Inevitably the last month or so has been spent thinking about the possible implications of the Browne Review and of the Comprehensive Spending Review that will follow it this week.  Informed guesswork, based on discussions with various informed individuals, led to me having a shrewd idea of what the whole package would contain.  But the final publication of the Browne Report last Tuesday has nevertheless left a sour taste in my mouth.  This relates to two inter-connected issues. I will quote from the report:

Page 14, Section 1.1:
"Higher education matters.  It helps to create the knowledge, skills and values that underpin a civilised society.  Higher education institutions (HEIs) generate and diffuse ideas, safeguard knowledge, catalyse innovation, inspire creativity, enliven culture, stimulate regional economies and strengthen civil society.  They bridge the past and future, the local and global.
Higher education matters because it transforms the lives of individuals. On graduating, graduates are more likely to be employed, more likely to enjoy higher wages and better job satisfaction, and more likely to find it easier to move from one job to the next.  Participating in highere ducation enables individuals from low income backgrounds and then their families to enter higher status jobs and increase their earnings.  Graduates enjoy substantial health benefits - a reduced likelihood of smoking, and lower incidence of obesity and depression. They are less likely to be involved in crime, more likely to be actively engaged with their childrens' education, and more likely to be active in their communities."

One of the things I teach my students is to identify ideaologies, discourses and arguments around the provision of 'public' and 'private' goods - and then to apply their understanding to the analysis of the different ways in which welfare regimes operate across Europe to infleucne the life chances of people.

These excellent two opening paragraphs of the Browne Review are eloquent in their justification of higher education as being both a public good (from which the whole of society benefits - first paragraph) and a private good (benefiting those who participate in its consumption - the second paragraph).  I would actually argue that certain of the features identified in the second paragraph (for example the lower crime rate or better health outcomes) are actually also a public benefit and should be seen as part of the 'public good' aspect of higher education.

By pages 20/21 the mood of the report has changed.  The scales have now been weighed, and the verdict now is that in terms of the provision of highere ducation "the public also receives a benefit but this is less than the private benefit."

By page 47 this new argument has led to the overturning of a key tenet of page 14 - that higher education is a public good with a range of benefits for the whole of society.  We now arrive at the point where only a very limited range of courses are seen as a public good - and should thus be publicly funded.  These are courses "that deliver significant social returns such as to provide skills and knowledge currently in shortage or predicted to be in the future ... Typically the courses that may fall into this category are courses in science and technology subjects, clinical medicine, nursing and other healthcare degrees, as well as strategically important language courses."

So everything else will be taken out of the realm of public funding (or "a hidden blanket subsidy" to repeat the dismissive language used in the report).  The first paragraph of the report has been completely forgotten.  Apparnetly there is no public good in:
- studying for a degree in Economics, with all the insight and knowledge that would bring to solving major world problems;
- becoming a commentator on social change, through Politics or Sociology. [Where is the analysis of the "civilised society" trailed at the start of the reprt?]
- becoming a lawyer or architect, a librarian or an educationalist
- becoming skilled in the science of management
- studying geography or town and regional planning with a view to "stimulat[ing] regional economies" (page 14)
- studying philosophy and getting to grips with the "values that underpin a civilised society" (page 14)
- studying literature or music in such a way as to comment on endeavours to "enliven culture" (page 14 again).

None of these should be seen as public goods: studying these subjects has no intrinsic value to society at large. I'm afraid I just do not accept that position.

And related to this is the view that anyone who wants to study such subjects must pay the full whack for doing so - something which goes against the complete tenor of European welfare thinking for the past 70 years or more.  In Europe every country has defined public goods in a relatively broad manner - accepting the benefits of public sector finance and involvement in areas such as health care, housing, pensions, and education at all levels.  With the Browne Review the UK is in danger of stepping outside that European mainstream and turning its back on decades of experience in producing social justice and the development of the common interest through public policy.

I squirm when I hear right-wing American commentators describe the NHS and other healthcare systems in Europe as "socialist, bordering on Marxism" (as I heard one Tea Party supporter say last week).  But the path from the Browne Review's espousal of claims that many social sciences and humanities disciplines should  not be funded could easily lead us in a few years to rather similar views about whole areas of university education.

It's not so long since Charles Clarke, a Labour minister of education, shared his belief that it was OK to have a few medieval historians around for ornamental purposes. Lord Browne and his team have not created their vision - they have borrowed from existing thinking.

But it is time for EVERYONE in higher education to support the public benefit argument for the sector as a whole, and for those parts of it that are now being regarded as of private benefit only and not worthy of public support.