Privatising The Public University

First Published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

With public colleges and universities facing substantial budget cuts and increased calls for accountability, more institutions now rely on private revenue streams for support. As market-driven policies and behaviors become more commonplace, some cautious critics sound the alarm, while others watching the bottom line cheer. But which perspective gets it right? Does the privatization of public higher education threaten its very mission or support it? In this collection of essays, economists, policy makers, political scientists, sociologists, and organizational researchers discuss the impact of privatization from their respective disciplinary perspectives and assess its implications for the future of higher education. Privatization may bring additional funds and services that are free from government regulations and oversight, but does it also allow private interests to have undue influence over public higher education? Should public universities have to compete in the economic marketplace as vigorously as they do in the marketplace of ideas? What are the implications when institutions of higher learning function like businesses? With privatization now a reality for most public colleges and universities, an objective examination of the issue from these diverse academic perspectives will be welcomed by those struggling with its challenges.

Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law is the first full-length critical study examining the impact of the dramatic reforms that have swept through universities over the last two decades. Drawing on extensive research and interviews in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Canada, Margaret Thornton considers the impact of the market on students, academics and law schools, documenting how both the curriculum and pedagogical methods have changed. If the passing of the idea of the university is rued, concern usually focuses on the humanities and the natural sciences. In this respect, law has been regarded as privileged because of the virtually unstoppable demand for law places and the willingness of students to pay high fees. And, as this book shows, it is commercial and instrumental forms of legal training that are now favoured, whilst the humanistic, critical, theoretical and social justice aspects of legal knowledge have been corroded. Privatising the Public University will be of considerable interest to legal academics; but it will also be invaluable work for anyone interested in the future of higher education, or, more generally, in the corporatization of culture.

Privatisation and Commercialisation in Public Education asks how publicness is being redefined through the restructuring of nominally public school systems. Over the past few decades, governments have engineered a wave of reforms in their public systems opening them to privatisation and commercialisation. In public education systems competition, choice and autonomy have become entrenched vectors of these reforms. This edited collection carefully examines the difference between privatisation and commercialisation and traces the varying effects privatised and commercialised policy reforms have had in different educational contexts. Many countries have approached the thorny issues of school choice and school autonomy in different ways, and this book investigates the impact of these agendas across the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and India. This book brings together contemporary, international perspectives from high-profile policy academics on both privatisation and commercialisation in public education systems under the provocation of how the ‘public’ nature of schooling is changing. This is essential reading for those interested in the idea that current education policy reforms are reshaping what might be considered core educational practices in public schooling.

Examines a range of developments related to the "privatization" of public higher education in the United States, including increasing "institutional autonomy, higher tuition, diminishing appropriations, alternative revenue sources such as philanthropy and new business ventures, and modified governance relationships." These developments, in turn, have resulted in an uncertain future for public academic institutions across the country, posing unprecedented questions and challenges for them.--Provided by publisher.

This book addresses the implications of this development in Kenya, with regard to the responsiveness of private higher education to issues of broadening access, equity and the traditional research function of universities.

Privatisation is supposed to bring about the retreat of the state. But what happens when the state privatises itself and even its core functions - tax collection, internal security, customs - are auctioned to the highest bidder? Does this imply a weakening of the state? Or, rather, does it lead to a scrutiny and control? The contributors to this work examine these phenomena in the former Second and Third World (Central and Eastern Europe, China and other parts of Asia and Africa) highlighting the very different ways in which continuing state interference and privatisation are implemented. What we are witnessing, according to this study, is not the eclipse of the state under the impact of globalisation but the end of the relatively short era of the development state and its commanding role. privatisation does not necessarily lead to a weakening of state control; it leads to new, and often more informal, forms of interference and influence, and it is these that are the book's central theme.