A critical exploration of changing definitions of public good in relation to higher education

Abstract

Discussion of the relationship between higher education (HE) and public good can be traced to Kant's argument that universities critically held society to account. Mill, Newman and Arnold suggested knowledge itself was a public good. In the twentieth century, economists argued education could drive national technological progress. More recently the public good of HE has been linked to social justice through increasing social mobility. In this paper I explore how the definition of public good has shifted over time and how UK government HE policies have incorporated these changes. I argue policy shifts have had an impact in altering the social contract between universities and the state. I suggest that current policy and practice is moving universities away from Arendt's notion that educators have a moral and social responsibility to inculcate new generations into the pre-existing knowledge of society and onto more individualised outcomes.

Keywords:

• public good
• knowledge
• individualism
• values
• policy
• society

Higher education (HE) has long been considered a public good. Kant ([1798] 1979) argued universities played a critical role in holding state bodies and the professions to account. Victorian proponents of liberal education suggested knowledge, in and of itself, was a public good. In the twentieth century, economists argued education, as a public good, could drive national technological progress or, through developing human capital, increase individual employability. More recently the public good of HE has been linked to the promotion of social justice through increasing social mobility. The definition of public good in relation to education has shifted over time. In this paper I will, within the context of a broader theoretical and philosophical discussion, explore how government policies in particular have incorporated changed definitions of public good and suggest how such policy shifts may have had an impact upon the HE sector.

I focus upon the example of English HE as a case study as I argue that, specifically in relation to British government HE policy, the definition of public good has, over the course of several decades, moved away from knowledge as a public good in and of itself; to objective knowledge outcomes which can be used to reap a national economic return; and finally to a focus upon social inclusion and social mobility in the form of individual employability, increased earnings and job security. Such changing ideas have practical repercussions in the altered social contract between universities and the state; the longstanding assumption that, in return for autonomy, universities would furnish the state with its cognitive requirements (Delanty 2001, 2) is called into question. In recent years, national government policies have moved from funding HE out of general state revenues on the assumption that universities benefit the public as a whole, to a more individualistic ideology that suggests graduates see financial rewards from their university education and therefore should contribute to its cost. I suggest that current policy and practice is moving universities away from Hannah Arendt's (1954) notion that educators have a moral and social responsibility to inculcate new generations into the pre-existing knowledge of society and onto more individualised outcomes.

Changing definitions of public good

There is a long history to the discussion of the concept of public good in relation to HE. Although he never actually used the term, Kant was perhaps the first to articulate the notion that universities could provide a public good through acting as a critical ally to national governments, the professions and society more broadly. In his book exploring the nature of a university, The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant defines faculties as ‘smaller societies, each comprising the university specialists in one main branch of learning’ ([1798] 1979, 23). He identifies four faculties in the universities of his day; philosophy, theology, medicine and law. For Kant, the philosophy faculty's inherent challenge to law and medicine created more critical, and therefore superior, practitioners. Kant suggests the pursuit of knowledge, which he linked to an Enlightenment concept of empirical truth, formed the basis for this criticality and universities needed freedom from the state in order to best fulfil this role. Kant therefore sees the university as a protector of critical reason. He portrays the philosophy department as being of primary importance to both the university as an institution and the broader pursuit of knowledge as it protected truth and independence from political and clerical authority, ‘it may use its own judgment about what it teaches’ ([1798] 1979, 25). Although philosophy was considered the ‘lower faculty’ Kant considered its fundamental significance lay in its independence from government commands, leaving it free to concern itself with reason and truth which would be of broader social benefit.

