk-averse culture emerges within a system underpinned by benchmark comparisons and league tables (TUC/NUS 2006, Naidoo 2003, Epstein and Boden 2006, McCulloch 2009).
For staff, this process has been driven by a number of interrelated processes, including the introduction of wrap-around ubiquitous teaching and learning technologies, often leading to the automization, intensification and casualization of intellectual labour (Noble 2001, De Angelis and Harvie 2009, Levidow 2002, Callinicos 2006, Nelson and Watt 2004), as well as the ongoing pressure on academics to favour research at the expense of teaching, exemplified in the United Kingdom by the RAE/REF (Research Assessment Exercise/Research Excellence Framework) (Callinicos 2006). These processes have done nothing to dismantle the dysfunctionality that lies at the core of a university education: the relationship between teaching and research (Healey and Jenkins 2009). At the institutional level, academics are subjected to new forms of managerialism, which have been plagiarized from the corporate world and are underpinned by the concept of âexcellenceâ (Waterman and Peters 1982, Readings 1996), the cult of auditing (Power 1999) and market managerialism (McKibbin 2006), with a corresponding fetishization of notions of leadership (Callinicos 2006) and quality (Morley 2003).
Across the university sector, new forms of privatized higher education have emerged: not just the University of Buckingham but now the BPP College of Professional Studies (BPP Holdings 2011), with others to follow. At the same time, fundamental changes are being introduced to the ways in which universities are funded (Callinicos 2006), and there is a regression from a unified mass higher education system to the potential re-creation of elite provision within the system (Willetts 2010). This process has been greatly accelerated in the United Kingdom by the publication and government acceptance of the Browne Report (2010), which sets out proposals for university funding in terms of government support and the level of fees that undergraduate students should be charged. The key issues are that student fees will be trebled; there will no government funds for teaching in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, with government funds for teaching targeted on Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) subjects; and more private sector provision will be encouraged. Under the proposed new system, funding will follow the student, so that courses provided will be based on anticipated studentâconsumer demand. The concept of student as consumer is given further emphasis by insisting universities publish information relating to courses, levels of student satisfaction, employability statistics and rates of salary on leaving university so that, it is claimed, students can make better informed decisions about where to study for their undergraduate degree. While these reforms are welcomed by some parts of the English sector, particularly the elite universities, they have raised very high levels of public protest from students and academics (McQuillan 2010). These forms of mainstream opposition demand âa belief in the public realm, publicly funded institutions, the idea of the university, and a belief in the necessity of critical thoughtâ (McQuillan 2010).
Defending the Public University
In the face of this process, many academics have criticized such rampant privatization. Deem et al. (2007), for example, have argued against the introduction of New Public Management and bemoaned the demise of Weberâs ethic of civic responsibility and its replacement by the ethos of private accumulation. Similarly, Fuller (2001) seeks to recover the original idea of the university by reconvening it under the notion of civic republicanism. This approach is mirrored in Nixonâs (2011) attempt to re-imagine the public in terms of what he describes as present and future trajectories: the social, the civic and the cosmopolitanism, inside and outside the curriculum. Delanty (2001) also wants to recover the university as a public space, by which he means democratizing the ways in which knowledge is produced with reference to notions of technological and cultural citizenship. While Ball (2007) argues that claims for the effectiveness of the public sector are a romantic fiction, he does maintain that the move towards a marketized system of education has led to hybrid forms of management, and that there is a need to think differently about higher education before it is too late. The strength of these accounts is their willingness to engage with the concept of publicness and seek to define general principles for action, but their limitation is that they offer no practical examples of what these alternatives might look like for academics in ways that connect with their everyday teaching practice.
A more grounded approach to defending the concept of the public in higher education can be found in the work of Burawoy (2007) and McLean (2008). Burawoy is interested exclusively with teaching sociology in a model he refers to as Public Sociology, which means that his discipline engages with issues of public concern so as to reinstate the notion of the university as a public good. For Burawoy, the notion of public resides inside as well as outside the university, and students should be seen not as a constraint on professional careers but as an academicâs âfirst publicâ (Burawoy 2005a: 322). McLean (2008) makes a strong connection between progressive forms of pedagogy in practice and the philosophical idea of the university. She argues that the current crisis in higher education does provide the opportunity for creating forms of teaching that derive their values from intellectualizing pedagogic activity, by means of fusing epistemology, ontology, political science, philosophy, ethics, politics and sociology. This is based on a progressive moral commitment to active citizenship in a democratic society, linked to the prioritizing of urgent ethical and political emergencies. McLean argues that all of this should be framed in a discussion about the meaning and purpose of higher education: âthe idea of the universityâ (McLean 2008: 161). The strength of this work is that it makes a link between teaching in the classroom and collaborations between students and teacher with a more expansive debate about the nature and meaning of higher education. These pragmatic and practical approaches by Burawoy and McLean, in the context of a progressive politicized project for higher education, provide the framework and the grounding that underpin both this book and the concept of teaching in public.
The Teacher in Focus
Teaching in public brings the teacher back into focus. An unintended outcome of the concentration on the notion of âstudent as consumerâ, leading to an obsession with student-centredness and the student experience in higher education, has been the diminution of the role of the teacher. The authors in this volume agree that
It is time to swing the pendulum back to teachers, not as âlone sages on the stageâ but to strongly position them with their students, and educational researchers and developers, as partners in an inquiry into disciplinary concerns . . . a restoration of dignity for academics and a promising reconfiguration of research relationships between students, academics, educational researchers and developers. (Cousin 2008: 269)
Contributors to this book agree that when we look back on our own education, it is the teachers who made a deep and positive impression on us as students that we remember. They, more often than not, were teachers who enthused, encouraged, challenged and stimulated us to learn and think differently about their subject and, at the best of times, altered our world view as a result. We do not look back on our education and think: âI met that competenceâ; âI demonstrated that skillâ; âI learned that factâ. âGood teachingâ and âgood teachersâ come in many forms (Standish 2005: 65), and universities have, to some extent, been able to resist the reduction of HE teaching to a set of narrow technical skills and closely described competences:
And there can be no recipe, for so much depends upon the teacherâs judgement: in interacting with the class, in constructing and delivering the lecture, in responding to the rhythms of the occasion . . . So much depends on good timing . . . There is no single way in which this is done well. (Standish 2005: 65)
Just as universities are places where diversity, it is now acknowledged, exists within the student body, the same is true of the academic body. This is not just about gender, social background or ethnicity but also about academic discipline, role, orientation to practice and tenure, for example. Teachers in higher education are members of multiple communities within and beyond the institutional base. Working with both students and colleagues, there are opportunities for teachers to make public the moral and ethical base of their professionalism, which will challenge performative notions of what it is to be a good teacher in higher education. As Walker puts it:
What kind of academics and teachers, then, are we, or can we now be? What are our educational purposes and values as teachers in higher education? How might we âdoâ critical forms of professionalism and reconstruct professional identities under changing conditions of higher education? (Walker 2001: 2)
The challenge is to bring out into the open and make public, with our students, the multiple ways of thinking and being within the world and how, in the critical spirit, they can be part of a collaborative and âself-critical community, one in which the participants share with and support each other, in their own struggles towards authenticity. The private becomes semi-public; the struggles intersectâ (Barnett 2007: 161). In order to work against the construction of students as consumers of the highe...
