Carlos Alberto Torres Distinguished Professor, UCLA Conference organized by the Chinese Taipei Comparative Education Society and Higher Education Evaluation.

Carlos Alberto TorresDistinguished Professor, UCLA

Conference organized by the Chinese Taipei Comparative Education Society and Higher Education Evaluation and

Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT). Internal and External Quality Assurance in Higher

Education: Developments and Trends in Asia. October 3rd, 2014

• University Crises• Crises of Legitimation• Crisis of Hegemony• Institutional Crisis• Jobless society Crisis• Global Universities

–World Class Universities and Global Rankings

– Global University• Global Learning• Global Research• Global Reputation (Branding)• Global Service• Global Civic Engagement

• Educational Crisis, Crises of Schools of Education, Multiculturalism.

• Globalization crises, Public Goods, and the new university responsibilities (BRIC UNIVERSITIES). – Carnoy et all: The Concept of Public Goods, the State,

and Higher Education Finance: A View from the BRICs. Higher Education. The International Journal of Higher Education Research, volume 68, number 3

The concept of public goods, the state, and higher education finance: a view from the BRICs

Martin Carnoy • Isak Froumin • Prashant K. Loyalka • Jandhyala B. G. Tilak Published online: 25 February 2014

• Abstract • Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the

way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political–social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state. Mediated through the state, this construct can change over time as the economic and social context of higher education changes. In this paper, we analyze through the state’s financing of higher education how it changes as a public/private good and the forces that impinge on states to influence such changes. To illustrate our arguments, we discuss trends in higher education financing in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We show that in addition to increased privatization of higher education financing, BRIC states are increasingly differentiating the financing of elite and non-elite institutions.

Carnoy et al argument• Our main argument is that these states use the expansion of education, including

university education, to simultaneously promote capital accumulation, economic growth, and political legitimation with the mass of families who want to enhance their children’s employability and social mobility (Offe 1973). We contend that the public/private nature of higher education is played out in this political economic context. Education also helps realize the self-interest of the state actors (including the intellectual elites in public universities) to increase state revenue and reproduce state power (Weiler 1983). Different groups in the state bureaucracy may have different views on how best to reproduce state power—that is, how to keep control of the state’s revenue and how it is to be used—but ultimately competing bureaucratic groups are situated in a state that must legitimate itself or collapse. Expanding education and reforming it serves the state because more and better education—in the state’s collectivity of competing bureaucrats’ view—increases the probability that workers find jobs, gives workers the hope that they and their children can move up the social and economic ladder, and simultaneously increases the profitability of capital through higher worker productivity, which in turn, increases state revenues and bureaucrats’ power and legitimacy. How higher education ends up serving private and public interests is part and parcel of state bureaucracies legitimizing their own power.

• A culture of consumption and marketization celebrates individual identities and not collective identities.

• Zygmunt Bauman identified a change in life organized around production (and hence normatively regulated) to a life organized around consumption.

• Higher education has an intrinsic identity as a common good well established for more than one century, but now it is been eroded or attacked. One could ask if higher education is not the peak of a system that create social inequalities?

• The great paradox in the expansion and democratization of higher education, is that contrary to the intentions, or democratic expectations, there is a growing differentiation and expansion of inequality, and a growing stratification among the different institutions affecting the life of real people

• We need to reimagine the universities for the XXI century

• We need to criticize human capital theory as the only referential framework for higher education..

• We need to cultivate other capacities such as a critique to democracy to perfect it.

• What are the great themes• Global inequality• access• employability• Graduateness • Pedagogy of a global identity•  •  

Reimagining a New Global University

• Basil Bernstein • Three pedagogical rights:

– increase in personal knowledge– increase of social inclusion,– increase of political participations.

• Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice):Public reason is central for the democratic politics in general and justice in particular.

• Marketing: exporting of brands (branding) is the competition for the most lucrative markets in a globalized world.

• 1. Lifelong learning: access and insertion at several points

• 2. New Social Pact State-Society-University (The educational reform of Cordoba, Argentina 1918). Definition of the university as a public good/private good.

• 3. New mechanisms of financing. Taxes to regulate financial transactions. The Tobin Tax (Currency Transaction Tax)

• “In addition to shifting to extensive private financing, at least three of the BRIC states have politically ‘‘negotiated’’ their definition of higher education as a public/private good through explicit policies that increasingly differentiate financing between elite and non-elite insti- tutions.7 In part BRIC states maintain legitimacy with economically more powerful groups by continuing to favor high-income families with much larger than average public subsidies to attend university. In the new financing configurations, this takes place mainly through the process of increased cost differentiation between elite and non-elite universities.” (Carnoy et al, page 368)

•4. Confronting the epistemological deficit of knowledge. Debates about the Science of the South versus Science of the North; critique of positivism and scientificism; post-colonial analysis.

•5. Confronting the Exceptionalism reclaimed by few societies (USA-Japan)

• 6. Confronting the growing disparity and inequality in the world. Racialization of inequality? Class versus race and ethnicity?

•7. University as labor markets. University unions? University as a source of knowledge and productivity (patents). The Political Economic Role of a Faculty of Extension.

• 8. An Ethics of Service?: An obligatory plan of social service for undergraduates upon graduation.

• 9. Global Citizenship and National Citizenship: Interactions. The citizenship’s responsibilities of universities.

• 10. Multiple Scholarships• * Scholarship of discovery• * Scholarship of integration• * Scholarship of intervention• * Scholarship of teaching

Boyer’s arguments• Ernest Boyer (1991) in a provocative essay defines the

scholarship of discovery as research. Unquestionably this is at the core of the mission of the university. Yet, Boyer insists in the need of a scholarship of integration. This implies making connections between disciplines, revealing specialties in a larger context, illuminating data and findings in ways that can help the non-specialist. The scholarship of intervention is connected with the innovative practice of the profession, and the implementation of new knowledge in concrete spheres of practice, that is the application of knowledge to resolve specific problems. He adds to these models of scholarship, the scholarship of teaching.

• Boyer, E. (1991), Scholarship Reconsidered: Principles of the Professoriate, (Lawrenceville, New Jersey: Princeton University Press).

Thank You!!!