1.3.4.2. Research Position: The Importance of Universities as Public Institutions
As described in the section above, more and more authors perceive universities as businesses and education as a market. Many of the industrialized nations and foremost the United States support this view in the current WTO negotiations education is negotiated to be included alongside other services like telecommunication and logistics. While there can be no doubt that universities comprise many aspects of economic organizations – they have budgets, they employ people who receive salaries and make careers, they have students who receive education and scientists who produce research – universities have so far always been setup as not-for-profit organizations. There are two fundamental arguments why universities and education in general should be a public good and not be treated like e.g. banking services.

1. When universities become integrated in the market logic they loose their academic autonomy (read objectivity) and become subordinate to the funding sources: Industry and – as has been described in the case of the LSE and the UOC – their clients. Two results are foreseeable:

a. As more and more applied research is conducted (Gibbons, 1994; Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2001) the question of intellectual property and subsequently of accessibility of the results is likely to be controversial, as funding bodies will hedge their interests. As postulated by Kant (1970) science necessarily needs to be publicly accessible and comprehensible. The public availability of knowledge is a key precondition for competition (, which fosters development and affordability) as well as for the participation of small and medium sized business in the market as they can not fund research.

b. Notably the opposite of competitive develop is also the result of privatization of research. Because scientists today operate on the basis that everybody has (more or less) access to the latest knowledge, they all compete at this knowledge frontier. In comparison, when knowledge is secured as intellectual property only the owner can push development, or, as allegedly has been the case for alternatives to the Otto-motor based automobile, the owner can freeze further development (i).

c. Researchers will deal with subjects related to the funding source and will tend not to be as critical as they would be without their financial support. This issue begins with the selection of what organizations and aspects of them are selected for review and training which results in the concrete conditioning of product spread. Two concrete examples are: Funding provided by Oracle to provide database management courses – naturally dealing with the administration of their solutions. Or the free provision of Microsoft Office Suites in schools and universities, which strongly favors these products in the market because users have their competence here.

2. The second point deals with changes related to the role of the university as social institution. Issue related with the loss of standardization, access to faculty and elitism as well as the neglect of citizen education (Delanty, 2001) have to be raised here:

a. Libertarians traditionally argue for the free market based allocation of goods and services as the most effective and efficient mode creating wealth and, so the argument, wealthy societies have means to secure justice and security. A chain of arguments can be brought forward to put this claim into perspective: Firstly result of free markets has been proven to be a severely increased polarization between poor and rich citizens and a subsequently less just society in the Rawlsian sense (Staloff, 2000). Given this experience with free markets, it is likely that a free educational market will result in a few (pricey) universities which will provide excellent education while the mass of people will either access universities with a lower standard then today or, perhaps more likely, will not have a tertiary education at all. The result of this scenario would be an amplification of the currently already increasing social divide with the finality of the distinction of an educated middle class, with the known consequences for the democratic system (populism and radicalization). If an inclusive knowledge society is the objective, education as a public good is one of the cornerstones.

b. A last trend that is already manifesting is the increasing bias towards vocational training and the concomitant neglect of citizenship education. Traditionally, the university was not seen as a place for vocational skills training but rather to transform its participants into educated (gebildet) humans, capable of holding and constructing a healthy society (Mill unity of science encyclopedia of ideas doc). This understanding was radicalized in Habermas’ conceptualization (Habermas & Blazek, 1987) of the university as institution for academically facilitated critical political discourse and the education of the critical Enlightened citizen (ii).
This role of the university is already in decline and the commercialization of education most likely encourages this trend.

In conclusion, it is argued that the transformation of (higher) education institutions to embrace free market conditions will likely cause (a) that the public availability of knowledge will decrease, (b) that companies will exploit the opportunity to use universities as (external) training facilities and to spread the use of their products, (c) that a competition amongst educational institutions will lead to high differentiation, while a few very excellent but very costly institutions will stand against a grand mass of low performing facilities for the masses, and last but not least (d) that the role of the university to review and critique issues of interest to society and to educate and foster its students to participate in public discourse will be diminished. Hence it is not rational to end the idea of the universities as a public institution but rather increase state funding to make it flourish as the motor of the knowledge society. As one possible remedy, the concept of knowledge entrepreneurship is proposed as suitable paradigm to be applied in the university and educational sector, in the following section.

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(i) Even though the case is in the moment only hypothetical, it is a credible thought experiment.
(ii) As attempted by the students of the FU during the student movement of the 1960ies.

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