The private take over of education

The ongoing student and faculty demonstrations in the US and the UK are in large part a battle against the privatisation and commercialisation of the education system.

Corporations, trade and industry are increasingly investing in the institutions of education systems. Many students are unhappy about the use of public infrastructure by private agendas.

DCU Professor Helena Sheehan says that Ireland may not be far behind: “There’s a privatisation by stealth going on already, within our universities, within our whole public sector. There’s a lack of respect for the public sector and for doing things for the public good, as opposed to profit.”

“There’s a problem with the private sector parasiting on the public sector, in a way that’s becoming increasingly objectionable. They give money to universities, they give grants – but they use a whole infrastructure that’s been publicly funded”.

In 2003, the European Network of Education Councils (EUNEC) held a conference to discuss the desirability of the commercialisation of education.

EUNEC subsequently published a report, which said: “In various countries substantial cuts in (higher) education budgets, have driven institutions for higher education to the market. By offering education services to the industry… they are trying to raise their budgets”.

This is happening in our university. In a blog entry last month, DCU president von Prondzynski calculated that over the last ten years, state funding for each student (allowing for inflation) has declined by about 50%.

He offered two possible solutions. The reintroduction of student fees, or increased commercialisation: “If the current refusal to face up to the issues continues, then universities will need to see education as only part of the core mission, and they will need to commercialise aggressively in order to open up other revenues.”

But the EUNEC conference report found that “the effects of market forces within education do not point unequivocally in the direction of the superiority or inferiority of educational systems in which market forces dominate.”

Professor Sheehan has warned of the dangers of the commercialisation of universities in the past. In 2006, she publicly debated Von Prondzynski on the issue. But she says that while the debate served to provoke discussion and articulate concern, there has been little positive change.

In the previous year (2005), the European University Association (EUA) carried out an institutional evaluation at DCU. The report noted that “the apparent lack of communication about the research strategy and ongoing developments of the Faculties (is) raising some concern among the academic community.”

“I think research is being driven too much by research funding”, says Sheehan. “It’s a normal part of any academic’s job to do research. But immediately if you talk about research these days, it’s judged by the amount of funding you’re bringing in.”

Von Prondzynski noted recently in a letter to the Phoenix, DCU has “topped the list for research income in Irish universities”.

But part of the problem is that certain disciplines – generally the sciences – attract the preponderance of investments. Biotechnology, chemistry and physics are routinely the top schools for research income.

Sheehan fears that the onset of market priorities has led to certain disciplines being de-emphasised or downgraded. She points to the lack of a history department, philosophy department, or literature department at DCU: “These areas of knowledge, globally, are under threat. They’re being drastically de-emphasised, and universities are being reduced to a series of market-oriented niche areas. The university agenda has become too narrowly aligned to the exact needs of the market.”

She adds: “There’s a lot more funding for applied science than philosophy and history. But also, it’s the way the curriculum is devised. It’s right across every facet of academe that the emphasis on things like IT and Biotechnology is up and the emphasis on things like history and philosophy is down.”

The 2005 EUA report acknowledged “the recognized tradition in DCU of cooperation with industry” and the university’s “network of relations with industrial partners”. It also found that “the university appears to be considered by companies as willing to engage with industry, happy to collaborate and not trying to dictate the fields of research.”

But who should dictate the public research agenda, if not the university? Private industry? Many students believe that private economic interests should have little or no role in dictating how universities operate.

Few people aspire to a system where the quality of education would be determined by the perceived profitability of courses. There is a worry of a shift towards ‘assembly-line’ education, whereby degrees exist with the simple aim of producing new cogs for the marketplace.

Modern discourse in Irish society stresses the need for a knowledge-based economy, but students must be wary of becoming simply instruments of corporations. Our universities should have purposes beyond equipping people with the skills needed for the labour force.

Were the market’s role in universities to increase significantly, what effect might it have on the quality and accessibility of education? Sheehan’s position is not absolutist – she sees a place for some degree of commercialization: “I’m not against any kind of role for the market – we want our students to be able to get real jobs. I just think there isn’t enough scrutiny about what is for the public good versus what will enhance private profit.”

Marketisation manifests itself in other ways. For example, since the installation of the self-checkout machines in the library, students are issued with a docket for borrowed books. Printed on the docket where one might expect the word ‘student’ or ‘library member’, is instead, the word ‘customer’.

This is likely a happenstance feature of the software, but it provokes some thought. Are we the students of our university or its customers? Are degree courses merely a bought-and-paid for service?

Sheehan too recognises a modern tendency to “talk about students as though they were customers.”

“It’s a symptom of the marketisation that I really find objectionable. It commmodifies knowledge, it commodifies relationships between teachers and students, and between the institution as a whole.”