Creating a New Public University and Reviving Democracy

Action Research in Higher Education

Morten Levin, Davydd J. Greenwood

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785333224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Théorie et pratique de l'éducation

Public universities are in crisis, waning in their role as central institutions within democratic societies. Denunciations are abundant, but analyses of the causes and proposals to re-create public universities are not. Based on extensive experience with Action Research-based organizational change in universities and private sector organizations, Levin and Greenwood analyze the wreckage created by neoliberal academic administrators and policymakers. The authors argue that public universities must be democratically organized to perform their educational and societal functions. The book closes by laying out Action Research processes that can transform public universities back into institutions that promote academic freedom, integrity, and democracy.

Part I

Public Goods, Bildung, Public Universities, and Democracy

Part I addresses the broad social, moral, and political arguments for the key role of public universities in democratic societies. There exist individual studies of the meaning and importance of public goods, of the concepts and practices associated with Bildung, the social importance of public universities, and the diverse meanings of democracy. In this opening part of our argument, we explore each element and argue they form a mutually necessary set of factors for sustaining and developing public universities and democratic societies. After discussing the concept of public goods and the variety of meanings of democracy, we argue for the key importance of public universities in democracies. We then present the multiple models of the purposes and structures of higher education institutions and review some of the ideological positions now attached higher education generally. This section closes by bringing Bildung, academic freedom, and academic integrity together and arguing that there is a mutually necessary relationship among these elements as well as between strengthening them and revitalizing the practice of democracy both in public universities and in society at large.

CHAPTER 1

Public Goods, Democracy, and Public Universities

In this section of the book our focus is the uneven and often incoherent approaches to universities in the (supposed) light of market economics. This topic is difficult because economic concepts are invoked and distorted by people on all sides. A key function of this section is to clear away some of this underbrush so it is possible to think more systematically about what economics has to do with universities. Economic analysis is relevant but methodologically and theoretically meaningful economic analysis, not invocations of pseudo-markets and pseudo-corporatization as ideological weapons.¹ There are serious economic problems with the way universities operate. They are not addressed by careless or intentionally distorted manipulation of economic concepts and evidence.

A key element in our analysis is understanding public universities as a public good. We show how the concept of public goods is actually argued from a neoclassical economic perspective. We emphasize the neoclassical economic perspective here, not because it matches our preferences for analyzing the political economy of universities but because contemporary discussions of the “business model” and “corporatization” of universities have converted simulacra of neoclassical economic analysis into revealed truths. We show that the actual deployment of neoclassical economic perspectives contradicts neoliberal ideologies and practices in higher education. This matters because neoliberals masquerade as economic analysts to support an authoritarian, hierarchical view of society. They use models that serve the interests of global elites and their local representatives. These obfuscations also prevent public universities from addressing the real economic challenges they face. Substituting pseudo-accountability and ranking for reflection on the serious allocation decisions they must make and that a genuine economic analysis would require permits authoritarian administrators and policymakers to do as they please and cover their tracks (or even confuse themselves) with false economic arguments.

The Neoliberal Construction of Higher Education

The first problem in analyzing the economics of higher education is figuring out which institutions we are actually talking about. Current debates on the future of public higher education tend to refer to higher education in abstract, generic terms without always distinguishing among the multiple types of higher education institutions existing everywhere. Doing this is already an ideological move as well as an analytical non-starter. There are community colleges, for-profit colleges and universities, vocational schools, liberal arts colleges, regional colleges, private universities, flagship public universities, land-grant universities, state university and college systems, and national public university systems in Europe. Failing to distinguish among them is an analytical and strategic error because homogenizing them produces analyses and reform proposals that confuse the part with the whole and that ignore the key differences among these types of institutions. It also overshadows their analytically relevant commonalities.

Currently, dominant policy models homogenize public institutions, including public education. These policy models ideologically reconstruct the public sector as a set of market-driven service organizations that are supposed to deal with clients (i.e., the public that pays the taxes and fees to support them) by means of putatively market rational allocation of resources and by administrative efficiency and transparency.

This ideological fantasy looks nothing like observable reality. The neoliberals use the failure of reality to match their market fantasies as a justification to lay waste to public sector institutions. Among other things, this neoliberal construction of higher education denies the unique functions and institutional logics of not-for-profit and public organizations in general and undermines the public goods creation essential to public higher education in any democratic society.

The obliteration of public goods is evident in all sectors subject to the “new public management” (Behn 2001) and has deeply compromised the institutions of public higher education along with most other institutions that provide public goods (e.g., utilities, healthcare). Public resources are stripped from these institutions and used to enrich global financial elites. The goal is nothing less than the destruction of all the social democratic gains made since the Second World War.

