Public-spiritedness and the autonomy of self determination in public education: Why University Should Be Free

“If life were a thing that money could buy,

                         the rich would have it,

                                   and the poor would die.”

               -Jammy Galloway, Land of Look Behind

     University should be a public institution because the scope of private industry is too limited to do what is in the best interest of the public. The goals of private industry and education are not congruent, graduate debt is detrimental to the economy, and a privatized post-secondary system leads to a dissatisfied public.

The goal of a business is profit; the goal of education is multifaceted. When universities become businesses, the telos of the institution narrows and profitability must supersede education. Not to say that these two things are inherently exclusive and unable to overlap, but one cannot be contingent on the other because the two projects (profit and education) have differing means.

This creates an academic climate where one discipline is less valued than others because their worth is set by the ultimate value, the ultimate goal, profit. Said value is determined by those people's work who is already profitable. Autonomy is crushed, control is in the hands of the few. A school is not allowed to be a school because it is really a business. When allowed to set its own values, the academy is much more of a community formed and informed by them, instead of the academic values just being a marketing ploy and people contribute for their daily bread alone. The academic values shape the school, not just provide a marketing strategy.

      The goals of the institution academically and how a school differentiates itself from others has less to do with shared academic values and more to do with marketability and profitability.

We see this at Trent University, where the profit motive dictates the academic goals of the institution, not the strengths and interests of the people doing the work of schooling (teachers and students). Profiteers wrote the 2012 Academic Plan, not educators. Educators were mere consultants. Scientists in a profit-motivated educational system do research based on the needs of people with money, not people in need and not based on their own expertise or interest. Profit motivation leads to skewed results as you are not going to say something contrary if your paycheck depends on you not doing so. The terms and conditions of your work is not in your hands.

Every value a university constructs for itself becomes subservient to its need to make money. For example, Trent is Canada’s small outstanding university and prides itself on its youth and adherence to academic tradition embodied in the college system (ical Recovery: An Academic Plan for Trent University). Yet, the colleges are slowly but surely being dismantled in favour of cost effective private residences. Trent values academic tradition, but said value becomes not value, but a marketable asset for what Trent has to value, money. By taking the profit motive away from Trent, we would see that the goals of the institution would be based on value alone and the downtown colleges would still exist.

     Debt forces graduates to do jobs they have no passion for or skill in doing. In his book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber tells the story of a Ph.D. graduate from Columbia University whose $80,000 debt load prevented her from an academic career because she could not afford it. Rather, she wound up working as an escort for Wall Street types. “Here’s someone who ought to be a professor,” Graeber explains, “doing sexual services for the guys who lent her the money.”

This is an American example and an obvious exaggeration but the point remains that this women is successful at her work but is not rewarded because her work is seen as valueless without an immediate, quantifiable payoff.

Closer to home, we can see the adverse effects of having to borrow to go to school. A graduate who has to borrow is told that their work has to have commercial expediency or it is valueless. A StatsCan survey found that “postsecondary graduates with student loans had, on average, lower assets and correspondingly lower net worth than those who did not have student loans.” “Lower net worth”: as in they have been devalued because their values were not that of commercial expediency (i.e. Getting a job instead of schooling) but valued being satisfied with their work instead.

In another StatsCan study done by May Luong, she states that: “Little research has been directed at exploring the impact that student loans may have on individuals’ financial position after graduation." With so little consideration being taken when it comes to the effect of students massive debt loads, it is difficult to hold to idea that the privatization of post-secondary is a benefit to economic stability. It is actually much easier to say that privatization is creating an economy of dissatisfied workers. 
 
      Tuition makes education an investment, not an exercise in job fulfilment. Once someone leaves the academy and enters the workforce, they are forced to take a job that pays well and forced to take a job immediately, not necessarily a job that they were their skills or expertise lay. This is a recipe for an unhappy, dissatisfied workforce and if people go unfulfilled in their work, they go unfulfilled in their lives.

A government enshrines opportunities for its people, and by letting the punitive individualism free market economy dictate what the value of a citizen's labour is, transforming people into profit­-maximizing machines, it ceases to provide opportunity and instead restricts a citizen's capacity to choose their own work. Rather, by making post-secondary public, a government can regulate and control the economy in order to allow its citizens to choose what their life's work is.

      University needs to be public spirited, not driven by profit alone. The goals of its participants are multifaceted whereas the goal of private interest are limited to profit. The debt created by post-secondary education is crippling the economies ability to function on behalf of its citizens. And by allowing the few who have the monetary means to dictate, via university, what work needs to be done, we are facilitating our own dissatisfaction.

References

Galloway, Jammy. “Land of Look Behind” by Alan Greenburg. Subversive Cinema, 1982. Film.

Graeber, David. “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”. Melville House, 2011. Print.

Luong, May. “The financial impact of student loans”. Statistics Canada, 2010 <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/75-001-x/2010101/pdf/11073-eng.pdf>. Web.

The Academic Planning Committee. “Radical Recovery: An Academic Plan for Trent (2012-2015)”. Trent University, 2012 <http://www.trentu.ca/vpacademic/documents/Trent%20Academic%20Plan%20%282012-2015%29%20-%20Jan%2018%202012.pdf>. Web.