The Education Solution Is Privatization

A new Vice Chancellor, John Hood, has recommended “replacing the traditional system of governance with a more ‘top-down’ managerial approach,” according to Martin Jacomb in The Spectator. But the professors voted Hood’s proposals down 730 votes to 456. Shades of Larry Summers and Harvard faculty.

The problem at Oxford is money. It relies enormously on government money, and the government money isn’t enough to fund competitive salaries for academic superstars and for decent undergraduate education.

John Hood wants to beef up the central administration so that it can start doing some serious fundraising, after the example of US universities. And he wants to increase student fees and put the money into undergraduate teaching.

But to Jacomb, that is only dealing with half of the problem. It is not just shortage of money from the government that is hurting Oxford. It is the government control. And the record of government control of universities is not reassuring.

[R]eliance on government money inevitably brings with it a reluctance to reject the orthodox thinking of the day. We all learnt how Pope Urban VIII (who was the government) dealt with Galileo when he produced some thinking which the Pope did not like... Does anyone doubt that Milton Friedman could have achieved what he did anywhere other than in a truly independent university; in his case, Chicago?
...
And history also tells a frightening story. German universities, which included some of the best in the world a century ago, became totally dependent on government money after the inflation of the 1920s; and, sure enough, most appointed posts were already held by Nazi sympathisers before the First Supplemental Decree (Aryans only) came into force in 1935.

Even in the United States the universities are far too dependent on the government. For one thing, most of the research money comes from outfits like the National Science Foundation. Then there is a lot of research in the social sciences for which the only purpose is to assist the government in the expansion of its programs of social control.

What will it take for the professors to decide that they would rather be independent and free than dependent and subservient to the government?

It’s the great question of the age. Up to now, the professors have positively luxuriated in their lapdog relation to the corridors of political power. They accept the dictates of government and think up rationales to justify them, and happily assist the government in its attack on private institutions from corporations to churches and college fraternities.

That means that We the People are going to have to separate the universities from the government. That ain’t gonna be easy.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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