The new public university by John Brewer

I attended a very interesting lecture recently. I’d like to share it with you.

Professor Michael Burawoy, Professor of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley, globally known and rightly celebrated for his challenge to the discipline to establish ‘public sociology’, has applied his ideas to the problems facing universities in the neo-liberal era. At an Academy Discourse in the Royal Irish Academy on Thursday 13th January to mark the 10th anniversary of the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, he delivered a lecture entitled ‘University in Crisis: A Public Sociology Response’. This is an issue dear to Burawoy’s heart. As Vice President for National Associations and now President of the International Sociological Association he initiated a blog ‘Universities in Crisis’ with over thirty reports from 35 countries (http://www.isa-sociology.org/universities-in-crisis) and he has spoken on the topic in other countries, including in South Africa in April 2010. What began as an analysis of his own university, Berkeley, and its transformation under budget cuts, has widened to be an analysis of most universities in most countries: China and Brazil are the major exceptions he notes. Burawoy has taken the opportunity of the world-wide university crisis to rethink the meaning of the university and to redefine the meaning of the public university; and in such a way as to reinforce the centrality of public sociology as an approach to the discipline and as a way of thinking about global issues.

He used public sociology to analyse the crisis as well as define the solution. The crisis is one which most people working in universities will recognise. The solution is likely to be more controversial, changing the meaning, as it does, of what a public university is about: no longer public in finance but in the ethos and focus of its teaching and research and in its direct participation with global civil society in engaging with the global issues facing the future of humankind.

The university crisis manifests itself in the commodification of knowledge, the marketization of the university and enhanced regulation of the whole higher education process. One of the paradoxes that mark this moment is the withdrawal of public funding and the simultaneous increase in public regulation: governments pay for less but intervene more and more. This gives us two forms of neo-liberal university, as he calls it: the market model, associated with the USA, with a decline in state funding and increased privatisation, and the regulatory model, associated with the UK, a form of Sovietisation of higher education, with the emphasis on regulation, targets, accountability and efficiency. The peculiarly British form of the university crisis has recently combined privatisation and regulation.

Both models involve the degradation of the university. However, this is an opportunity as well as a threat. In their moment of most ruin, universities can be transformed in positive directions.

Professor Burawoy sees an alternative model: the public university, where universities engage in a form of deliberative democracy to participate with civil society to produce reflexive knowledge. This idea involves a dramatic shift in what people in Ireland and the UK understand by the public university.

Two questions are deployed – knowledge for whom and knowledge for what – to deliver a four-fold typology: ‘for whom’ distinguishes between academic and extra-academic audiences, ‘for what’, either instrumental or reflexive knowledge. A public university deploys reflexive knowledge to speak to and with extra-academic audiences about global and local issues in a way that critiques these issues and the policy responses of governments and other academics as well as seeks to tackle challenges together with civil society and in public. It is publicly accountable, but in a deliberative democratic way to local publics, and engages with various publics rather than simply with itself in the ivory tower or narrowly with policy-makers bent on utilitarian notions of the value of universities.

The alternative to degradation, he said, is ‘to seize this opportunity, exploit the spaces for deliberation, call upon the state to honour its commitments, open up debate both within and outside the academy, a debate about the meaning of the public university’.

There is a challenge here, I think, not only to what we understand as the public university now, but to the role of social science within it. More on that anon.

An earlier version of his talk can be found at: http://publicsphere.ssrc.org/burawoy-a-new-vision-of-the-public-university/

John Brewer, BSA President