Higher Education and Public Good

Abstract

Discussion about the purposes and benefits of higher education has been stymied by a particular construction of the relation between private and public benefits now dominant in policy circles and public debate. In this reading of higher education, the private and public benefits are rhetorically juxtaposed on a zero sum basis, while the individual benefits are defined as solely private and in economic terms. In liberal Western societies, in which limiting the role of the state is the central problem of politics, and individual freedoms tend to be positioned as outside both state and society, the collective conditions (‘social benefits’) provided by higher education are seen as exclusive of the individual benefits. These collective benefits are shadowy, undefined. Given that in liberal Western societies—especially English-speaking societies—understandings of the public good(s) created by higher education have become ideologically ‘frozen’, so that the public good can scarcely be identified, this suggests the need to look beyond liberal Western jurisdictions for fresh insights and conceptual frameworks. Notions of the role of government and of universities, the ‘social’, ‘community’, individual and collective, and public good, vary considerably between different traditions of higher education, for example the Nordic, German, Russian, Latin American and Chinese traditions as well as those in the United States and the Westminster countries. There is no good reason to treat the Anglo-American approach to public/private as the sum of all possibilities. By comparing the different approaches to ‘public good’ in higher education that have evolved across the world, generic elements can be identified, and a common language of public good developed. This also makes it possible to establish a broad-based notion of specifically global public goods.