In his autobiography, John Stuart Mill ([1873] 1981) explores the relationship between individual happiness and the happiness of society as a whole; in a reformulation of the concept of utilitarianism, he rejects the Benthamite approach of arguing for the individual pursuit of ‘the greatest happiness’ as an end in itself. Instead Mill argues that ‘Those only are happy … who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness’, which he suggests can be found in ‘the happiness of others’ or ‘the public good’ (in Small 2013, 107). Mill was particularly interested in exploring the role of art, and most specifically poetry, in awakening individual sensibilities to what he perceived to be higher-order pleasures. Mill went on to link this redefinition of utilitarianism to education in general and HE in particular, suggesting that a ‘higher level of education brings higher intellectual and aesthetic pleasures within our grasp’ (Small 2013, 123). Ultimately, Mills' arguments for education as a public good are actually arguments for knowledge as an end in itself; knowledge may make us ‘Socrates dissatisfied’, or open our minds to the pleasures of poetry but it serves little practical utility. Echoes of this role for education can be seen in the writing of Mill's near contemporaries, in particular Newman's ([1852] 1959) notion that ‘Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward … ’ (96). Arnold (1904) similarly claimed that ‘The ideal of a general, liberal training is to carry us to a knowledge of ourselves and the world … . The circle of knowledge comprehends both and we should all have some notion, at any rate of the whole circle of knowledge’ (399).

Hannah Arendt further expanded upon the concept of knowledge as the public good of education in her notion that schools and universities play a special role in preserving and transmitting society's accumulated collective knowledge and understanding of the world for future generations. She argues it is because children are born ‘into an already existing world’ that educators have a specific responsibility to pass on society's knowledge ‘even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is’ (1954, 185–86). When the role of education is conceived of in this way it suggests instrumental public good claims may belie a broader intellectual crisis in society's collective sense of which knowledge is sufficiently worth passing on to future generations. Arendt notes, ‘the crisis of authority in education is most closely connected with the crisis of tradition, that is with the crisis in our attitude toward the realm of the past’ (1954, 190; see also Williams 2013, 30 for a fuller exploration of these arguments).

As this paper goes on to explore, the twentieth century saw a growing challenge to arguments that education could be justified in its own terms and that knowledge as an end in itself could be considered a public good. After World War Two the economic definition of public good provided by Paul Samuelson (1954) came to dominate the discourse of HE. Samuelson defined a public good as having non-excludable and non-rivalrous outcomes; being state-funded; and generating externalities in the form of social and public benefits (Desai 2003; Tilak 2008). The integral point of state funding to the definition of public good locates it within a specific historical era which Desai suggests ‘we are about to leave or have even already left’ (2003, 13). When defined in this way, the removal of state funding from HE explicitly challenges the concept of HE as a public good.

Although Samuelson's (1954) definition of a public good has become a corner-stone of subsequent discussion, its applicability to HE is not straight-forward. Contentious issues include: whether the public good is reaped solely by students or by society more broadly; whether the public good is an outcome of HE or emerges within the process of scholarship; and whether the public good is quantifiable or conceptual. In particular, attempts to explore the concept of HE as a public good at a time when state funding is being redirected raise questions about the constitution of the beneficiaries and the nature of the outcomes. Sheehan (1973) differentiated between consumption and investment goods, noting a particular difficulty with demarcating between inherent properties of the good itself versus the use to which a particular good is put (21).

Marginson (2011) draws a similar distinction between public goods and The Public Good, defining public goods as the end product or commodities produced by the HE sector, although noting that they may be intangible and take either collective or individual form. This could include a range of intellectual, social and economic outputs such as a more economically productive workforce; increases in intellectual capacity which led to scientific advance; or knowledge conceived of as a search for truth. Of these, Marginson argues ‘the most important goods produced in higher education are universal knowledge and information’ (2011, 416). The Public Good, on the other hand, Marginson suggests refers to activities, benefits or resources accessible to all and reaped through participation in HE rather than its outcomes. The Public Good, in this form, includes better informed citizens leading to improved democracy and a more inclusive society and knowledge conceived of as an end in itself. It is possible for knowledge to be considered as both public goods and The Public Good, as both an investment and consumption good, depending upon the timescales measured and (the act of gaining knowledge or the knowledge gained) the purpose to which knowledge is put (instrumental or as an end in itself; economic or social).

In the following section, I will explore how government policy documents from the past 50 years redefine the public good of HE away from knowledge towards social and economic outcomes; and from public benefits to more individual gains. Today, public good is most frequently defined in relation to social justice, which, in turn, is considered to emerge from HE providing the conditions for individual social mobility as defined in economic terms. A commitment to widening participation in HE to people from disadvantaged social groups is presented in government discourse as a means of increasing access to the private benefits of HE reaped by graduates which take the form of higher earnings and increased job security. The emergence of this definition of public good will be traced through the ensuing discussion. At this stage it is worth highlighting some potential problems with the direction in which government HE policy and public good have travelled. Current definitions of public good employed in policy documents often seem to be simply the sum of individual, often financial, gains. There is no reference to knowledge in current discussion of public good other than in a very instrumental sense of individual skills for employability. Similarly, there appears to be no role for universities, as institutions, to exercise academic autonomy and freedom by offering a critical account of government in particular, and society more broadly, for the public good.

