Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity

ABSTRACT

Universities remain the most important organisations involved in developing knowledge and providing means of social mobility. However, they are facing challenges from new providers facilitated by new technologies. Here, we propose an analysis of three challenges to established understandings of higher education: Digitalisation, Commodification and Precarity. Each of them proceeds through claims to disrupt established hierarchies, representing the existing university system as a form of cartel that embodies the interests of knowledge ‘producers’ against those of ‘consumers’ of knowledge, or the wider publics that fund it. In this way, a particular idea of the university as a ‘bundle of functions’ is challenged, with those functions disaggregated and addressed separately as problems for technical solution. What is at stake, we shall suggest, is both social and epistemological. Social in the sense that the university is re-directed from serving the public good (including conceptions of economic benefit) to serving the market, including that of student investors in their human capital; epistemological in the sense that the conditions of knowledge production are dramatically transformed.

KEYWORDS:

• Audit
• higher education
• marketization
• neo-liberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We refer to England because, after the creation of devolved assemblies in 2000, higher education became a devolved matter. However, there is no separate assembly for England whose legislation is passed by the all-UK Parliament. The recent changes to higher education have implications for Scotland and Wales, but are, in their main aspects, specific to England.

2. Student places were previously assigned to each university when directly funded and a university could not exceed its allotted number of funded places except by incurring a penalty.

3. On the commodification of research, see (Berman 2012; Radder 2010); on the UK Impact agenda see Holmwood (2011).

4. The distinction between the minimum wage, as legislated by the UK government, and the ‘living wage’ as determined by a realistic estimate of the living costs of workers and their families is an object of campaigns at universities under the aegis of the Living Wage Foundation. See: https://www.livingwage.org.uk/what-real-living-wage.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Holmwood

John Holmwood is Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham and Research Professor at the Institute for Science, Technology and Society Studies of the Institute for Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences. He was member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 2014-15. He is editor of A Manifesto for the Public University (Bloomsbury 2011) and co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University.

Chaime Marcuello Servós

Chaime Marcuello Servós teaches Social Work and Social Services in the Department of Psychology and Sociology at the University of Zaragoza. He has been coordinator of the Master’s and Doctorate programmes in the Sociology of Public and Social Policies. He is Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Teaching Innovation Group (GIDID), and co-founder of the Third Sector Social and Economic Studies Group (GESES). He was President of the RC51 on Sociocybernetics (2014-2018) of the International Sociological Association.