ABSTRACT
Higher education institutions and state-financed public universities in recent years have been encouraged through various policy mechanisms to become more responsive both to market and government priorities. Many researchers have indicated and illustrated that the shift from public to private good has challenged more classical academic values as well as the autonomy of higher education. In this chapter we provide an overview of past, present and future attempts to define and use the concept of public good especially in relation to private good. We present a chain of arguments on the need to establish communicative reason creating a rationale for deliberative communication that will strengthen public good. We anticipate that communicative rationality will enable academics to be more conscious and articulate morally and politically about the role of higher education. Such an approach, we argue, will cultivate deliberative attitudes and virtues as means of promoting public good.