Public good and the pursuit of knowledge

The links between the Catholic Church and Medieval universities meant that production and transmission of knowledge was inherently linked to a divine concept of truth. When, from the eighteenth century onwards, the religious foundations of knowledge and the concept of scholarship as an act of spiritual devotion were gradually weakened, new forms of authority for knowledge and universities were sought. By the nineteenth century, universities in countries which had experienced the Enlightenment began to repose the search for truth through knowledge as a rational and secular rather than spiritual pursuit. In The Conflict of the Faculties ([1798] 1979), Kant extols the need for a transition from the religious authority of knowledge, to a more secular, rational and empirical source of legitimation. Kant describes the Enlightenment as being, ‘man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance’ ([1784] 2009). Kant here locates the source of reason as lying within man rather than God and as a result he saw the university as a protector of critical reason, with the philosophy faculty playing a crucial role in relation to the rest of the university and society more broadly.

Only very slowly did universities shift allegiance from church to state as a concept of knowledge based upon a secular view of truth emerging from empirical reason rather than faith and belief took hold. Kant argued the capacity to reason, and therefore the source of knowledge, was to be found in the minds of individuals. Knowledge came to be considered autonomous of political and religious influence because it encapsulated an inherent truth based upon the objectivity of reason; Kant argues, ‘Reason is by its nature free and admits of no command to hold something as true’ ([1798] 1979, 29). For Kant then, truth as the essential condition of learning was dependent upon the freedom to reason; increased insight could be gained if man was free to allow his own inner reason to develop. The freedom of the philosophy faculty within the university was therefore imperative to the mission of the whole institution as it meant the higher faculties would be better instructed and lead officials further on to the way of truth.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Durkheim could confidently assert that the capacity for individuals to reason was the unique quality that made people human and this formed the basis for society's collectively held objective knowledge of the world (2008). At this time one form of the public good of HE was assumed to occur through the moral and cultural training of a social elite in preparation for leadership in society. The inherent authority of academic disciplines to have emerged from the medieval university was both moral and intellectual; advanced training in the classics was thought to form both mind and spirit. Up until the beginning of the twentieth century a liberal education comprising primarily disciplines from within the humanities remained ‘unquestioned as the best way of preparing men of the appropriate lineage to rise to positions of power at home and abroad’ (Muller and Young 2014). It could be argued that what occurred in universities as this time, primarily in relation to the transmission and advancement of knowledge, but also in connection with the moral and cultural training of a social elite for leadership in society, was so automatically considered to be of public good it did not need to be explicitly stated. This legacy of the Enlightenment persisted until prior to the Second World War, an era Delanty terms ‘liberal modernity’, when the pursuit and importantly, the nature (or mode) of knowledge with the university was still compatible with the Enlightenment's ideal of truth and the ultimate unity of culture. From this point, the university and its intellectual products began to be perceived as instrumental to a range of national, social, economic and political goals (Delanty 2001, 34).

Public good and the national economy

The experience of the Second World War and especially the capitulation of the German universities to the demands of Nazism lent urgency to funding, expanding and simultaneously maintaining the autonomy of British HE institutions (see Shattock 2012, 10). In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Kantian role of the university as critical ally to both the national government and the professions came to the fore. The autonomy of institutions and the exercise of academic freedom represented a means of maintaining civilisation. Public good was considered to be inherent in the very existence of universities as places of learning and advancing knowledge. In addition, HE was linked to a particular concept of civilisation and considered to serve a civilising influence upon the country (Delanty 2001, 51) which was thought an important counterbalance to the barbarism of the war and a means of preventing such atrocities from happening in the UK.

