The last decade or so has seen enormous changes in world politics. It’s also seen some major changes the way governments relate to higher education, particularly in the anglosphere. For many, it’s been a polycrisis on top of a polycrisis – a multi-directional series of attacks on and challenges to the public standing of higher education at the exact moment when the socio-political underpinnings of the entire post-war settlement seems to be crumbling.
Sounds like a pretty good subject for a book, doesn’t it?
Returning today as my guest is Simon Marginson. He’s Emeritus Professor of Education at Oxford University, and the author of a new book entitled Global Higher Education in Times of Upheaval: on Common Goods, Geopolitics and Decolonization. The book covers pretty much everything – the rise of right-nationalism, the scientific rise of China, neoliberalism, neocolonialism – and how it has all created both uncertainty and in a few cases promise. It was a good interview, with one of the giants in the global study of higher education: Simon laid out with skill the case for higher education systems which are both global in outlook and oriented towards the common (not the public) good, and I got to ask him a pointed question or two about who exactly is supposed to fund the common good. I hope you enjoy it.
And without further ado, let’s turn it over to Simon.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.20 | Higher Education Beyond the Public Good
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Hi Simon. I wanted to start with the title of your book. You talk about times of upheaval, and I must admit, when I first saw it, I thought maybe you were talking about Trump, Trump Two, COVID in between. But that’s not really what you’re talking about, right? You’re talking about a much longer span of time — a much more enduring upheaval. When does your time of trouble start?
Simon Marginson (SM): I think it does start in the mid-2010s. I think there’s a real sea change at that point. Now, you can do what many people do and trace that sea change back to earlier tendencies, and I’m sure that’s all true. But we start to see the world shifting decisively with Brexit in the UK, with Trump’s election — with his celebration of the uneducated.
And it takes five or six years for that to really manifest: a series of crises and problems, things like the China Initiative in the U.S., and then, of course, the assault on universities in 2025. But also issues around higher education in Europe — for example, Central European University being forced out of Hungary.
So it takes a while for it all to settle into a new pattern, if you like. My feeling is that before the 2010s, we had the neoliberal period, which is basically the whole of our working lifetimes. I don’t think the university as an institution was fundamentally destabilized by neoliberalism.
There were issues and questions that arose that were difficult to resolve in that period: how much higher education is really about the public good anymore; whether users should pay for everything — and in some jurisdictions they do, or most of it anyway; whether employability becomes the sole objective of higher education, and so on. Those issues emerged in the neoliberal period.
But the university retained its autonomy, conditioned and regulated, and maybe more corporate than before. And, of course, the American university had been corporate in many ways for much longer. Academic freedom basically survived. And I suppose the core point is that the teaching, learning, and research processes inherited from the medieval European university and from Humboldt in the nineteenth century remained intact under neoliberalism.
That core is now in question. The purpose of the university is now in question, I think, in a new way.
AU: The book is split into two halves. One is called Sovereign Individualism and the Common Good in Higher Education, and part two is called Sovereign Nationalism, Geopolitics, and Decolonization. It feels a bit like two books in one. What’s the thread that draws those two pieces together?
SM: I thought a lot about this, as you can imagine. Biographically, you could say it reflects my own movement over the course of my career — from a national policy framework into global and international issues. But I also think it reflects the work we did as a group across ten countries on the public good role of higher education, which is the work that runs through part one.
We really reached a point at the end of that project where we found that the public good role of higher education was intact — quite intact — in some jurisdictions; troubled in others, particularly those more influenced by neoliberal ideas; and had been shot to pieces in the U.S. and the U.K., and was in serious trouble in Australia. I’ll come to Canada later, because I think we’ll probably have that discussion during the course of this interview.
By the end of the public good project, it looked to me like there was nothing much we could do to retrieve the public good role of higher education in the U.K. and the U.S. The state framework of regulation had decisively shifted into pure economism, if you like — the idea that the higher education system has to deliver for capital, and that is its sole rationale. Anything outside that is treated as inefficiency. And I couldn’t see, at the end of our project, any way out of that.
So I thought: how do we rethink the problem? And that meant going outside the box. Going outside the box meant going to the global level, and to non-Anglophone jurisdictions — the Nordic world is one part of that, East Asia is another — where the problem of collectivity and individuality is handled better, in my opinion, in many ways.
In those contexts, the public contribution and the common good contribution of universities is very much intact. Then you start to ask: how do we bring that kind of sensibility back to bear on Anglophone jurisdictions? They’re not going to change their minds just because Finland or Japan or Singapore does something differently. But they might be relativized and rethought in a global framework — what is the global common good? How will the world cooperate in the future? How can higher education contribute to world-building in a constructive way, one that respects both unity and diversity?
That’s where I went. I said, look, we can’t deal with this problem solely within our nation states — we’re not going to solve it there. Private capital is too deeply entrenched as the core organizing principle of these societies. But in other societies, it’s better. So we need to bring our societies into relationship with others, in a common project of building the world as — if you like — a better place: one that can address environmental problems, one that can respond to the challenges facing humanity, and one that brings higher education to bear on those challenges.
