Bully U: central planning and higher education.

• Author: Tucker, Aviezer
• Position: REFLECTIONS - Essay

The self-governing large public university that combines research with teaching and is financed but not managed by the state has come under increasing criticism recently. The university model that Wilhelm von Humboldt pioneered in Berlin two centuries ago has arguably exhausted itself. Lifetime tenure, lack of financial accountability, and autonomy from the state have been blamed for rent-seeking behavior; resistance to innovation, change, and new ideas; xenophobia; intellectual and social inbreeding; dogmatic homogenization of opinions; low standards of customer service; lack of cost effectiveness; and resistance to supplying rising student demand (Tucker 2000; Burris 2004; Klein and Stern 2009)

The shortcomings of self-governing public universities have been particularly apparent in parts of Europe where public universities do not have to compete with private universities. In some European countries, such as Norway and France, private institutions of higher education are legally banned from calling themselves "universities" and from awarding academic degrees. As Michael Dobbins put its, "Instead of Humboldt's ideas of unfettered scholarly inquiry, academic self-governing models have frequently become synonymous with the deterioration of teaching, mass bureaucratization, and distrust between the state, universities, and society" (2011, 40). As a consequence of this policy, almost all the best universities in the world are in the United States.

European governments and bureaucrats have feared that one of the factors that contributes to the decline in their economic competitiveness is their inferior universities. Politicians and bureaucrats have wanted to increase the proportion of university graduates in the population to increase the competitiveness of their workforce (Dobbins 2011). Like central planners in general, they have measured their success by the quantity of what they produce rather than by its quality, in part because without a market and its pricing mechanism only quantity can be measured.

For the planned economic results, universities had to reorient and restructure from producing research and offering theoretical, scientific, and moral education to producing large numbers of vocationally trained graduates who can get good jobs and pay taxes that the civil servants will then spend. Some basic research may still be necessary, so the central planners in the Ministry of Education designate a few research-intensive universities or academies of science to carry on research, but most universities are in the process of becoming cheap vocational schools. The vocational focus of higher education implies the centrally planned expansion of vocational programs such as football management and marketing "science" and the elimination or radical reduction of theoretical fields such as classics, history of science, and philosophy. More challenging disciplines and subdisciplines that have higher rates of student attrition and lower rates of graduation, most notably foreign languages and subfields that require quantitative or formal skills, are under pressure to be eliminated from universities altogether. Languages are hit twice, first because they appear nonvocational to provincial managers who work for the state and do not quite understand the significance of languages in a globalizing world and second because they are challenging for monolingual, equally provincial students, who fail language courses more than other courses.

This curriculum shuffling is central planning in its self-contradictory essence, as one policy undermines the other: one hand of the central government wishes to turn universities into vocational schools by teaching students skills that are in demand, but the other planning hand wishes to increase the number of graduating students, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of students who enroll, by dumbing down the quality of education in exactly those skills that are most transferable and vocationally useful--languages and quantitative skills. The central planners have been worried that their countries are losing their competitiveness because their universities cannot match the quality of the great U.S. research universities, so they attempt to limit and concentrate research and dumb down the level of mass education. Faculty members, regardless of their intellectual capacity to update their knowledge of their fields and conduct research to expand knowledge, do not have the institutional resources, time, and incentives to do so. The limited holdings of continental European academic libraries in countries such as Austria and Italy severely curb the potential for offering updated contemporary education, let alone for conducting research. European scientists are in a worse condition than scholars in the humanities or social sciences because the latter can try to get the books and articles on their own and find time to be creative, but empirical scientists cannot innovate without laboratories and instruments.

Narrow, vocational education without research has been advocated as a moneysaving policy. The central planners sometimes formulate the case for vandalizing research as a case for education. They argue that academics should concentrate on serving their students through teaching rather than on using public funds for their personal research interests. In the context of central planning, such ideas never remain on an ideal level; they imply the construction of bureaucratic hierarchies with vested interests in their implementation. Concentration on teaching can be more expensive than financing research when it implies the installation of a pedagogic bureaucracy in charge of training, evaluation, retraining, evaluation of the evaluation and the training, and development of new training modules and new forms of evaluation that require training in them, and so on. In comparison with the traditional Humboldtian apprenticeship system, where graduate students train as their teachers' assistants, the centrally planned teaching university wastes colossal resources on formally training academics as teachers. More significant, the bivalent assumption that scarce time can be used either for research or for teaching is false. Teaching without research quickly becomes outdated and is uncreative and unimaginative; the students memorize data but do not learn how to produce knowledge and how to innovate. Research without the need to explain and systematize results and methods for students remains in large part a means of accumulating only private, underdeveloped insight.

Narrow vocational training actually creates unemployment. Overspecialized vocational training, typical of the Soviet model of higher education, produces workers who can do only one thing. When technology advances or production moves elsewhere, they are unprepared for alternatives. A flexible, nonvocational general training can be more conducive to obtaining employment in the long run. American liberal arts colleges are not known for producing unemployed graduates; had that been the case, their tuition fees would have plummeted, or they would have gone bankrupt.

Central planners attempt to match the education they offer with the requirements of large local employers. The reasoning is simple: if the primary goal of higher education is employable graduates, higher education should adjust its curriculum to the requirements of the largest employers. The corporations will tell the public universities what kinds of specialists they need, the universities will produce them, and the graduates will have an excellent chance to work for the companies. The state will collect and spend taxes, and the corporations will save on the costs of training new employees. However, the interests of the big corporations are not identical to those of students and workers. Corporations prefer to receive welfare from the public purse to save on their training expenses; they prefer highly specialized workers who can start work immediately and cannot change jobs easily. Workers who are overspecialized cannot find alternative jobs easily and therefore occupy a weak negotiation position. If they lose their job when the company collapses or contracts, they have a limited set of skills to offer other employers. Any specific set of skills becomes obsolete sooner or later.

The civil servants who consult with the managers of large corporations do not consider small businesses, which actually create more jobs than big business, because their own career aspirations and prospects may include joining the vast bureaucracy of a large corporation, but not the founding of a small business.

Managerialism

It is difficult if not impossible to force reforms on autonomous, self-governing, and therefore conservative institutions. Therefore, the general trend in many European countries in the past couple of decades has been for central planners in ministries of education to abolish academic self-governance, the autonomy of departments, whole departments, tenure, and academic freedom (Dobbins 2011), replacing the Humboldtian model of the university with a managerial model that resembles the late Soviet model of industry during the Brezhnev era. The Soviet state set production targets and quotas. The "Red" managers had considerable local powers and autonomy and were assessed mostly according to their fulfillment of these targets. The Red managers used their powers and autonomy to serve their own interests, mostly through corruption.

The new "Brezhnev" managerial academic model was pioneered and has been most developed in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years. Self-government, autonomy, departments, tenure, and academic freedom have been gradually abolished there (Grafton 2010; Pears 2010; Head 2011). Some European countries, such as Germany and Italy, retain aspects of their traditionally Humboldtian higher education, but the general trend, encouraged by the European...