The British political and cultural elite saw a potential for the universal values expressed through high culture, not just in relation to literature but also in other art forms, to play a role in the creation of a progressive modern society. Sinfield (1997) describes how as part of the post-war welfare settlement, art, music and literature were envisaged as ‘good things’ which should be generally available to all but that this had the effect of enshrining what had been considered elite culture as universal culture (2). Sinfield notes that the problem of defining high culture was not touched upon at this time and was simply assumed. In part, the post-war government sought to exploit high culture in order to promote national unity by incorporating all of society into a shared cultural outlook. Less cynically, there was a non-instrumental belief in access to art being good in and of itself alongside which sat a belief in the educability of British citizens and that, once provided with access to high art and education, people would be able to appreciate and share in the culture of the social elite. This influenced attitudes towards increasing the number of university students overall as indicated in The Robbins Report (1963), and the particular growth of the humanities within universities at this time.

At the same time as HE was considered of national importance for the promotion of culture, an alternative concept of public good also came to the fore. Universities were increasingly expected to play a role in scientific advance and technological development. The 1950 University Grants Committee's A Note on Technology in Universities focused specifically upon the need to harness HE to the development of technology (Shattock 2012, 21). Universities, and the knowledge they produced, were looked upon to ensure Britain's continued standing on the world stage: a fact made particularly important by the growing awareness of the fragility of the British Empire and the need to compensate through industrial progress at home.

In 1963, the economist Baron Lionel Robbins wrote a government-commissioned report on the future of HE in which he argued for the expansion of the sector and, significantly, that people from more diverse social backgrounds with ‘ability and attainment’ should be given the opportunity to study at university level. Robbins argued that there was a need for ‘increased attention to including young men and women from families with scant educational background’, pointing out that working-class ‘grammar-school boys’ may not perform as well at university admission interviews as their middle-class, perhaps privately educated, peers. The Robbins Report came out of a period of relative economic prosperity and social pressure to liberalise opportunities to more people in society. The national prosperity of this time was built upon developments in industry and manufacturing; in 1963 British Prime Minister-elect Harold Wilson made a speech hailing the age of the ‘white heat of technology’. Robbins argued for educational expansion as a means of capitalising upon scientific and technological advance that would in turn have a direct impact upon the national economy and help the UK maintain economic competitiveness.

A first formal declaration that HE will come to be seen as a public good of HE is provided by The Robbins Report (Committee on Higher Education 1963): ‘higher education is so obviously and rightly of greater public concern’ (chap. 2). While there are no such explicit statements to be found in HE policy documents prior to 1963, Robbins' statement of ‘public concern’ did not so much alter what occurred within universities but rather provided a label for the existing reality. The fact that the public good of universities was the subject of explicit discussion for the first time does represent a shift in attitude among the political and cultural elite; there is a perceived need for government ministers to justify expenditure on HE. Robbins' statement that ‘higher education is so obviously and rightly of greater public concern, and so a large proportion of its finance is provided in one way or another from the public purse’ (1963, chap. 2) begins to create a quid pro quo between public funding and economic, intellectual or social returns for the nation. Throughout the 1960s the driving force of increased funding to the HE sector (and a prime motivation for the establishment of the polytechnics) was a belief that the public goods of HE were realised outside of institutions and in the external benefits to the economy or society more broadly, that is, by non-graduates as well as graduates. The focus was on Marginson's concept of public goods as it was the outcomes of HE that were expected to benefit everyone in society. Although Robbins did begin to consider expanding university places ‘for all those who are qualified by ability and attainment’ (1963, chap. 2) and who wished to pursue HE, there was no expectation that the rewards of HE could only be reaped by those attending universities.

The Robbins Report is also indicative of an epistemological shift: the assumption that knowledge can be linked to a pursuit of truth or considered an end in itself is questioned. Instead, the pursuit of knowledge is considered to need instrumental justification. Not only the relationship between the state and HE changed but the relationship between the academy and knowledge also changed. Instead of a liberal view of knowledge being considered as an end in itself (such as described by Newman in The Idea of a University), knowledge becomes an instrumental means to achieving public goods however they may be defined. While this epistemological shift towards instrumentalism predominantly represents the views of the political elite, it was largely welcomed within the academy as the experience of the Second World War and, of the holocaust in particular, served to discredit ‘grand narratives’ including the Enlightenment-inspired positivism, empiricism and belief in ultimate truth in knowledge (see Bauman 1991, Modernity and the Holocaust). The pursuit of public good provided a moral justification for HE when Enlightenment values were discredited.

