ABSTRACT
I have written about the political philosophy of universities and higher education. The argument is not so much to do with issues of distributive justice, but about how public policies and institutions shape people and culture and so change the contours of democracy. I think the argument is an urgent one because in many ways it is being made too late – once a tradition is gone it can rarely be recaptured: universities and higher education provide a public benefit by enriching democracy through a process of civilisation. Maybe it is not too late for other countries to heed the warning, and maybe it is not too late for policy-makers in Britain to reconsider their market system. Markets are highly differentiated but they do tend to require aggressive sales techniques, especially, perhaps, at the lower end of the market. If people within universities are rewarded through self-promotion, through ‘entrepreneurial’ activities, and the hierarchy stretches too far, then the capacity for civilising begins to break down. I think this is a seminal form of corruption that then engenders subsequent corrosion of civility in other institutions. Education is such a porous concept that it has come to serve as an ideal political tool: offering up the possibility of meritocracy, or social mobility, or elitism, or increased productivity, or social justice, or effective role allocation, or the development of good character. Much like the term ‘democracy’, education is all things to all politicians, while those students, teachers, researchers and managers are buffeted from pillar to post. Its porous character enables policy-makers and vested interests (some of whom may also be policy-makers) to equivocate over the category of good to which education most properly belongs. For instance, empirical research on earning differentials between graduates and non-graduates has supported the claim that higher education mostly benefits the individual graduate and, as such, must be a private good. If higher education is a private investment good, then it follows that individual graduates should bear the costs. ‘Why should dinner ladies pay for the degrees of university graduates?’ was the politician’s populist refrain when justifying the introduction of tuition fees in England. But already in this story there is sleight of hand. Public goods are not defined as goods which don’t confer any benefit on the private individual. Think of some paradigm example of a public good (even on Paul Samuelson’s classic, narrow definition),
non-excludable and non-rivalrous, like a street lamp. When the street lamp lights up the darkened alley it obviously brings me benefit as I amble home late at night, but this is not to say that the street lamp becomes a private good. This book is an attempt to shed some light on higher education and universities and what has happened to the academic ethic in recent decades. In around 1769 Denis Diderot wrote a short story called ‘Regrets on my Old Dressing Gown’. The story is simple. A man gets a fancy new dressing gown. He’s very pleased with it. But his new dressing gown starts to make his other possessions look rather shabby. So he replaces all his old things with shiny new things. Then he gets some more new stuff. This is not Calvino’s fable about the mountain of waste that is hidden in plain sight of conspicuous consumption, but rather that before he knows what’s happened, the dressing gown’s owner has a whole new group of friends round at his house looking at his newly acquired works of art and it begins to dawn on him that he no longer knows anybody and he has become a different person.
