Chair Talk #8 The Point of Public Higher Education
The Point of Public Higher Education
For much of the history of higher education it has been viewed as both a private and public good. On the one hand, those who go to university benefit directly, in a variety of ways. On the other, we all benefit from a more highly educated citizenry, again in a number of ways. A focus on the public good allowed our Land Grant and public research institutions to lead the way in making the United States the economic and industrial powerhouse that it became in the mid to late 20th century.
Recent decades have seen a shift in emphasis towards the private side of the equation, which for various reasons many in the academy accepted. According to this narrative, the primary purpose of higher education is to better one’s employment opportunities. While this is indeed an important outcome of attending university, it was a mistake to acquiesce to the notion that attending to “work-force needs” should be the primary purpose of higher education. Taking this approach has not increased public support for higher education, as its proponents had hoped; instead it has led to the idea that public universities should shift away from their historical focus on serving the public. Further, a focus on private gain provides the justification for substantial increases in tuition – those who benefit should after all pay the associated costs.
All this sounds like a recipe for turning our public universities into high-end vocational schools. We certainly need such institutions, but public research and Land Grant institutions also need to speak to the quality of lives that our citizens lead now and into the future. One of the consequences of an undue emphasis on economic factors in driving people’s lives is that scholarship dealing with non-economic domains of the human experience is undervalued – the arts and humanities get even shorter shrift in this world, to the detriment of all of us, but mostly our students, who are deprived of the opportunity to acquire knowledge that could serve them in good stead down the long and winding road that is actual life.
The shift in emphasis from “public” to “private” good as applied to higher education is part of a broader shift in society along the same lines, hence cannot be reversed without taking into account these broader societal trends. But societies and narratives do change, and we must find a way to re-focus on the narrative that has driven public universities for much of their history: namely, that public universities such as the UA provide the foundation for a better life for both individuals and the broader communities they constitute. They serve both private and public needs, and they require the support of both.
Chair of the Faculty Lynn Nadel