Public Purpose of Higher Education: Glacial Recession and Receding Knowledge

Knowledge matters. Knowledge is to climate change like opinion and perception are to local weather. This week AAUP put this statement out reflecting this position. Universities are not the only places where knowledge is created and shared. Indigenous knowledge systems also create knowledge for example. However, all systems of knowledge share a systematic approach to knowledge creation that has at its root some form of critical thinking and iteration toward greater and greater accuracy and reliability over time. In the West, the knowledge system has by and large been located in universities. In other places in the world, the knowledge system is located elsewhere in society. Wherever the systematic generation of knowledge is located, the distinction between knowledge and opinion/belief/perception articulated by AAUP and endorsed by others like AACU etc. is a powerful warning. The erosion of our public commitment to a shared knowledge system is as serious a threat to society as climate change. Just because it is snowing in my town doesn’t mean the global average temperature isn’t reaching record highs every year, the global stores of freshwater - ice caps and glaciers and lakes - aren’t disappearing, and massive shifts in the global ecological system are not driving the largest species extinction since the dinosaurs. 

Without a shared knowledge system and the social and physical technologies that flow from it, without a sustainable climate system and the delicate balance it provides for life to flourish in the oceans and on the land, we will perish. The erosion of each is tied to the other and will lead to more conflict and war... over life-sustaining resources like water, and facts.

One way for universities to address this issue is to rediscover or reinvest in their public purpose missions. Over the last half-century, particularly in the US but true globally as well, public finance of higher education has rapidly declined. This has lead to greater and greater dependence on individual tuition payment - fueling the student debt crisis - and an incentivized commercialization worthy research. Both result in a notion that the purpose of higher education is to serve private economic interests - of the student seeking preparation for employment, of the corporate need for particular workforce attributes, and of the researcher and university seeking the prestige and possible private gain of a commercialized knowledge product or patent. Likewise, the press's emphasis on the lack of upward social mobility of college graduates as a failure of higher education rather than a failure of the overall economic system - stagnant wages and radically accelerated inequality - feeds the notion of the primary value as private economic interest.

Some of the angst and disillusionment of the general public towards universities is reflective of the perceived and sometimes actual abandonment of public purpose. Public discourse about the broad public benefit of higher education has all but disappeared since the Space Race and the social transformations of the ‘60s. As the comments to the Inside Higher Ed article linked above reflect, the higher ed press's focus is on the weekly sexy controversy about this or that professor be disciplined or about these students crying foul about speech issues, or about some other problem in the university system. Even stories about the ongoing affordability crisis rarely highlight the drastic decrease in public investments in higher education since the 1970s or the enormous corporate profits generated off of scientific knowledge wholely created by public investments in research. The iPhone, Facebook, Google, would not be possible without those prior public investments. As one commenter makes clear, however, if the weekly focus of the press on the sexy problematic attributes of higher ed was a reliable systematic means of judging the whole of the institution of higher ed, the weekly focus of our local news on businesses that cheat people should convince us that all private business is evil. 

Still, public purpose and benefit have continued to happen in universities despite the increasing push to private reframe and the increased coverage of politically charged debate. It is rarely celebrated by universities, always under covered by the press, and little understood by the public. Until the public purposes of higher education are again heralded, again invested in, and again forwarded in the consciousness of the public mind, the value of knowledge will continue to be eroded, and the ice will continue to melt.