The old joke in higher-education circles is that public colleges and universities have evolved from “state-funded” to “state-supported” to “state-sponsored,” and finally to “state-located.” The joke used to be a mild exaggeration, but in the last decade has become a deadly accurate representation of our situation. It’s no joke; the portion of most universities’ budgets that comes from state allocations has shrunk so dramatically that it constitutes only a minor fraction of most university operating budgets.
Whence comes this massive de-funding of higher education? The reasons are many and varied, but at least part of the underlying cause rests in a fundamental equivocation about the term “good.” We use this term in a number of ways: it can be used adjectivally to describe the merit of a person or thing, as in “Abraham Lincoln was a good man,” or “that was a good apple,” or it can be used as a noun. When used as a noun, it can have two senses. When, for example, economists speak of “goods and services,” by “goods” they intend some tangible item of value that a consumer might wish to purchase. In this sense of the term, a flat-screen TV or a pound of hamburger or an SUV all qualify as “goods,” that is, items that may or may not be purchased depending on the needs or wants of particular consumers. But we also employ the noun “good” in a sense that is closer to its adjectival meaning, namely, to mean “a good thing,” something that is broadly agreed upon as beneficial. Safe drinking water is a “good,” as is clean air, and literacy. Implicit in this categorization is a human community that agrees on the “goodness” of these goods, and indeed, to make that more explicit, one often uses the term “public good.”
The difference between the two senses of “good” is significant. A consumer good is good only insofar as a particular consumer values it. I am free to choose whether or not a carton of chicken livers is good, and I vote on their goodness by dipping into my disposable income and purchasing them—or not. A public good, by contrast, is something whose goodness is a matter of broad consensus, in which all members of a community have a stake, and for which all members of a society pay through taxation.
For over a century, beginning in the later nineteenth century, as colleges and universities began to spring up in the wake of the Morrill Act, and extending through the 1970s, the citizens of the United States clearly adhered to the notion that public higher education was a public good. Taxpayers subsidized state colleges and universities in order to keep tuition low and encourage widespread attendance. The value to a burgeoning economic power of an educated citizenry was patently obvious. In the Cold War environment of the 1950s and 60s, public higher education received another boost as our leaders looked to education as the pathway to achieve and maintain intellectual, and especially scientific, superiority over the Communist bloc.
Since the tax-cutting 1980s, by contrast, we have seen a rapid dissolution of that consensus, and in the last decade the process has only accelerated. As cash-strapped state governments try to deal with budget shortfalls, they are forced to engage in a triage of funding priorities. In all 50 states, higher education is a discretionary budget item, and therefore a prime target for cuts in expenditures. As the burden of paying for higher education has increasingly fallen on students and their families, we have seen a concomitant shift in the perception of what kind of “good” higher education is. Whereas K-12 education is still widely perceived (and enshrined in budgets as) a “public good,” postsecondary education has been relegated to the role of a consumer good: a luxury that should be paid for by the user, who alone benefits from it.
Once higher education takes its place amid the array of consumer goods, it lies defenseless against the logic of the market. Educators find themselves thrust into the odd role of touting their “product” in terms of its tangible benefit to the “consumer,” whether career advancement, income potential, status, or some other marketable quality. Public colleges and universities vie with for-profit corporations to operate in this marketplace, and for both, the financial bottom line is always in focus.
Even those who would defend higher education as a public good find themselves making their arguments on the basis of a narrow view of its social utility, expressing themselves in terms of workforce development, economic stimulus, and global competitiveness. The utilitarianism of the Cold War-era valorization of higher education has evolved into a new utilitarianism.
And here, I think, is where we have gone terribly wrong. For the “good-ness” of higher education has never lain merely in its economic benefit to the individual, nor in its ability to fill a workforce, as important as those considerations are. Rather, the enterprise of higher education has always been fundamentally concerned with nurturing a certain kind of citizen who will contribute to a certain kind of society, one characterized by civil and rational discourse and a commitment to justice and progress. When we reduce education to a commodity we invite its fruits to be employed to serve any end whatsoever. America leads the world in exporting technical prowess; people come from around the world to fill their minds with techne, and we gladly sell it to them. But we do not export the ethical and humanistic frameworks within which technical prowess is inevitably exercised.
Unless and until we recapture and promote a coherent account of why higher education is a public good, we will remain trapped in a world of pure consumerism as the dust of death settles over the once-bright vision of the value of what we do in our colleges and universities.
