Sussex Not For Sale

It's a good thing if the university is more market oriented.

It will mean that people from less privileged backgrounds will feel comfortable studying for example Art History. They will do so in the knowledge that they as well as engineers will develop personal and intellectual skills useful in the job market. Only the privileged or well connected can study at university without a care that what they're doing will help them find work afterwards.

 Michael



It's a shame your points are quite poorly elaborated and therefore it's hard to say where you're coming from. 



1. Marketisation means that more people from less privileged backgrounds will feel comfortable studying an arts degree (applies well to Sussex) actually) because it will not mean they will become less employable (as opposed to engineers).



This might be true. A more labour market oriented Arts History course might mean more students will find direct employment after graduation, but this can never be a turned into a universal truth since the labour market, especially in the arts, gets saturated very quickly and there is fierce competition for jobs. 



Secondly, there is no reason to believe that a discipline like Arts History, having undergone a process of marketisation, will attract more working class students. In fact, the advent of top-up fees and loans have deterred a lot of working class students from applying to University. The possibility (not the certainty) of earning more after graduation does not seem to weigh up to the mountains of debt (currently around 30k) for most working class school leavers. Finally, it has never been proven that graduates earn more on average. The government, justifying its cuts in spending, has used a few examples and turned it into a universal benefit.



In brief, it's simply an untrue assumption that marketisation will make HE easier/more attractive for students from less priviliged backgrounds. Quite the opposite is true: we should campaign for free, universal education and grants, funded by taxing the rich. This is a policy that benefits the working classes. It's not like the money isn't there (war, trident, border security etc).



2. Education is for sale and has always been.



I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the Blairites who are currently selling out our public services all enjoyed the benefit of free education, and grants. They didn't pay a penny. This was the same in my homecountry, the Netherlands and still is the case in Greece. Fees in Belgium, France, Spain and Portugal are trivial, a couple of hundred euros. What are you talking about?



3. Competition is an aid to maintaining high standards.



There is nothing wrong with a healthy bit of competition, one can not deny it being a intrinsic part of human life. But mutual aid and cooperation are too. The problem with the current system is that is based on a view that humans cannot be trusted and are narrowly calculating for their own interests. This is a cynical view of human life that excludes possibilities of sacrifice, cooperation, aid, in other words, simply working together. Your assertion comes directly out of the Capitalist Guide to Human Life, a very poor and narrow minded guide indeed. Academic research and teaching are intrinsically cooperative activities, and rely on people working together. Capitalist enclosures of intellectual work first of all deny access to knowledge to most citizens, and secondly prevent people from working together to benefit society. It turns people and institutions into greedy and selfish beings, who only do research not because they are excited by it or because it will help people, but because want to make lots of money or because they have to in order to stay afloat in the free market. In short, the death stab to academic freedom and universal emancipation. 



4. A university is a business.



This is your most crude and most untrue assertion. A university is not a business (although some people wish to turn it into a business, this is a project that is ongoing and resisted on a global scale). It is a public good that is there to provide a forum for citizens to grow intellectually, to think critically and to find ways to better society for all. Universities embody the Enlightenment ideal, which Immanuel Kant described as 'Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!'



Today all knowledge is guided by the tutelage of the market. It is therefore a fundamental attack on Enlightenment values, a fundamental attack on what universities used to be about. 



This doesn't mean that I idealise the old ivory tower structure of the university. We need to take back our education from government and corporate control, and turn it into a truly accessible, critical forum that is open to all, thereby turning it into a truly revolutionary force in society.