So I jumped from a pragmatic acknowledgement that we’d hit a wall in trying to retain a social democratic approach to education in the Anglophone world, to saying: okay, let’s look at what a common good approach means at the world level. That might be the way forward.
AU: You draw this contrast between Anglophone higher education and its neoliberal, individualist approach, and you contrast that with other parts of the world. But I look at places like Japan, Korea, or Taiwan, where 80 percent of the system is private. That’s true in big chunks of Latin America too. Even India is pretty cutthroat about some of this stuff.
Do you think the Anglophone world is really that different from other places? How strong a distinction can we really make between Anglophone systems and the rest?
SM: That’s a very good question, and it needs a complex answer, probably more than we have time for. I wouldn’t say that all societies are better than my own society at all. There are strengths in the Anglophone world — not just military and economic strengths, but cultural strengths as well, and intellectual strengths too — and major contributions to the world as a result of that.
But if you look almost everywhere else, the family is a bit stronger than it is in the English-speaking world. That’s one symptom of what you might call the “me, me, me” high individualism that we’ve made a virtue of. The second thing is the capacity of private capital to accumulate. And I’ll admit, sometimes you look at India and say, well, it’s a little bit like the Anglophone world in that regard, isn’t it?
But there are a lot of balances in India too — from religion to kinship to regional identities and language, and so on. And in Japan, for example, while there are some very rich people, there isn’t the same sense of evacuation of the social. I hesitate to go here, but the Epstein phenomenon — what concerns people there is this idea of rich people doing whatever they want, knowing they don’t have to obey the rules.
That kind of thing is harder to do outside the English-speaking world. It might be easier in Russia, perhaps, but it’s certainly harder in China, Japan, or Korea, where collective values are stronger. There’s more morality in the system, and people are policed by that — informally and formally.
So yes, I do think there’s less social responsibility in our neck of the woods than there is almost anywhere else.
AU: You take aim at neoliberalism in this book for a number of, I think, quite justified reasons. You talk about it blocking the formation of collective goods and distorting the cultural framework of education. But let me make the contrary case.
Neoliberalism is actually really good at incentivizing universities to accept students, right? It puts them in a position where they push for efficiency and they push for more money. If we hadn’t had a neoliberal system over the last 30 or 40 years, I would argue that in much of the West we’d still have a university system — and in many ways it might be better — but it would also be smaller and poorer. Is it so bad that the system is larger and richer?
SM: Well, you’ll recall the book we did on high participation systems — the 2018 book, which you very kindly reviewed, and which I think you liked.
AU: I love that book.
SM: What we found was that there are a lot of trajectories, or routes, to high participation systems. One of them is certainly the Brazilian, Indian, and Philippines model of building a huge private sector — partly a for-profit sector — and using that to drive infrastructure expansion. It’s hard to imagine, say, Brazil having grown as fast as it has without that, because there hasn’t been a consistent and coherent state policy building infrastructure on the public side.
On the other hand, there’s the Nordic model, or the East European models, which are a weaker version of something similar. The Nordics have certainly proven that you can have a high participation system, at a high level of quality, that is publicly funded. It is possible. Of course, the price is higher taxation overall. You generally have a wage structure that is less elongated than in the Anglophone world — people aren’t getting rich in the same way they are in other parts of the West — and you still have a welfare state.
So the welfare state model, underpinned by taxation and a strong growth economy, can do it.
I take the point that in the Anglophone context, getting the student to pay — or to pay a large part of the cost, as in Australia, the UK, and the U.S. — has underpinned much of the growth. But the U.S. is an interesting case, isn’t it? If you look at the public sector, for in-state students, public institutions are still relatively cheap compared to most of the Anglophone world.
So the U.S. achieved a very high level of participation — it’s a wealthy country, of course — despite a shrinking tax base at the state level.
AU: One thing in the book that might surprise some people is the amount of time you spend making distinctions between the public good — or public goods — and the common good. What distinction are you making here, and why is it important when thinking about higher education?
SM: I think the public good has been the touchstone — the focus, the lens, if you like — for talking about the larger social and collective contributions that higher education makes. It’s been under that heading of the public good. And the reason we have this nomenclature, in part, is because of the great example of building a massive higher education system in the United States.
The U.S. was so far ahead of the world in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. The great expansion of higher education participation to around 50 percent — well in advance of the rest of the world — was carried by the growth of public institutions. These were largely publicly funded and nested in civil society, with a civic mission and strong economic and social functions associated with them. The land-grant model was a great driver of this in many ways.
That expansion was very much characterized as a public good mission: higher education providing private benefits for many, many people. The wheels eventually fell off in the U.S., but that notion of public education is still associated with the great promise of mass higher education.
The assumption at the peak of that model was that it could be of high quality — nominally high quality — for everyone. That wasn’t fully achievable and wasn’t achieved, but that’s the ideology the word public calls up. And there’s really no other narrative — no other model — of the collective social contribution of universities besides that.
There’s the very simple narrative that universities produce economically useful things: human capital in the form of graduates, and research that can be turned into innovation in industry, adding up to GDP. That’s certainly an enabling argument for the government, but it’s not the great narrative of the public good, is it?