Desai (2003) characterises the state at this time as being perceived by the public as a ‘benevolent dictator’ in that government sought to safeguard the economic and social well-being of all citizens. Universities were perhaps keener to accept the benevolence than be dictated to: as relatively autonomous institutions, universities had up until this point been mainly free from state interference and able to set their own largely liberal academic priorities. While Robbins reasserts the importance of knowledge outcomes in HE and argues for knowledge to be considered important in and of itself, he also claims those knowledge outcomes (rather than individuals participating in a university experience) will provide the cultural capital to unite the nation and the scientific advance to drive forward the economy. In this government-sponsored declaration that HE should be considered of public social and economic value, the autonomy of institutions is called into question, and a public good role for HE to act as a critical intellectual friend to government and industry is likewise challenged. Brown (2013) notes that universities continued to enjoy relatively high degrees of autonomy but conditional upon the production of valued public goods (125) and that eventually increased state funding opened up universities to greater direction from national government and the expectation that they would provide knowledge and skilled workers to drive the economy.

Public good and human capital

The economic downturn of the early 1970s brought with it the growing political popularity of human capital theory in the USA at first (see, for example, Becker 1993) and later, its pervasive influence upon UK education policies. The Conservative government's Higher Education; Meeting the Challenge emphasised the role of universities in supplying graduates for industry. While the public good of HE continued to be perceived primarily in relation to national economic competitiveness, this was increasingly in terms of the financial returns to businesses to be accrued from employing graduates. By 1997, Dearing's National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education was able to suggest a shift away from knowledge as an aim of HE towards more explicitly individual and instrumental ends: the role of universities is to serve the needs of the economy rather than the economy responding to the impetus of new knowledge. In addition, it is now only the individuals themselves who ‘own’ that knowledge and the businesses that employ them that can be expected to reap the rewards. Although the concept of human capital may appear to offer a return to intellectual outcomes this is in a form quite different to knowledge worth pursuing as an end in itself. One consequence is that the public good was no longer perceived to be extended to everyone in society but only to those who had experienced HE themselves or directly employed graduates.

Dearing suggested that government and universities must ‘encourage the student to see him/herself as an investor in receipt of a service, and to seek, as an investor, value for money and a good return from the investment’ (chap. 22, para. 19). This notion of HE as an individual investment chimed with a more atomised social and political climate (see, for example, Lukes 1973; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001). Dearing breaks with the established discourse of national economic advancement and begins a focus on private economic gains for which students become investors in their own stocks of human capital. The public returns to HE in terms of increased wealth and employment are seen to be accrued by graduates alone, and it is only ‘spillovers’ that benefit others in society. It is perhaps only logical that students are then expected to contribute towards the cost of this private investment. As the perceived benefits of HE are considered accessible only to those who attend university, attention shifts to disparities of access and a new political focus upon widening participation. The state takes on a new role in seeking to regulate university admissions and attempting to equalise opportunities for all citizens to participate in HE (see Fisher 2006, 158).

Public good as social justice

Post-Dearing, and with the introduction of higher tuition fees paid by individuals, the Labour government sought to reclaim the concept of HE as a public good. The administration's final HE policy document, Higher Ambitions (BIS 2009) claimed: ‘The process of knowledge generation and stewardship is a public good and important in its own right. Research and learning in universities have intrinsic value aside from any economic consideration.’ However, this statement is followed with the assertion, ‘we are determined that no stone should be left unturned in maximising the economic potential of higher education for this country’ (2009, 41), thereby moving quickly from claims about the intrinsic importance of generating knowledge to the economic potential of HE and calling into question the veracity of statement regarding intrinsic value. Perhaps to balance these economic goals, Higher Ambitions presents the public good of HE in relation to social justice:

Everyone, irrespective of background, has a right to a fair chance to gain those advantages. This is vital, not just as a question of social justice and social mobility but also for meeting the economy's needs for high level skills. (2009, 3)

This is the first time we see social mobility as a stated goal of government HE policy although it may have been the intended outcome of previous policies designed to raise the age participation ratio to 50%.

