Universities are routinely described as public goods. But it is remarkable how little the phrase still tends to be interrogated even though, as the vast literature in economics shows, there are genuine problems of definition.
That will not do. I was stimulated to think about this issue again after reading a recent column by the indomitable Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. For, as Wolf points out, public goods are “the building blocks of civilization.” As he also points out, the challenge of supplying public goods “could be the defining story of the century.” Yet at the moment, one of the most central of public goods, higher education, seems to be coming under threat. There is agreement amongst most commentators that markets cannot do the job of supplying public goods like higher education on their own but also that states cannot fill out the whole field either, not least because the number and scale of public goods has increased markedly. But after that, the spectrum of opinion is very wide, partly based upon ideological grounds and partly based upon grounds of what actually works in practice.
The reason that the spectrum is so wide partly depends on what is counted as the public. Nowadays, many commentators would agree with the premise that the public does not exist in the abstract but arises out of matters of concern: there are publics rather than one public. But such an argument is a particularly fraught one for universities. As Michael Kennedy has brilliantly argued in a recent book edited by Diana Rhoten and Craig Calhoun, Knowledge Matters: The Public Mission of the Research University, making arguments concerning why university resources should be devoted to particular publics in compelling and general terms is often very difficult and can instead be seen by some constituencies as an implicit politicization of the university. There is no explicit method for determining which publics universities should serve, although they clearly serve more and more of them.
Perhaps the argument is easier to mount if universities are thought of as global public goods serving a global civil society, both notions on which there is growing literature: a cosmopolitan ethics (with all of its undoubted problems) gives credence to the idea that universities are there to facilitate the flow of information and ideas worldwide and to cultivate global citizens in ways which could never be achieved simply by private provision.
But, as Kennedy argues, this argument is not without its difficulties too. There is an implicit politics of recognition to be surmounted, of course. But there is also the very practical issue of whether the university can ever transcend the proximate publics of its national foundations, an issue which is currently being worked out on the ground, so to speak. In the end, Kennedy argues that universities main duty must be to inculcate the values that they hold dear as a community into more or less proximate public discourses: we need to “ask how university work itself informs the qualities of public life with the values that motivate scholarship.” To judge by the current state of affairs, that remains an unfinished task which requires more and more forms of engagement if it is to ever succeed.
