THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY

An audio podcast from the Warwick Higher Education Summit

University funding is going through an era of great change. Three panel members at the recent Warwick Higher Education Summit discussed the public versus private debate. When it comes to universities, is public funding best, and if so, why?

Listen to the podcast:

Professor Bernard Longdon

“What constitutes a private university as opposed to a public one? As I prepared this talk I became increasingly convinced that the distinction between public and private was not just anachronistic, but actually it was irrelevant on two counts... ownership and funding.

Let me deal with the ownership side first of all. Our present day universities have their origin way back... when there were universities established by the Church. In those days, and over the next 600 years, they remained few in number.

We actually started off our lives as universities in the private sector. They weren’t funded by the state. It wasn’t until the end of World War I that the state reorganised the strategic advantage of controlling the direction of university teaching and research. It increased its interest in universities by creating an increased dependency by universities on public funding, which led them to behave and be treated as agencies of government, being managed more for public accountability than for institutional autonomy.

So if one uses a strict definition the contemporary university is not a public institution but is better described, I suggest to you, as a state-dependent institution, with its buildings and its land in private ownership. But it does depend on the state for its funding. It currently does but it’s going to change. That change is going to come about next year. The purpose of the university, then, is currently being redefined all the time.

I want to move away from an utilitarian view, which is the predominant view at times in this country, to one which says liberal education is not obviously wealth-creating but, I’d argue, it's contributing effectively to the prosperity of the nation’s stage. I think it has got a place there.

So far, then, I have argued the public and private divide isn’t really valid - it’s outdated - and secondly the purpose of a university should incorporate liberal scholarship alongside utilitarian activities. My proposition is that our university system is already a not-for-profit system. In a White Paper that came out, Students at the Heart of the System, there were only three references, interestingly enough, to not-for-profit... it’s only three references [but] I would be very concerned about the fact that they were there in the first place.

The further marketisation of higher education in England is being managed, albeit by light touch, through the introduction of not-for-profit language. This, I suggest, is the prelude to the next stage when for-profit concepts will be introduced into the lexicon of the higher education system.

State-dependent universities are prevented by statute from generating and operating profit. They can generate money which then has to be fed back into the system. Now that’s something very, very different from the for-profit system. Why should we be worried about it in the UK? There are three reasons: accountability, quality and debt.”

Adam O’Boyle

Student Hubs has a network of hubs that do things at a local level... we do believe very strongly in the public role of universities. What I want to do first is cast back a little bit on the historical perspective... although we are going through a time of great change, and the changes happening to the universities probably are too far and too fast ... there is an historical perspective on this.

The way I often look at it is to look at the somewhat tripartite nature of the university mission, which can be reflected in universities in the West after the last 800-900 years. If you take the medieval, the early modern and the modern university you see features of universities coming out in different lights.

Moving into the modern era we have got the motto of Warwick University, "Mind over matter".

[The first] one is very much about service to the community - what is the university’s role in the wider community? You look at perhaps Oxford University’s motto ‘The Lord is my life’ from Psalm 21, I think that gives a very good indication of what the medieval university was about in the early days: service to the church and service to the community.

And then we move to the early modern era, and you have something like Birmingham University’s motto which is ‘Through efforts to high things’. Really in the 19th century universities were focused on higher education as perhaps their primary pursuit, educating men mostly for service to the nation.

Moving into the modern era we have got the motto of Warwick University, which is about 'mind over matter', where universities perhaps are focusing more strongly on research and knowledge as a pursuit [to serve] its own end.

I think within that tripartite we should remember that all of those qualities can come out at any time and are stressed perhaps at any time. What we would want to do at Student Hubs is to make sure that these are balanced in some sort of way and ensure that in the debate none gets lost. Service to the community, provision of higher education as an educative function, and the advancement of learning: none of these fall short at any time.

Therefore it’s important to reflect that, as Bernard said, public universities have existed prior to public funding. To some extent, although we may be despondent about the way in which our funding landscape is changing, it remains within our grasp as members of higher education landscapes to shape that story. I think that the greater private nature of university funding will require universities to put more of a stress on the greater public benefit of universities.”

Paul Manners

“My day job is working in a centre that’s trying to work with researchers in universities to draw out more public benefit from their work, so this is obviously a topic very close to my heart. The thing I wanted to talk about briefly is this notion of the story. People have said again and again 'Can we come up with a new narrative that will help make the case of universities?' I just want to play with that a little.

If we were to make a drama about higher education we’ve got relevance, accountability and benefit to play with.

Is there a story we can find about a public university?... What are the emotions and what are the issues that sit at the heart of the public university?... For me, three things have come up today that would sit at the heart of that story. The first is about relevance - that isn’t necessarily going to make a Hollywood blockbuster, I appreciate - but it’s about the relationship between knowledge and society, between curiosity and application. The second thing is about value and benefit, and how we put into words the values and also whose values they are.

I think the third thing that’s come up again and again is about accountability and about who has a stake, and how is that stake properly enacted and how are the relative stakeholders allowed to influence the future?

So if we were to make a drama about higher education we’ve got relevance, accountability and we’ve got benefit to play with. I think we could usefully spend a huge amount of time actually talking about those things and trying to understand them better and think them through.

But I think a story also needs a compelling, driving moral, and that’s what’s interesting about the public university... it has values around social justice, around curiosity, around culture... and I think if we forget those things, we lose our way and the story loses its way.

So I think it’s finding a way to have that kind of big moral debate about the purpose of university that’s at the heart of telling a good story... For me the most important idea is conversation, dialogue, engagement, because that, I think, is where we will take this debate forward, because we need to listen as much as we need to tell a story.”

Bernard Longdon is Co-Director, Centre for Higher Education Research Development. He is also Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Policy at Liverpool Hope University where he has been a teacher and researcher for over 35 years. He is a past Chair and Executive Board Member of the European Association for Institutional Research, and is current editor of the Routledge peer review journal Tertiary Education & Management - a journal fousing on higher education policy and practice. His research interests have always related to the student experience of higher education, performance indicator measures and the impact of funding mechanisms on higher education provision.

Adam O'Boyle is a Founder and the Executive Director of Student Hubs, as well as the Founder and Executive Director of Hub Commercial Ventures CIC. He graduated from St John's College, Oxford, in 2009, having in 2007 taken a sabbatical year from his degree to found the Oxford Hub. During this time he also worked as a part-time analyst for New Philanthropy Capital. He is a member of the NCVO Leadership 20:20 group and a trustee of Students Supporting Street Kids.

Paul Manners trained as an English teacher then worked for 12 years at the Open University as a producer of TV, radio and multimedia before joining the BBC as an executive producer of a number of national public engagement campaigns. He advises a number of national organisations on learning and engagement, including the National Trust and the Science Museum. As Director of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE), he is responsible for its strategic direction.

By Penelope Jenkins