Social mobility suggests movement from a lower social class to a higher social class is therefore an individualised phenomenon in contrast to national prosperity which is a collective goal. Indeed, if all of society gets generally more prosperous it is more difficult to measure individual movement. The discourse of social mobility shifts responsibility onto individuals for their own employment prospects and economic circumstances there is an expectation that individuals, through education, will create the conditions for their own economic reproduction (see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, 203). The 2010 UK coalition government continued to link HE to social mobility in Students at the Heart of the System (BIS 2011) which claims social justice is achieved through individual social mobility defined as increased earnings potential and greater job security, ‘Higher education can be a powerful engine of social mobility enabling young people from low income backgrounds to earn more than their parents and providing a route into the professions for people from non-professional backgrounds’ (BIS 2011, 54).

Although HE has arguably always led to social mobility for some individuals, in the past this was a by-product of the social and cultural capital students more or less consciously accrued. Promoting social mobility was not the defining role of universities it has now become: ‘[institutions] must take more responsibility for increasing social mobility’ (BIS 2011, 4). The public good of HE thus becomes reconceptualised according to a more individualistic methodology as ‘the mathematical sum of the private benefits’ (Marginson 2011, 413). As there are considered to be few benefits from HE for non-participants, the emphasis in terms of promoting the public good through HE is placed upon encouraging more individuals, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to participate (see, for example, Widening Participation; DfES 2003). In turn, universities now relate to students as individual fee-paying customers who make a private investment to gain a return in their own future employability and/or social mobility. Despite direct state subsidies to universities in the form of block teaching grants being withdrawn, universities have become increasingly concerned with state projects of ensuring employability and prosperity of individual citizens. This represents a ‘structural, sociological transformation’ of universities as social institutions and through them, a new relationship between individuals and society (see Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, 202).

From knowledge to employability

The historical and philosophical analysis presented shows that the definition of public good in relation to HE has, over many years, shifted emphasis between intellectual, social and economic aims. Whereas Kant, Mill and Newman conceived of a public good in relation to knowledge, knowledge itself has come to be de-centred from state educational projects. Knowledge moved from being seen as an end in itself to serving the interests of the national economy. From here knowledge has come to be seen as a route to personalised economic and social outcomes which provide private gains for individual graduates who can earn more than those without a university degree. Knowledge, most specifically in the form of culture, is no longer presented as a civilising influence on society or serving a social role in including all of society into a coherent cultural vision but as a means of bringing about social justice through individual social mobility. McLean argues we can no longer think of knowledge as serving a unifying purpose and that universities have outlived the role of ‘producer, protector and inculcator of the national culture’ (2008, 38). Students are no longer perceived to be potential contributors to the public intellectual capital of the nation, but instead as private investors seeking a financial return in the form of enhanced employability skills.

Such epistemological shifts have been driven by different groups in turn. Whereas a desire to create economically useful knowledge to maintain Britain's standing on the world stage was led by a political and economic elite, the simultaneous desire to promote a coherent national cultural project was endorsed by sections from within the academy (see especially Leavis, Education and the University, 1943). In more recent times, we can see that although the promotion of HE as an individual investment in employability and earnings potential has been driven by successive government ministers, many academics have bought into the idea of HE promoting social justice or social mobility. The idea that university may be a personally transformative experience (see McLean 2008; Nixon 2011) may be politically more palatable that a perceived ‘neo-liberal’ agenda, but it is no less a privatised experience for that.

When the idea of a university (if never actually the reality) was linked to the Enlightenment project of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake in the context of universities which were relatively autonomous institutions, it was the separation between universities and the state that allowed public good to be realised as knowledge production and transmission on the one hand, and as critical ally of government, professions and society more broadly on the other. Since the Second World War, the British HE sector has received increased funding from the public purse and as a result has been co-opted more closely into the state machinery. The most recent presentation of HE as inextricably linked to individuals' economic and social life chances incorporates the public good of universities more completely into the aims of the state at the same time as expecting individuals increasingly to contribute towards the financial costs of their HE. This reconceptualised public good is problematic for HE as the focus upon social justice and individual social mobility moves universities away from the non-excludable knowledge outcomes described by Marginson as: ‘the unique claim of higher education’ (2011, 414).

