I was recently reading this great book of essays edited by Philip Altbach (if you are studying higher education and have never read Altbach, you are should immediately read everything by Altbach) entitled University Reform.  It’s a great read, in particular the introduction, which lists the nine challenges facing higher education systems around the world.  They are:

1. Expansion of enrolments
2. University-society relations
3. Student activism and unrest
4. The need for greater “relevance” in curriculum.
5. Technology of instruction
6. Financial constraints
7. University governance
8. The changing role of universities
9. The “politicization of the university”

Some of these nine challenges overlap a bit (for instance, “relevance” and “the changing role”) and others are linked closely (growing enrolments, financial constraints, and technology of instruction).  And some of these areas (enrolment growth, student activism) are more prevalent in some countries than others.  But as a list of things that global higher education contends with, it’s remarkably comprehensive.

Did I mention the book was published in 1973?  

This suggests higher education isn’t really that complicated a policy field.  Genuinely “new” issues in the system are rare.  It’s usually the same patterns repeated.  The humanities have been “in crisis” for about as long as I have been alive, which makes me think that crisis in in fact its natural state.  I’ve been to well over two hundred universities in about three dozen countries, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and literally every single one describes itself as “under-funded”, which suggests that this too might be more feature than bug. 

I think you can probably boil down Altbach’s nine points into three slightly lengthier axioms. I use the term “university” here, but these axioms generally apply to colleges and polytechnics as well.

• Governments think that universities are creatures of the state and exist to make the state (or at least, the economy) stronger; faculty think that universities are holding entities for local branches of their specific academic disciplines.  This difference creates a fundamental divergence of opinion about the ideal curricula and range of programs offered.

•  University costs are always rising, either because of increasing enrolments or because universities are like beagles, with no real internal mechanism to stop eating.  Governments cannot cover these costs infinitely, and so they either put clamps on demand (numbers controls/numerus clausus systems), clamps on spending (which require cost-saving measures), or allow private funds (tuition) to make up the difference.  All university funding debates confront this three-sided tension.

• Universities are institutions with both real and symbolic resources.  Politics determine the nature of the institutions, safeguard their operations, and/or control them, both financially and symbolically.  Administrators, students, staff (academic and otherwise), governments and the public all have legitimate interests in deciding how these resources are deployed.  This makes the university a site of multiple, overlapping contesting interests in perpetual tension.

No matter where you are in the world, university politics is fundamentally about these three tensions; for colleges and college-like organizations, it’s mostly just #2 and #3 – #1 doesn’t apply in quite the same way.   Time and space will vary the specifics of the three tensions, particularly #3, where the array of forces can be very different depending on different legal and academic traditions, as well as the current state of society, but in a very real sense it’s all the same thing. 

In turn what this means is that there are only two criteria for being a good higher education consultant: longevity and pattern recognition.  That’s not to say that every set of problems aren’t unique: but they do rhyme.

Apart from the intro, most of the specifics of this particular book are kind of ephemeral: even though all the chapters are of historical interest, I doubt very many people will care much any more about the difficulties of expansion and reform on India and Nigeria in the 1960s.  That said though, the chapter on France after 1968 and the loi Faure is spectacular and I wish everyone could read it.  Pre-1968, every university in France had the same five faculties; post-1968 the government allowed professors to set up their own new “departments,” in the belief that this would be a huge step towards interdisciplinarity.  The result was that 115 large and closed faculties were replaced with 720 even more narrowly focused but equally closed groups.  It’s a genuinely spectacular example of how an academic oligarchy can work if left to its own devices. 

Anyways: to understand higher education today, it helps to understand history (and, of course, to read six decades or so of Phil’s output).  Perspective always helps.