This “marketizing” and homogenization is accomplished by invoking but not applying neoclassical economic theory and methods to public higher education. It trades on the, to us dubious, scientific legitimacy of neoclassical economic theory and analysis. Rather than being about economic choice and rationality as they claim, these policy efforts focus on undermining both the social and educational functions and the institutional autonomy of public higher education to further consolidate the political and financial hegemony of global elites.

These are bold claims, and to support the contention that neoliberalism is a purely ideological distortion of neoclassical economic theory, it is necessary to make a brief foray into the fundamentals of neoclassical economic theory and generations of research in economic anthropology.

Neoclassical economics is an elegant theory of allocation driven by a small set of operating assumptions. The first assumption is that human beings universally have wants that exceed the resources they have to meet them, an assumption generations of anthropological research have called into question (Polanyi 1944; Sahlins 1972).

These supposedly endless wants are not all equally important and thus they are hierarchically ranked so that some receive a higher priority than others. Humans then must allocate their resources to satisfy their wants, resources gathered either by directly creating them with their own labor, through exchange, or through other means of accumulation. In satisfying our wants, we supposedly wish to expend the smallest possible amount of our resources to acquire the largest amount of goods and services that satisfy our most highly ranked wants. That is, we must engage in allocating scarce means among alternative, hierarchically ranked ends. Since suppliers also are attempting to maximize their incomes, they want to sell their goods and services at the highest price possible and spend the resulting income to acquire those things that they value most. Thus the whole system is built on chains of interrelated decisions among putatively rational, perfectly informed actors. Each of the actors is maximizing their gains in competition with each other to get the best personal outcomes (Marshall [1890] 1920; Robbins [1932] 1937).

Valid critiques of the realism and details of this theoretical model abound. They have been available for decades and are ignored by the neoliberals and their policy operators. Still, even neoclassical economists agree that, no matter how it is framed, there is nothing in this theory of allocation that determines which ends will be ranked highest. Thus different actors will not necessarily rank their ends in the same ways. In addition, the marginal utilities that various actors realize from these transactions are not easily commensurable.²

A genuine application of neoclassical economic theory to public higher education necessarily would have to start with the way purchasers and sellers of public higher education define and rank the ends they associate with higher education. Whether or not it is acceptable to call consumers of higher education “students” or “customers” (an important issue that we will come back to later) does not matter as much as recognizing that the first step in doing an economic analysis of public higher education is to figure out what those who pay for it value about it. What other things they are willing to forego to access public higher education, what those who fund it through taxes value about it, what components the faculty and students in these institutions value, and how those elements are ranked and transacted in relation to each other are necessary data for using such a model. We would need similar information about the providers of higher education as well.

The complexity of the interactions among the supply and demand crowds, each with their hierarchies of wants, their different interests, their different resource endowments, and the different marginal utilities for the things they can “buy” with their goods, is obvious. Further, we know how imperfect the information all the actors use actually is and how heavily decisions are affected by non-rational elements. Trying to reduce this complexity to a simple calculus is a fool’s errand. But clearly there is a sufficient supply of people willing to keep this fiction going.

For the neoliberal construction to be reasonable, the following conditions have to be met: all students are only seeking high paying jobs through education; all non-student university customers are seeking high value research and development work at the lowest price; all faculty want the highest salaries for the least amount of work; and the sellers of higher education are also rationally motivated. Further, it must be assumed that transparency and accountability will be complete, so that perfect information can inform economic maximizing decisions by all actors; that the rationalities of the supply and demand crowds will match up; and that public higher education institutions will be forced by consumer demand to provide precisely what the consumers want at the lowest possible cost and in the most efficient way and nothing else. If this scenario is persuasive to you, this book will not make sense to you. Versions of this tale guide a great many higher education policy prescriptions and administrative strategies. Competent neoclassical economic analytical thinking is in short supply at many universities and in most branches of government.

Among the many missing elements in the neoliberal construction is whether or not what the student “customers” will want and get will turn out to be an “education” in any meaningful sense of the word. Nor is it clear what kind of research and development non-student consumers are trying to purchase and whether or not universities are positioned to provide this at the lowest possible price. No clarity is presented about faculty motivations in teaching and conducting research. Instead, the empirical gaps are filled in with negative and positive stereotypes to make this construction work.

Another manipulation common to this neoliberal scheme conflates minimizing costs with achieving efficiency. It is easy to show that what is low cost and what is efficient are rarely identical, particularly when the time perspective is added and the sustainability of particular strategies is taken into account. Such a conflation is simply wrong. Yet arguments abound claiming that what is “efficient” according to neoliberal political and social ideas is market rational.