Such a shift to individualised HE outcomes has occurred because alongside changes in government policy there has been a concurrent epistemological shift within the academy which has resulted in a collapse of the Enlightenment concept of empirical truth in relation to knowledge. Instead, especially in the humanities, this has been superseded by a more relativistic stance that knowledge is premised upon experience and view-point. Nixon, in his book Higher Education and the Public Good, argues for HE to place an emphasis on ‘recognising difference … in a world of difference’ which moves us from knowledge as truth to a position where public good lies in the knowledge that there is no truth. Nixon argues, ‘the legitimacy of any institution of higher education cannot be premised on prior assumptions regarding the provenance of truth … [it is instead a] place where arguments are held and divergence of view-point is valued’ (2011, 42).

Previously, a public good of HE has been the role universities play in challenging, critiquing and holding society to account. If all different views are afforded equal respect then such an academic enterprise is no longer practicable as there are no grounds for challenging one opinion more than another. To assume that there is no truth and that only difference can be acknowledged would mean people can no longer access the powerful knowledge needed to be able to argue for some ideas to win over others in the marketplace of ideas. We are left with only ‘voice discourses’ which reduce knowledge to experience. As Young notes:

The practical and political implications of such a rejection of all knowledge claims is that voice discourses is self-defeating. They deny to the subordinate groups, with whom they claim to identify, the possibility that any knowledge could be a resource for overcoming their subordination. (2008, 5)

In reality, despite the rhetoric of recognising difference it is clear that some values are to be encouraged more than others; McLean, for example, specifies a focus on addressing inequality, and tackling issues associated with poverty, the environment and conflict (2008, 17). It can seem as if public good is now to be found in the individual take-up of particular (pre-determined) values by students.

Conclusions

Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been an idea (indeed, an ideal) of a university as an autonomous institution that could act in the public good through the creation and transmission of knowledge (as its own end) and, through the exercise of academic freedom, as critical ally to government, professions and society as a whole (see work by Newman, Mill and Arnold, as well as earlier work by Kant). Following the Second World War, public funding for HE resulted in a loss of autonomy for the sector and an explicit government commitment to the production of the public good defined as knowledge that could benefit everyone in society through its instrumental use-value in relation to technological advance. This was not met with strong opposition from the within the academy as there was already a climate of questioning key Enlightenment concepts such as truth, rationality, positivism and grand narratives.

Since this time, successive redefinitions of public good in the discourse of government HE policy documents have shifted the focus away from knowledge outcomes that can benefit everyone in society to a more individualised terrain of skills for employability which can result in increased earnings and job security. Public good has been redefined as the collective private gain. This has been challenged by some within the academy with only partial success because, as previously, it falls into an intellectually receptive climate. While anything tainted with ‘neoliberalism’ is challenged, many academics see a role for themselves in relation to promoting social justice and social mobility or supporting students with individual projects of transformation. Such goals reinforce, rather than challenge, the instrumental and individualised agenda of government in relation to HE. They say little about knowledge as a collective social project and, through the promotion and inculcation of particular values, run the risk of abandoning academic freedom and the questioning ethos of HE and thereby diminishing the social role of the university in relation to criticality.

Losing knowledge and criticality from our understanding of public good fundamentally challenges the nature of HE. Arendt (1954) suggests education plays a role in inculcating new generations of students into the knowledge of a pre-existing world for them to make anew. If we were to consider public good in this light it could be conceived of as emerging from the formalised relationship through which disciplinary-specific, non-excludable knowledge outcomes are passed from one generation to the next. This would be to consider HE as a social contract between the generations based upon the broader public good its knowledge outcomes provide for the whole of society (Tilak 2008; Brown 2011) and not just the individuals who attend university. This would necessitate bringing knowledge back into the university, but ‘without denying its fundamentally social and historical basis’ so as to avoid ‘the slide into relativism and perspectivism’ (Young 2008, 19). This is not an argument for a curriculum ‘set in aspic’ that aims at preserving the status quo through transmitting an unchallengeable body of knowledge that transcends generations and social circumstances. Instead, this is an argument for knowledge to be explored in relation to its social, political, historical and cultural origins; for it to be part of a living curriculum that can be mastered, engaged with, questioned and challenged. This would allow universities to play a critical role in relation to both government and society.