AU: So instead you turn to the common good?
SM: Right — that’s the alternative. But of course, that term comes with baggage. It has a particular history as well. In the West, the idea of the common good comes out of northern Italy and traditions of communal, local cooperation in the provision of public and community services, with support from a central state.
That notion fed into UNESCO’s idea of education as a global common good. It draws on traditions of local democracy, consultation, and central state support enabling local activity. It’s not yet fully clear how the common good idea translates at the national level, or at the global level, but it’s a starting point.
Those of us working with the idea of the common good are now trying to put flesh on it. That’s the work we’re doing.
AU: What struck me is that with a public good, you’ve got governments that can pay for it. It’s not clear to me who pays for a common good, right? Is that the heart of the problem you’re trying to solve?
SM: Yeah, that’s exactly right. The positive side of the public good concept is that it’s linked to the role of government. The government is the one part of society that represents the whole of society and is capable of mobilizing resources.
The fact that neoliberal governments have refused to do that in the way we’ve needed for the past fifty years is what convinces me we need to go somewhere else — rather than the principle itself being wrong.
Part of the problem is that we no longer have broad public support for the idea of the public good role of higher education. That’s partly because that idea has been hollowed out. Perhaps the common good approach allows us to rebuild public support because of the normative resonances of the idea of the common — of collectivity, in a positive and democratic sense.
That might enable us to rebuild the social project: the idea of a community committing to higher education as something that benefits it, and as an instrument for its own betterment and development. The common good might provide a way out of the trap that the public good nomenclature has fallen into.
But then we still face the problem of mobilizing political support to get states to come in behind it.
AU: You spend a lot of time making another distinction — between internationalization and globalization of higher education. Why does this matter?
SM: I think globalization, in the positive sense — and this is another word that’s been rather spoiled by the way it’s been used — is about world-building. It’s about building international cooperation, but more than that, it’s about going beyond the nation state and focusing on the things that all nation states have in common, or should be concerned about.
That includes issues like environmental regulation, and the possibility of some form of political authority beyond the level of the nation state — something that can help coordinate efforts to solve global challenges.
There are already things that are global, in the sense of transcending the nation state. The science system is one example. Scientists working together across borders constitute knowledge — in the natural sciences and the social sciences — largely independently of direct regulation by national governments.
Although, of course, we’re now seeing that this arrangement is quite fragile. It can be pulled back inside the national envelope and turned into a more purely national instrument.
AU: I’m wondering about the practical takeaways from this book. You make, I think, a compelling argument that systems of higher education are not just a long way from producing optimal outcomes, but might actually be systemically incapable of producing those outcomes without some kind of major political or economic revolution.
So what’s your advice to people who want to change the system? If an ambitious new university president came in and said, “This is all terrible — what can I do about it?”, what would you tell them?
SM: The first thing I’d say is that we need to work on ways to remain globally connected and internationally active, at a time when international activity is being viewed with less trust and more suspicion by national governments — some of them anyway, perhaps many of them.
We need to find ways to use our autonomy to maintain those links. Simply keeping international activity going right now has consequences for the world as a whole, not just for higher education — for retaining its epistemic liveliness and effectiveness — but also for ensuring that countries continue talking to each other. Higher education and science are among the key areas where that happens.
If countries stop doing that, or do it less in higher education and science, the world starts to become a set of walls. Business and higher education are probably the most internationalized activities we have, so it’s important to sustain that.
Good presidents already understand this. They focus on it. They value internationalization and see its benefits — whether for prestige-building, knowledge-building, revenue, or other institutional goals. So the challenge is how to retain those international linkages alongside nation states that are increasingly keen to control them. That’s an open challenge, and we’re clearly going to handle it better in some countries than others.
The second thing I’d say is that we have a fundamental problem around defending and advancing the core of our activity — teaching and research immersed in knowledge. That pedagogical and curriculum-based approach, with all the baggage that comes with it — medieval gowns and caps at graduation, organization into academic disciplines, the teaching–research nexus — is now in question in a way it wasn’t before.
I’ve always been very struck by Clark Kerr’s argument that the university is a multiversity — that it doesn’t really have a centre or a single core rationale. But I think that teaching and research grounded in knowledge is, if not the rationale, then the core practical activity.
If that activity doesn’t work — if it doesn’t produce employable graduates — then we really do have a problem. That will determine whether the university as an institution continues, along with all the social contributions it makes.
I don’t think this will be solved by everyone going to a conference and coming up with an idea. It will be solved through good practice in individual institutions — institutions that are well embedded and strong in their own societies, and that develop workable new solutions.
AU: Simon, thanks so much for joining us.
SM: My pleasure, Alex. It was nice to speak to you.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Samantha Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you — our listeners and readers — for joining us. If you have any questions about this episode, or concerns or suggestions for future episodes, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week, when our guest will be Donatella della Porta. She’s a professor of sociology and political science at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and she’ll be talking with us about the wave of youth and student protests around the world over the last twelve months. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