There is a deeper theoretical and mathematical problem that goes beyond the foregoing problems. There is no theoretical justification for combining students and non-student consumers into groups with a homogeneous set of preference scales. There is no reason to assume the preferences of the university demand and supply crowds are homogeneous, just as it would make little sense for any other categories of actors. The first step in speaking about “students” in the neoliberal scheme is to improperly homogenize the stakeholder groups by asserting that stakeholder groups each have a collective preference scale (Elster and Roemer 1993). Vaulting over this analytical mistake, neoliberals then proceed to examine how institutional behavior responds, rationally or not, to their fictitious homogenized preference scales. Put more baldly, they fabricate the preference scales and then pretend that institutional behavior either satisfies them or fails to satisfy them. Where institutions fail to meet these imagined preference scales, public universities are then subjected to neoliberal reforms.

Economic theorists have long known that combining interpersonal utilities is mathematically and conceptually dubious and thus scientifically uncertain (Elster and Roemer 1993). While there is a great deal of work on this subject, the mathematical difficulties of comparing individually created preference scales responsive to different resource endowments, values, and contexts was demonstrated clearly years ago but is ignored in the bulk of economic analyses in higher education, regardless of the analysts’ ideological commitments.

To hide this problem, both neoclassical and neoliberal exponents of reform export their own preferences scales to fill in the blanks in the combined utilities of the actors. This means that, prior to the analysis, the analysts have already imposed their own preferences (including their politics and ethics) on what is presented, but portray it as if it were a simple objective calculation. In the case of higher education, the ideological preferences of the analysts are converted into the goals that universities have to meet or, more commonly, that they fail to meet. Since universities fail to meet these imposed goals, the analysts and policymakers feel justified in imposing their preferred political control systems and organizational models on universities to force compliance with their ideological vision. All of this is carried out under the veil of supposedly objective quantitative analysis.

Typically, this ideological strategy emphasizes the preferences of one group (usually students or the private sector). It ignores the preferences of the faculty, staff, community members, taxpayers, and other stakeholders. We searched in vain for books that balance the interests and wants of all the stakeholders in universities. Analyzing universities this way actually discourages serious empirical study of what diverse and complex student constituencies actually want and what diverse faculties do and do not want. Also ignored are the diverse and often divergent goals of administrations and policymakers, the wants and interests of community members, and the complex and dynamic structures of the research and development and employment markets. The neoliberal operators and their administrative enablers already “know” what people should want and punish them when they don’t conform.

These points could be considered elementary in neoclassical economics and yet they rarely are taken into account in policy actions or policy critiques regarding public higher education. In place of a solid theoretical and empirical grounding, ideological notions of transparency, efficiency, and consumer choice are recommended as the solvent to banish irrationality from the system, protect the public from the selfishness of faculty and administrators and from the fecklessness of students, and to stop the waste of public funds on the middle and working classes. All the while, these operations hide the ideological agendas of the analysts.

Operating this way ignores the key requirement of any economic analysis to define the ends to be met, their relative priorities, and the complex mix of supply and demand crowds with their dynamic, diverse, and perhaps inconsistent or incompatible preferences. When economic analyses are done seriously and these fundamental violations of economic theory and method are avoided, the resulting conclusions are much more complex and differentiated (see Ehrenberg 1997, 2007; McMahon 2009; McGettigan 2013). Not surprisingly, the neoliberal solutions turn out not to be solutions at all but a significant part of the problem. The neoliberals are the ones who must be held to account.

To return to our point of departure, when these neoliberal operations dominate the scene, democratic debate about the multiple missions of public higher education is shut down. The unexamined and ill-defined ends are taken for granted and institutions are simply held accountable for meeting them by the “authorities.” Such operations reinforce current behavior and organizational structures, are inherently backward looking, oversimplify institutional missions, and consolidate administrative power at the expense of everything else. The results are predictably negative and fundamentally anti-democratic both in terms of university operations and in terms of a key institution’s contribution to the promotion of a democratic civil society.

In this context, many institutional leaders support the neoliberal accountability scheme by trying to spin their numbers to look good or using external accountability demands as a way of consolidating their own authority over internal constituencies. Others turn themselves and their institutions upside down trying to meet these externally imposed demands and act in ways that nullify or entirely shut down discussion about the potentially unique missions and situations of their institutions. Still others count on their institutional reputations and wealth to overcome any problems with their numbers. The overall scene involves pseudo-compliance or naïve compliance to imposed, irrational objectives. These circumstances often bring out the worst in institutions and have been central to the radical decline of public universities.

For these reasons, we highlight the resulting absence of substantive discussion of the meaning and ends of public higher education on campuses, in state governments, and in national and international arenas on the right, in the center,...