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Commentary No. 324, Mar. 1, 2012
"Higher Education Under Attack"
For a very long time there
were only a few universities in the world. The total student body in these
institutions was very small. This small group of students was drawn largely
from the upper classes. Attending the university conferred great prestige and
reflected great privilege.
This picture began to
change radically after 1945. The number of universities began to expand
considerably, and the percentage of persons in the age range that attended
universities began to expand. Furthermore, this was not merely a question of expansion
in those countries that had already had universities of note. University
education was launched in a large number of countries that had few or no
university institutions before 1945. Higher education became worldwide.
The pressure for expansion
came from above and below. From above, governments felt an important need for
more university graduates to ensure their capacity to compete in the more
complex technologies that were required in the exploding expansion of the
world-economy. And from below, large numbers of the middle strata and even of
the lower strata of the world's populations were insistent that they have
access to higher education in order to improve considerably their economic and
social prospects.
The expansion of the
universities, which was remarkable in size, was made possible by the enormous
upward expansion of the world-economy after 1945, the biggest in the history of
the modern world-system. There was plenty of money available for the
universities, and they were happy to make use of it.
Of course, this changed
the university systems somewhat. Individual universities became much larger and
began to lose the quality of intimacy that smaller structures provided. The
class composition of the student body, and then of the professorate, evolved.
In many countries, expansion not only meant a reduction in the monopoly of
upper strata persons as students, professors, and administrators, but it often
meant that "minority" groups and women began to have wider access,
which had previously been totally or at least partially denied.
This rosy picture came
into difficulty after about 1970. For one thing, the world-economy entered its
long stagnation. And little by little, the amount of money that universities
received, largely from the states, began to diminish. At the same time, the
costs of university education continued to rise, and the pressures from below
for continued expansion grew even stronger. The story ever since has been that
of the two curves going in opposite directions - less money and increased
expenses.
By the time we arrived at
the twenty-first century, this situation became dire. How have universities
coped? One major way was what we have come to call “privatization.”
Most universities before 1945, and even before 1970, were state institutions.
The one significant exception was the United States, which had a large number
of non-state institutions, most of which had evolved from religiously-based
institutions. But even in these U.S. private institutions, the universities
were run as non-profit structures.
What privatization began
to mean throughout the world was several things: One, there began to be
institutions of higher education that were established as businesses for
profit. Two, public institutions began to seek and obtain money from corporate
donors, which began to intrude in the internal governance of the universities.
And three, universities began to seek patents for work that researchers at the
university had discovered or invented, and thereupon entered as operators in the
economy, that is, as businesses.
In a situation in which
money was scarce, or at least seemed scarce, universities began to transform
themselves into more business-like institutions. This could be seen in two
major ways. The top administrative positions of universities and their faculties,
which had traditionally been occupied by academics, now began to be occupied by
persons whose background was in business and not university life. They raised
the money, but they also began to set the criteria of allocation of the money.
There began to be
evaluations of whole universities and of departments within universities in
terms of their output for the money invested. This might be measured by how
many students wished to pursue particular studies, or how esteemed was the
research output of given universities or departments. Intellectual life was
being judged by pseudo-market criteria. Even student recruitment was being
measured by how much money was brought in via alternative methods of
recruitment.
And, if this weren't
enough, the universities began to come under attack from a basically
anti-intellectual far right current that saw the universities as secular,
anti-religious institutions. The university as a critical institution -
critical of dominant groups and dominant ideologies - had always met with
resistance and repression by the states and the elites. But their powers of
survival had always been rooted in their relative financial autonomy based on
the low real cost of operation. This was the university of yesteryear,
not of today - and tomorrow.
One can write this off as
simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except
that the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus (not of
course the only one) of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is
such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic
transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order. At the moment, the
turmoil within the universities seems no easier to resolve than the turmoil in
the world-economy. And even less attention is being paid to it.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by
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These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on
the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate
headlines but of the long term.]
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